Please note: this article is in no way giving advice on what to do or how to prepare in buying a home. This is our experience of the home buying process.
During these 6 months we focused back on us and what we actually wanted. Created a list of our wants and needs and which items we couldn’t live without. One day we decided to look at one more new home listing for curiosity’s sake and went into an area that neither of us had ventured before. To our surprise the area was beautiful. It was far enough from the freeway where we didn’t hear cars, a newer shopping area, and the neighborhood was idyllic. Our first thought… what’s wrong with this place?
No Backyard. But honestly if that was the only thing, we would be okay with that. Our jobs and kids keep us busy enough to where we wouldn’t have much time to take care of a yard anyways. We went through the model homes aware this time that everything we saw was not part of the base model but knowing that the base was $50K less than proposed budget gave us hope. We liked this place. I mean, we really like it but we didn’t want to make an impulse decision on it. We gave them our names to contact us when a new batch of houses came out and got all the information we could (incentives, the plans, etc) before leaving.
For the next 2 weeks we talked about this house almost every day. We had numerous conversations in the realm of “are we prepared to buy this house if the call came in tomorrow?” Then finally the call came (the week after our wedding). It was a sort of shock (even though we were expecting it) we were not fully prepared to buy a home and get married within a week of each other. We asked if we could discuss this before providing an answer which they promptly agreed to.
We got down to the nitty gritty of it all and with considering everything that was happening in the world (this was during the pandemic) we decided to go for it. We made sure we felt comfortable and that no matter what we would always stay within our budget. We went in the next weekend with our initial deposit, signed some papers of our intent to buy and we had a house!
Oh my goodness, we have a house! We couldn’t believe it, we were getting a brand-new house, that we knew we would be happy in, that our kids would be happy in and that we could comfortably afford. Now all we had to do was wait. Waiting is always hard to do; especially when your told the estimated move in date was 9 months away. But this put us in the right time frame for when we wanted to move, it was perfect.
