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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

House Hunting Part One

With a closing date set for my home in Minnesota, it was time to go house hunting in Georgia. Being the obsessive/compulsive person that I am, I'd begun watching houses online about a year ago and that picked up in earnest a few months ago. I knew what area I wanted to live in and I knew what things were important to me in a house.

TBH, I didn't expect to find anything for a long, long time. You see, I really, really loved my house in Minnesota. I'd picked out the plans, I had it built, I chose everything from floor to ceiling, and it was a totally awesome home.

Last Wednesday, my agent and I looked at a house under construction. It was above my price range, but it had a basement and would be a brand new house. Two pluses for me.

When I got there and saw the lot, my heart sank. The road sat high and the house sat really low. All I could see was rain hitting the ground and streaming for the house.

We went in and walked around inside. It was a nice floor plan and had a lot of similarities to my house up north, but it was cramped. I swear it had to have less square footage because so much of the total was in the bonus room over the garage, not in the rooms on the main level.

Still, it wasn't too bad and it had a basement. We went down to look at it and there, against the front wall, was water. In fact, the red Georgia clay stained the entire length of one of the basement walls.

My agent called the builders agents and got some more information. The basement had been poured a long time before the walls and roof went up and that was probably where the water had come from. Also, the steep lot we saw wasn't what the final version would look like. There was a lot more grading to be done.

This left it on the list of possibilities. If the builder was willing to take less than what he was asking for. I didn't, however, want to commit to the first house I saw, so my agent and I made a date for Saturday.

To Be Continued.