30 Before 30: Buy a House!

Spoiler Alert: Here's our house!

And here we go, the next (much overdue) post!  Taylor and I decided late last year after he secured his full-time job that we wanted to start looking at a more permanent place to live.  Apartment living, especially with a dog who needed to be taken out on a leash every few hours rain or shine, was getting old.

We also felt like the slump in the housing market and the low interest rates wouldn't last forever, so once the new year hit, we decided to start thinking about it.  We first dipped our toe in the water by going to an open house on a Sunday afternoon.  Here's the house

It was cute, cheap, and had a lot of potential including an addition off the back that gave it a 4th bedroom and a big family room with a fire place.  However, after thinking about it for a while, we realized that unfortunately the neighborhood just wasn't what we wanted.  It's on the edge of a somewhat rough area on the Ann Arbor/Ypsi border and just wasn't quite what we wanted.

However something very good did come of the open house!  We met our realtor Jaimie, who was holding the open house.  She was very sweet, young, and definitely understood what we were looking for, so without much looking around, we started working with her in January.

Before our first day out with Jaimie, we did a "just for fun" day of open houses around the highly-desirable Burns Park neighborhood of Ann Arbor.  It was a good reality check and helped us to figure out what we wanted.  We started watching the MLS listings and when we had about 5 or so houses we really wanted to see, we set up a Saturday to go out hunting in the snow with Jaimie.  

Our first day of house hunting was fun!  We saw about 4-5 places.  One of them I was very excited about because of its location and price. We had the viewing all set up, but when we got there, it turned out that they had already accepted an offer, in about 3 days on the market!  Crazy! 

We were bummed, but not deterred.  After seeing a few of the neighborhoods that had houses like what we were looking for, we narrowed down a little further the areas that we were actually interested in.  And then we waited.  Basically, once you see everything in your price range, you just have to wait for new houses to come on the market.  Then one day, while I was in New York for work, a listing popped up that looked just perfect.  I e-mailed our realtor and we went to see it the next day when I got home.  Before we even got to see it, they already had 3 offers and one more coming in and had set a deadline for any more offers of the next day. So when we got there that Thursday night, it was decision time.

The front of our house

And. We. Loved. It.  Hook line and sinker I wanted it, it was mine, give it to me now.  :)  It has 3 bedrooms, 2 upstairs original rooms and a basement bedroom with attached bath that is a perfect "inlaws" suite.  The hard is big, and the whole back half of the house has an 8-foot addition that makes for a nice large master bedroom, bathroom and a HUGE kitchen complete with breakfast bar.  The house isn't huge, just 1,600 square feet, but it was perfect for us :)

We headed straight back to Jaimie's office and put together an offer.  They were asking $175,000 and given that they had multiple offers, Jaimie suggested that we go in at Asking Price and include something I had never heard of called an escalation clause.  Basically it said that we would beat any verified offer (meaning they would have to show proof of it) by $1,000 up to a ceiling price, which we set at $190,000 (I told you I wanted it!).

We put in the offer and waited.  They came back a couple of days later saying that we were their top choice offer, but with some conditions.  First, they has invoked the escalation clause to $186,000 because they had another offer at asking with an escalation clause to $185,000.  They also put in a note that we would agree to pay this price regardless of appraisal.  Now if you've ever bought a house, you know this is unheard of, but apparently this is what happens in a market when houses are going up in value quickly but appraisers haven't yet caught up to what the market is willing to pay.  You see, banks won't loan more money than the appraised value of a house, and typically that works in the buyer's favor because if the house appraises lower than the accepted offer, then get to negotiate down.  However, with this clause they were basically saying that they wouldn't negotiate in anticipation of a low appraisal and wanting to make sure they still got their money.  We decided to accept this point with a $10,000 cap meaning that we would only pay $10,000 over appraisal.

And then we waited for the appraisal.  And waited.  And waited.  FINALLY it came back right at asking, $175,000.  Which was kind of the worst case scenario for us because 1) we would have to come up with the full $10,000 out of pocket and 2) we didn't get much of a break on the price.  Womp Womp!  So at this point, despite being the one who insisted we get this house from the beginning, I decided to play hardball and try to see if we couldn't work something out.  So I asked our realtor to go back to the sellers and basically plead for mercy and split the difference with us.  Since they were getting the absolute best scenario and were anxious to close, I felt it was only fair. We asked them to meet us at $181,500 and they agreed.  So that was our final price.  

The inspection went well, with only a small electrical issue noted, and we closed on our first house and the single greatest expenditure of our lives on March 16, 2013.  My brother and his friend helped us move that day for some pizza, beer, and $50 each and before we knew it, we were homeowners! 

Here are some pictures of our little abode:

Living Room

Another view of our bedroom

Our bedroom and my favorite picture!

Kitchen

Basement entertainment room

Downstairs guest bedroom

Downstairs guest bathroom

One of our favorite things about this house is our back yard, which has quickly become Nash's beloved domain:

He is so good about just hanging out out there and has never jumped the fence or anything!

Some of our favorite memories in our house so far:

• Our housewarming party in April that my mom came for
• Having campfires in the backyard fire pit that the previous owners left for us
• Cooking out on the 4th of July with our friends Susie and Sundar and setting off (legal) fireworks in the front yard
• Learning to love to cook in my big kitchen
• Getting tile installed on our steps landing, our much-needed first home improvement
• Hosting our families and lots of friends for graduation, holidays, football games, reunions, and just for fun
• Exploring the neighborhood with Nashville
• Playing tennis on the court that you can see from our backyard!
• Growing tomatoes in our garden (and failing at every other thing we planted)
• Laying in the hammock that we got on our trip to Honduras in March
• Decorating for our first Christmas! - Another thing I love about having our own house in a real neighborhood is the ability to decorate for Christmas.  Here are our first-year Christmas lights:

Our House with Christmas Lights!

And here is our first Christmas Tree, which we chopped down ourselves this past weekend:

At the tree farm!

Sorry for the delay in posting this, but I hope you enjoyed learning about our new little home.  First major project, nursery! :)