House hunting on Saturday didn't get off to the greatest of starts. My agent was a bit late because she'd gotten a phone call from another agent. The first house on our list of appointments already had five offers on it and she basically told my agent not to bother. This house had gone on sale like 2 days earlier.
House 1 off the list, sight unseen.
House 2 didn't get off to a good start either. We arrived to find: The owners still home, another set of house buyers looking during our time (they'd had an appointment for later in the day and just showed up), and repairmen there doing...something.
Everyone cleared out a few minutes after we got there, though, and we started to look around. It was a nice, two-story house with a lot of windows and light. Corner lot, but it was on a small, cul-de-sac street so it wouldn't be an unbearable amount of traffic. Fantastic landscaping and I liked the light fixtures they'd chosen.
But the master bathroom was small and so was the kitchen. The other rooms were upstairs, including a bonus room that was being used as a man cave. I liked it enough to keep it on the list, but I was kind of meh about it.
House 3 was a new house in a subdivision that had been started maybe 5 or 6 years ago? Maybe a little longer. We never got out of the car. My agent took one look at it's location (it was a on a corner lot) and said I'd have car lights from every direction because of how the roads were situated with the lot. I agreed with her.
House 4 was another new house in the same subdivision. Again, we never got out of the car. My agent took one look at the power lines going through the area behind the back yard and said I'd never be able to sell the place with that there. I thought health hazard and no, I didn't want to live behind the big, ginormous power line towers.
House 5 was at the top of a hill. A fairly steep hill. When my agent brought her car to a stop, I told her to put on the parking brake. I was afraid her car would roll down the hill if she didn't. To drive into that garage, you wouldn't be able to slow down much until you'd leveled off the car.
This house was a one story--ranch--with hardwood floors in the entry and kitchen, upgraded carpeting and padding in the rest of the house, a kitchen with plenty of storage room and a good sized pantry, granite counter tops, and big rooms. It was awesome. It even had an in-ground sprinkler system.
But no basement. I really wanted a basement.
House 6 was 3000 square feet, all brick, but built in 1989. We showed up to discover the reason it had so much square footage was that the owners had enclosed the garage and made it a room. Sort of. It wasn't a very pretty or useful room, so I don't know why they gave up the garage, but they had.
We needed to enter through the back door because there was a problem with the front one. The backyard was beautiful. Very private and large, especially for the area we were looking in.
As soon as we walked in, I decided it had to have been owned by an elderly lady. All the walls were stark white except for the borders around the walls near the ceiling. The kitchen had peach counter tops, ancient appliances, and the linoleum needed to be replaced. It was big, it had a built-in oven (which I love), but holy cow.
The rest of the tour didn't get any better. All the rooms were big and the bones of the house were good, but it would take another $50,000 dollars to fix everything that needed fixing, update all the old stuff, return the garage to being a garage and host of other issues.
Even if this house hadn't been priced slightly over the top of my budget, I wasn't willing to tackle a fixer-upper. Especially one this intensive. I crossed it off the list.
House 7 was the house I'd looked at on Wednesday, the one under construction and at the very top of my price range. Okay, beyond the very top of my budget, but my offer was going to be my max amount. We talked to the agent and I decided this was the house, so why not go ahead and put in an offer?
But as I started asking questions and realized I would have to take vinyl flooring and builder-grade carpet, that I would be allowed hardly any choice in anything at all, I panicked.
I said, "I have to think about this." And we left.
To Be Continued.
