Nervous Knitter Buys First Home

Now that we are almost all of the way through the process, I feel a bit more comfortable talking about it.  Before now, we didn’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves in case something fell through.  And with buying your first house, there are a lot of reasons and ways that this can happen.

As we have been getting ready for the wedding, we have been talking a lot about what our future, first home together, might look like – this might sound impossible, but we have been doing a lot of researching, saving and soul searching.  We narrowed down the area and school districts, the size and style of the house, and what we were willing to pay for it.  So we weren’t completely dreaming.  Between online and driving through different neighborhoods, we’ve really been actively researching for over a year now.

Spending this much time and energy thinking about anything generates a lot of excitement.  We decided, after much consideration and conversation, that we were ready to channel that excitement into looking for a home. Did you catch that – much consideration and conversation.  This process has gone smoothly for us, because we make time to sit down and talk with each other.  We talked about all of the different parameters – and looked at our lives over the next 5-10 years.  That helped us decide on what we needed, wanted, and what we really didn’t want in our first home.

Advice on budgeting for your first home:

A wise friend of ours told us to make sure that your monthly mortgage payment is no more than one of your individual monthly paychecks.  AKA that if something happens and only one of you is working, one of your paychecks covers your mortgage and the other gives you cash to live on.  This ensures that you are not house poor, can prevent losing your home if something were to happen, and build your savings back up after purchasing you home.

Being a first home buyer, we wanted to work with someone that we know (who also knows us – and gets our quirkiness), the area in which we are looking, and that we can trust.  It was only natural that we reach out to our close family friend who is a phenomenal realtor. We sat down together and talked through our wants, verses our must haves and our really don’t wants with her, while she entered it into the MLS database and got us set up with an email notification whenever a house in our area and price range came on the market.

Advice on finding homes in your area: 

Find an agent and have them set up this email notification.  Once you have all of your decisions made, it takes five minutes to set up and you’ll see the houses before they hit sites like Zillow.  We got lucky and found a house on Zillow before it got grabbed up, but that’s not always the case.  Just to do our own comparison, we’d look at a house on Zillow and check the MLS – on Zillow it looked available, but on the MLS you’d see it was already under agreement or contingent.  Use the MLS if you are looking for a home.  It will save you the heartbreak.

When we started the search, we called our bank and talked through the process of getting a mortgage – all the different documents you’ll need and how the process works.  We were able to get pre-approved for a certain amount, and I highly recommend it.  Being pre-approved doesn’t necessarily make the the process of getting your mortgage go faster, but it does help you when you put an offer in on a house because the seller knows that you can actually buy it.

It was about a month in, that this little ranch came up in a Zillow search, a for sale by owner deal.  I wrote it off but my Fiancé looked closer.  Literally, he drove out to see it one day and called the guy who told him to take a walk around the property.  He loved it.  So he got me to come out and see it.  Now I loved it.  Going into the process we were still unsure of the whole for sale by owner process, but then we found out that the seller is actually a licensed real estate agent so that made it better. The next day, we got my parents to come out and see it.  They liked it too!

Now comes the awkward part.

The seller had one more appointment scheduled, and even though we wanted to put in an offer, we all agreed he needed to honor that appointment.  So we went for apps at The North Park Lounge.  Together, with my parents, and after talking to my future in laws who were also very helpful and knowledgeable, we crafted what we would offer.  Normally this is where you call your agent and they give the offer to the other agent…yea we had to do it face to face, in the guys living room.

Oh my goodness I was squirming.  I’m so proud of Christian who handled the whole thing, and did it flawlessly.  After we gave the offer, we left and gave him time to think about it and come up with his counter.  This is where being pre-approved came in again.  Not only did he know that we were serious, but the other people who had seen the house, weren’t.

Advice on getting pre-approved:

DO IT.  It takes a phone call and maybe a bit of extra work, but it gives you and the people you’re working with more confidence in your ability to buy.

That night, while we waited, the furry of nervous knitting began.  I get a lot of nervous energy during situations like this and I cannot sit still.  For fear that I might start packing up our current place, I had to start doing something with my hands.  Thank God I had presents and donations to make.  I might not have made it!  And the more I knit through, the less I have to move.  If you’re not a knitter, you might not understand the stashes of yarn that start to accumulate…

This is also when another round of that all too important conversation came back into play.  It’s beneficial to get your budget and what you’re willing to pay worked out before you start seriously looking at houses yes, but now we had to sit down and apply all of that to this particular house.  What would we be willing to pay – and at what point would we have to walk away.  Granted this is all without seeing an inspection but still, you need a ceiling.  We had multiple phone calls with both sets of parents and it helped a lot.  They made sure that we were seeing clearly and not getting too excited – imagine that, me get emotionally excited about buying something as large as our first house?

With our crazy schedules, it took a week to get an inspection scheduled – that’s right – a week of nervous knitting.  Don’t worry, my fingers are still functioning…and my Christmas knitting is almost done! The house is a brick ranch and it was built during an era before they started skimping on materials to cut costs.  We’ll have a laundry list of little things to fix but nothing major – and a miracle for western PA – no radon! My basement office/craft room is a go!

Now we are just waiting on all of the final paper work – and then we can close! We’ll hopefully be in our house before Christmas!

I’m still nervous knitting, but now a little less furiously.