House Stuff

*this post has a lot of dates and random information no one will care about--

it's mostly for journaling purposes.

At the end of November 2010 Jack and I started looking at houses online. At this point it was more just lusting after homes than really considering making the purchase. After finding a few we really liked we met with a Realtor and looked at a home in Lehi. It was a foreclosure in a newer area and just walking through the house got us both excited. We were ready for our own home. After our first Realtor stopped returning our phone calls we met someone who was as gung ho about finding our home as we were (we heart you Realtor Phil). We may or may not have picked him because his name was Phil.... and he was a Realtor... just like Modern Family. We just lucked out that he was a fabulous Realtor too.

For the next few months we looked at homes EVERY WEEKEND. And usually throughout the week too. I got online first thing every morning and looked at all the new listings. We spent hours after work driving around looking at all the houses we liked online. Phil got us in to look at any home we were even remotely interested in. We put in a few offers and were always outbid. We really wanted to stay in Orem but were willing to move to most of the nearby cities if we could get into something we liked. I was more willing to travel then Jack was. To be honest I reached a point (probably one week after we started looking) where I would have moved into an outhouse if it could be my own. I was NOT patient.

The last week of January we went to look at a home in Orem that looked perfect. It was a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house tucked into an adorable culdesac. We were in love. It had an unfinished basement with plenty of room to grow and they were asking 140,000 for it. We took Jack's brother and his wife with us to look at it and we all loved it. On January 24th we put in an offer at 135,000 but we all knew there was no way we would get this house. It was a short sale home and we knew those took months and had to go through MANY people before you would even know if your offer was accepted. The sellers accepted our offer within a couple of days and we had hope. We waited and kept looking. We found a few more homes we liked and put in more offers.

At the end of February we looked at a house in North Orem not far from our dream home. It needed a lot of work but the price was significantly lower than our loan amount so we were interested. We put in an offer and then started playing the back and forth game with the bank. On February 25th the bank came back and told us there were multiple offer in on the home and if we were still interested we would need to up our bid and resend them all out paperwork. And we only had 2 hours to do it. Realtor Phil worked like crazy putting all the paperwork together and sending it over to us. Jack was at work so I signed everything and as soon as he got home with the car we sped back to his work so we could fax everything back to our Realtor. We were 30 minutes away from the deadline.

While Jack was faxing all of our paperwork I got a call from our Realtor. I answered and quickly assured him we had just faxed everything over to him so he should be waiting for it. He started making light conversation about how our day was going (this was weird because for the past 2 hours we had had many stressed conversations). He asked me if our weekend would be better if we knew we were moving into our house. I laughed and said yes, assuming he was implying that we wanted to know if we got the current house we were looking. He said good and told me he had just heard from the Realtor on our "dream home" and the bank accepted our offer. There was only one condition. We had to move in in 1 month. I think I told him to shut up a few times and squealed when Jack got back in the car. We had a house!!!

We drove past our "home" on the way back to our apartment and took stalkish pictures. It was the best news we had had in years and we were beyond excited! We called our families and posted it on facebook. It was hard to believe in 1 month we would be moving in to our OWN home. It was perfect. The next month was stressful. Dealing with Lenders, Realtors, Title Companies-- It did not run smoothly. But on March 25th the papers were signed, the boxes were packed and we moved into our home. And we've loved every second of it.