Holy Crap!!! A House???

I still don't quit believe this myself. We are only 13 days away from getting the keys to OUR very first home!!!!! (If all goes well.) Aaaaaaaaaaa!!!!! This is something I have wanted since High School. I always thought of ways to change my parents house and besides Marine Biology, I thought about going to school for interior design.

So how did we finally decide it was time??? Well it all started back in like January and Lynn thought that maybe we should try, so that we could get the tax credit since it was the last year for it. (Which we did find out that no matter what, we would have had to wait until September anyway in order to get our loan.) Lynn signed up on some realtors web site to get updates. So he would show me houses and I was like "No, we aren't ready."

Well in June we got some really crappy neighbors in the duplex next to us. When we would be in the back yard, all we heard was f this and f that. They would be saying this to little kids, too. They have thrown dirty diapers over the fence into our back yard, they put yard waste in our recycling can when it was out by the street, the cops have been there three times (that we know of), the girl was beaten by her boyfriend one day(thank goodness we weren't home when that happened) and there is a lot of suspicious activities going on there (drugs???). Anyway, this is not the only reason we are moving, because we could have neighbors like this anywhere, but I think it was the push that we needed. We also hate living on a busy road and not having a fenced in back yard for the kids and it sucks to pay rent!!!

So in July we called up Myan. He is in our ward and a realtor. We felt like we could trust him. So then we went in to try to get pre-approved. Since we have no down payment, we needed to get, basically, a second morgage on the house. We needed our credit scores to be at a certain number in order to do this. Mine was there, but Lynns was not. So for the month of August we had to get our scores up. There were 3 things that were in our bankruptcy that were being reported inaccuaratly, so I had to write letters to the credit reporting agencies, we needed to lower the balance on Lynns credit card and because he was late on a tool box payment in Sept. 2009, we had to wait until September 2010 to try for the loan and to just be careful that month.

In the meantime, during the month of August, I went out during the day with Myan to look at homes. Lynn, me and the kids would go out on the weekends to look at the outside of homes that fit our criteria and budget. We could tell that just by looking at the house on the outside, what kind of neighborhood it was in, or where the house was situated , we could eliminate some and not waste our time and our realtors time to see the inside. For example, a couple houses you had the freeway in your back yard, one house had a buisness right behind it, some were in really crappy nieghborhoods that we did not feel comfortable driving in, let alone living in and some were really run down on the outside. Call me picky if you want, but this is the biggest, most expensive purchase we will ever make and we wanted to feel comfortable in the area. We looked at over 40 houses on the outside and saw about 25 on the inside. It was actually about the 20th house we saw, when we knew we found THE one.

So we hoped and prayed that that house would still be on the market in September, when we could try for the loan and possibly make an offer. So we made the appointment to get our pre-approval. I was a nervous wreck, but we had done it, our credit scores were right on. So we made an offer on the house that night. We got a counter offer the next day, and it was right where we wanted it, so we accepted!! Next the house had to be inspected. That was on Tuesday. It went great. Nothing major was wrong. There were a few minor fixes that were reccomended that we can totally fix and two things that FHA might flag for safty reasons that might need to be fixed before we can buy the house but they are simple and the seller will pay for one of the problems and we can take care of the other one. Right now we are waiting for the appraisal/FHA inpection to be done. Hopefully by Monday. After that, and if we need to make those 2 repairs, we just need to close. The date set to close by is September 29th and we should get the keys on the 30th. We hope to move on Saturday, October 2nd. I am so nervous and excited.

Here is our house. It has 5 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room, a family room, new carpet in every room, new kitchen cabinets, floor and granite countertops, 2 car garage, storage area in basement, storage shed out back, fenced in back yard, and it even has gas hook up outside for the grill!!
The house still has a lot of work that we would like to do, so over the years we will make upgrades, which is actually what I look forward to. For example, we will eventually redo both bathrooms. They are ugly and dated. And I would like to repaint rooms and change some of the landscaping and so on and so on.

This is the view from the back yard.

It was so exciting to pull up to the house and see "SOLD" on the sign, knowing that it is US buying the house. Only 13 days!!!!!