Tales of a New Homeowner: Segment 1

Well, you may be curious…how did the move go?

Here is a summary of the roller coaster that was Monday…

1)      Stay up until 2 a.m.  because I can’t sleep.  Paint my nails 3 times before remembering I was going to be moving…remove nail polish.  Finally fall asleep.

2)      Wake up at 7 a.m. and take the dogs for a walk.

3)      Meet the Realtor at 9a.m. to do our final walk through.  Nothing has drastically changed.  All I can think is, “wow, this is a lot dirtier than I remember”  Get a call from the mortgage broker, we can close at 10:15.  Hurray!

4)      Go to the bank and get a certified check.  Proceed to Mortgage Broker’s office…stop at Starbucks to purchase a classy “closing beverage”

5)      Sign papers, hand over our check.  Leave.  Realize no one gave us keys, go back in and get keys.  Leave.

6)      Pick up the dogs, go to our house.  Dogs proceed to have a complete spaz attack, for your viewing pleasure, available here on YouTube

7)      Unload our moving van in record time. It was just the 2 of us and it took us 90 minutes to unload.
We placed it all in the garage.

8)      Complete our first fixes to the new house.  Remove 3 shelves, a door, and of course, change the locks (Chisels are essential to change the locks.  Located them buried in a pile of stuff in the garage)

9)      Leave to return the moving truck that we left sitting in our driveway with the keys in the ignition (we think?).  Discover keys are missing.  Commence a 3 hour search through the grass, house, and every single box we just unloaded into the garage.  Can’t find keys.

10)   Drive to Uhual to pick up a spare key.  Try it.  Spare Key doesn’t work.

11)   Call Uhual for an alternate spare key…none exists.  Commence another search…fail.

12)   Decide to take a break and grab dinner.  Can’t find house and car keys.  Launch a new key search.  Succeed.

13)   Eat Taco Bell.  I love crunchwraps.

14)   Drive to old apartment, pack up work clothes and odds and ends still left.

15)   Drive back to new house.  Start cleaning cabinets and ripping out contact paper.  Think about missing moving truck keys.  Decide to look again.  Still can’t find them.  Check ignition just in case someone took them by accident and returned them.  They didn’t.

16)   Decide to take a shower.  Can’t find shower curtain, just the rod.  Shower without the curtain and then wipe the floor with paper towels.  The floor was dirty, so turns out, this was a multi-tasking event.

17)   Go to bed exhausted.

18)   Wake up at 3:00 a.m. Tuesday unable to breathe on account of the dust.  Launch a search party for allergy medicine.  (The house has been vacant since September, and it’s questionable when the last time was it was really cleaned.  Also, I’m horribly allergic to dust)

19)   At 3:30 a.m. decide to just get up and start cleaning the dust.

20)   Set up shelves in the basement, smack thumb with hammer.  Bleeds.  No bandaids.  Shake it off.

21)   Vacuum and dust every available first floor surface of the house before work.

22)   Steve stays home from work to call a locksmith to deal with the UHaul.  Commence a search to find some sort of shoe that I can wear to work.  Find shoes in a laundry basket, they don’t really go with my outfit, but hey, it is a matching pair.

23)   Leave for work.

Luckily, things have smoothed out since Monday, but man, that was a rough first day!

Movin’ on up

So between Steve and I, we have moved roughly 25 times in our post high school graduation lives.  I thought I would share some of our tried and true methods and tricks behind an easy move.

1) Rent as big of a truck as you possibly can.  This seems counter intuitive, but the difference in cost between moving trucks is at most $20.00.  Factor in a marginal amount difference in gas mileage (lets face it, all moving trucks have AWFUL gas mileage) and the time and headache you save yourself far outweighs the added expense.  With a big moving truck, you don’t have to be as strategic about how you pack things, and you can be sure that absolutely everything will fit without having to make multiple trips.  There is nothing worse than helping someone move who has not rented a moving truck (or rented too small of a truck).  I am happy to help you move, but I don’t want to drive back and forth across town following your pick-up to do it.
This is officially the load where we stumbled on the “biggest moving truck possible” tip.  They screwed up our truck order and just gave us what they had in stock.  I moved my ENTIRE apartment in one trip.  It took us an hour to load and an hour and a half to unload (there were more stairs on the unloading end).  I had it back in time for the person who had actually reserved it to pick it up.  This was, and still is, my absolute favorite packing experience ever.2)

2)  Speaking of renting trucks, be sure to do your research.  The big players in moving trucks are UHaul, Budget, and Penske.  We have found the downside with Budget is that they don’t guarantee you your truck in advance (hence the photo above)…so if you go with them, show up the second they open to claim your truck, otherwise, they might give your whole house moving truck away to a girl moving out of her 2 bedroom apartment into a 1 bedroom apartment.  Uhaul was fine for an in town move, but their fleet seems to be a bit older and we have friends that have had a problem with their truck breaking down.  By far my favorite moving truck is Penske.  They have 24 hour drop off, are incredibly friendly and helpful, and their trucks are new, clean, and generally easy to navigate around.  You should also check online, a lot of moving companies run specials and offer coupons if you book online.  We have found the best deals are if you are planning to move on a Sun-Thurs.

Here’s how we got ourselves to Omaha!

3)  Okay, so you have reserved your truck and planned your moving day.  Where should you get boxes?  This has also been a perfected art.  I know there are many people who love to move in banana boxes…I haven’t had much luck with this, only because it seems everyone requests these to move, I have never been able to actually get any boxes from a grocery store.  I am lucky that I work at a company large enough to have its own print shop.  If you are too, ask the print shop if they will save up their boxes for you.  They come with sturdy lids and handles and they are all the same size…plus, they are the perfect size to ensure you can’t pack your box too heavy (unless it’s gym equipment!).  Our other favorite place to get boxes is PetSmart.  They all do shipment of different days, so just call the store, ask when shipment is, and then ask if they can hold boxes for you.  We have packed our cars to the ceiling with PetSmart boxes, they are great!  We have had great luck using FreeCycle and Craigslist to get rid of our boxes, so remember to always check there too.

Some of our boxes waiting to be packed into the moving truck

4)  For our larger, longer distance, more involved moves, we also purchase multiple colors of duck tape.  We use colored duck tape to tape up the box.  That way, when we unpack, we know at a quick glance what goes in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, office, etc.  It’s a really slick system that makes unpacking that much easier later!   You can see we have some pink taped boxes in the picture above, those are headed for the kitchen!  This tip goes hand in hand with pack strategically and put items from the same room together.  Sounds intuitive, but I wasn’t very good at this my first few moves and it takes FOREVER to find the one thing you stuck in some box quickly because it fit…

5)   Furniture moving straps.  We received some of these as a white elephant gift at Christmas and were excited to try them out.  We found that they generally work best if you are moving something that is not going up or down any stairs.  They work based on keeping the item level, and the first time we took a dresser down the stairs, we learned that they aren’t too secure.  Luckily, no one was injured in this lesson, and we adjusted our tactic for future trips.

6)  Speaking of dressers, we have found that the best way to move the dresser is to empty the contents, sran wrap it to keep all the drawers in tight and then haul it out on a hand truck/dolly.  This way, you don’t have to try to get those drawers back on the right track (which I can NEVER manage to accomplish) or worry about pinching your fingers.  Easy as pie.

7)  Reclining couches.  Steve has a big, heavy, leather, reclining couch.  It is a HUGE pain to move, and everyone dreads it.  Out of curiosity, we flipped it over and found that sure enough, you can take that thing apart.  So now, it comes apart in 3 easy to carry pieces which saves a TON of wear and tear on the back of the couch, saves everyone’s backs, and no doors or walls are harmed in the transportation of the couch.  We always take apart anything that can be taken apart –> desk, coffee table, kitchen table, shelves, etc.  They transport easier and we put all of the screws/washers we remove in a plastic baggie and attach them to the item so when we get there, it’s easy to put back together.

8 )  Packing the moving truck.  We have found what works best for us is to pack the front with all of our boxes and whatever we can find that is square and normal sized…we work our way towards the back with increasingly awkward items.  We have found it’s easier to squeeze in lamps and other odd-shaped things when we have all the normal sized stuff out-of-the-way. (I can’t take credit for this tip, that’s all my engineer hubby’s doing.  My brain doesn’t think like this)
9)  Have a lot of friends…moving is way more fun when you have a large group of people doing it.  It’s actually the way we introduced our groups of friends for the first time.  That said, in order to get help, you always have to be willing to reciprocate any moving favors.  If our friends asked us to move, we were there!

10)  Last, be sure to take care of your friends…we try to make sure we always have water and Gatorade on hand for the move and we like to order some pizza and beer to wrap up the move.  Nothing is better than sitting on the floor of your old/new place with your friends eating some pizza and relaxing.

11) Wear leather work gloves.  I was a bit hesitant to wear gloves at first, but it saves so much wear and tear on your hands and makes it much easier to get a good grip on things.  Work gloves are a must have!

There you have it, our top 11 tips for moving.  I have put off my own packing long enough, time to get to it!

It’s officially official

We are closing on Monday.  I’m bummed we aren’t closing early (before the weekend nonetheless), but we have a closing date and time.  It’s great to be able to FINALLY make plans.  We were able to set up our utilities, and Cox was able to get us in Monday afternoon, so we’ll have internet in no time!  I love multi-tasking a good day off.  We still need to reserve our moving truck and then we are good to go.  The apartment is probably 30% packed, but we’re very confident this will be taken care of soon, once we get rollin’ we tend to go until we finish, but we’re always slow to get it together.  I will be posting our moving tips soon too (since we don’t plan to move for the foreseeable future, maybe our tips can help you now?).

So how has the house buying process been?  Well, in short, very frustrating.  Now, I don’t know anyone who has bought a house and called it an easy experience, but I wasn’t prepared for it to be this painful!  As I’ve already alluded, instead of the customary 24 hour response, Freddie Mac had longer to respond than a normal seller would.  The differences between buying a foreclosure and a normal house sale really started there.  We had an accepted verbal offer, and it took an additional 10 days to receive the signed purchase agreement from the Freddie Mac representative.  This held up our entire mortgage process.  Once we had this, we were able to do our housing inspection, but then we were stuck again waiting on paperwork to complete the appraisal.  After our Mortgage Broker was able to get what he needed, the appraiser went out to take a look.

The great news is that our house appraised for over what we paid for it, the bad news is that when the appraiser was there the water was off, so we had to wait, get the water turned on and then have the appraiser head back to give his final sign-off.  We were going with an FHA loan, so there are more standards that have to be met than with a conventional loan.  Luckily, our house passed the FHA appraisal.

Next up, a LOT of waiting.  We had to provide a lot of extra documentation for the underwriter, which we did as promptly as we could.  Then, our closing came down to 2 items.  1) in Nebraska foreclosed houses have to be posted in the paper, so we needed to wait for the proof that this had taken place (and no, I could provide the proof, though I did offer to sort through library newspaper archives to speed the process along) and 2) a copy that they had received and cashed our earnest deposit check.  UGH!  the good news is, all hurdles have been cleared and we are set to get the keys to our new house!

For fun, we brainstormed our potential projects list for the new house, and man, we have a lot of good stuff coming up.  I’m excited to get started!  (though as Hubs continually reminds me, these things all take time…)  :-)

In honor of our upcoming closing, my good friend Morgan sent us a house warming gift.  What you ask?  A gorgeous purple orchid!  I love it and can already picture it in our new house (I know exactly where it’s going to go, but you’ll have to wait to find out!) 

The Good, The Bad, and The “What Were They Thinking?”

In our quest to find the perfect house for us, we have run across some funny house features that make us scratch our heads and think…what were they doing when they built this??  (I borrowed all of these photos off the MLS a few months ago…suprisingly, these houses are no longer on the market, so I can’t link you to them.)

I thought I would share a few of our favorites…

This house loved hot tubs so much they decided to build a bright green room for the hot tub…I have many questions about the safety of the slick tile that is bound to get wet.  I would think some tread strips would at least be necessary to avoid smacking one’s head on the floor… but wait, it gets better….

Yes, you can hot tub while your friends sit on the adjacent couch and watch tv…..handy? awkward?  Chlorine in your couch anyone?  At least the couch has a rug, so you only have to slip and slide your way across half of the room.

I don’t know if a 1800 sq. foot house really needs a “dinner bell”, but I guess if the hot tub party is on, there might be no way to announce dinner over the din

Different house…I know that wall ovens and flat stove tops are in right now, and I really love that, but I’ve never seen this interpretation of the trend.  I guess they figured buying an extra stove was the same price, might as well stick that bad boy in the island….

Different house…but a variation of the hot tub theme.  This one is in the corner of the basement.  As an EXTREMELY allergic to mold lady, the carpet and the hot tub are grossing me out…plus I have so many questions, did they have to dig the foundation down to accommodate it?  What happens when the hot tub breaks, how are you supposed to get in and fix it?  The sad thing is, we really liked the rest of this house, but there was no way we were dealing with the basement mold.

Different house….Who doesn’t want a multi-striped wood floor?

Different house…Next up in decorating trends…matching your carpet to your wall color!  Poor Barney…

…Plaid carpet… no other comment is needed

So there you have it, just a few decorating trends you will NOT be seeing in our new house!  Happy Tuesday everyone!

And the winner is…

We found a 2 story that we fell in love with…it wasn’t love at first sight.  In fact, we found the house about a month before we actually went to see it.  It was a foreclosure, it’s a bit bigger than we were thinking we wanted, and the list price was over our budget.  We ignored it and went about our business.  We ended up finding a house in the area that we decided to go for (it didn’t have everything on our list, but it had the location we wanted).

We offered on it and quickly learned there was another bidder.  We found it pretty ridiculous to get in a bidding war in this market, so we offered our best final, but we didn’t get it.  We were crushed…this was when I learned how truly emotional buying a house is.  Since this is our first house purchase, I didn’t know what to expect, but I figured we would look, find something we liked and it would all work out.  I didn’t count on how STRESSFUL it is to being constantly searching, researching, debating if you are getting a good deal.  So feeling somewhat deflated, we decided the only way to get through was to push on and check out more houses.  We went and visited some other houses that were lingering in the back of our head as possibilities.

For several reasons, none of those were the house for us.  I took some time that night and conducted a thorough search of our desired area.  I re-found the house we had passed up the month before.  They had dropped the price of the house $15,000 which put it definitely in our range.  We decided to go give it a look and I was in love before I even pulled up to the house.  There was space between the houses, the neighborhood was very family oriented, and the house was GORGEOUS.  The love only grew as we walked in the front door.

It fared very very well on our list.  4 bedrooms, a 3 car garage, HUGE fenced in yard, laundry room off the garage, new kitchen countertops, plenty of space in the kitchen, fireplace in the family room, all the bathrooms had doors, and there is at least one bathroom on every floor.  The basement is roughed in so if we decide to add a bathroom later, we have that option and it will be pretty painless.  All of the bedrooms can easily fit a queen size bed and they all have ceiling fans and overhead lighting.  The house is within walking distance of the elementary school, middle school, and high school.  It’s 2 blocks from the park and 6 blocks from the lake.  This was the PERFECT location for us.

We had to assess the things it didn’t have from our list as well: the big one missing was the finished basement, but at 2500 square feet of finished living space, we thought it to be more than enough room for us, the doggers, and any future kiddos that may decide to join our family.  Plus, if we start to feel a bit cramped, we can finish the basement ourselves, adding useable living space and value to our home.  All in all, this seemed to no longer be a “MUST” for us as we were evaluating.  The other thing we are really sacrificing is the mature trees that come with an older neighborhood.  We currently have, what can generously be described as 3 “sticks” planted in our back yard…there will not be a lot of leaves to rake in our neighborhood come fall, that’s for sure.  We were sad about this, but we are planning to plant our own trees and as the neighborhood ages, the trees will too.  All in good time, right?

We did end up with 2 “toilet rooms”, a tree in our front yard, and not a trace of ceramic tile.

We went home, talked it over and called our agent.  We agreed to get together the next day and put in an offer.  Since the house is a foreclosure, the bank had 48 hours to respond to our offer.  We offered on a Thursday, so they had until Monday to respond.  Monday came and went and we hadn’t heard a thing.  We were crushed…we had offered pretty competitively and couldn’t believe we didn’t hear back.  We chalked this one up to “it wasn’t meant to be”, but then, lo and behold, the very next day they came back with a counter offer.  We were excited that they responded and sent over our counter…enter another 48 hours of waiting and we had a deal.

We set in motion immediately getting everything we needed in place.  We gave notice at our apartment, got the home inspection, finalized our mortgage paperwork, had the appraisal, had the re-appraisal, and we’re hoping to close this Friday!  We are SO excited to have our first house (and it still feels a little surreal…I keep reminding myself it is happening).

I will be sharing our experiences hiring the people that would guide us through the process (Realtor, Lender, etc.), the bumps along the way, and I have a lovely post prepared for you with some of the downright hilarious things we found while on the hunt.  Has anyone else found the house purchasing process to be a bit drawn out and confusing?  Anyone else contemplate throwing in the towel and roughing it out in an apartment?  :-)

P.S. If anyone is looking for more perspective on the first time home buyer process, HGTV has a great show called “My First Place“.  The show portrays, what I have found, to be some realities of buying a house for the first time.  Feel free to check it out (I’m not part of HGTV and have in no way, been compensated to promote them)!

Terrific Two Stories

The last type of houses we explored were 2-stories.  We weren’t sure initially if we would like this type of house, since we both grew up in ranches, but we definitely knew we wanted to check them out.  It took some trial and error, but we were able to start honing in our preferences.  We discovered we did like two stories, we really wanted the kitchen to be open to the main eating area and the family room.  We weren’t a huge fan of the “formal living room” scenario, and liked all of the bedrooms on the same level.

We also loved having 9 foot ceilings on our main floor.  It made it feel more open.  We also were big fans of the 2 story entry way.  We found a few houses  that blended the modern style we liked with the more traditional floor plan.  This house had one of my favorite entry ways.  Ultimately, we passed on this house solely due to the location, we’re trying to head to a different area of town.
This is a pretty traditional 2 story, we love front porches!  I have fantasies of reading the afternoon away on porch swings.

The openness of the upstairs with this type of entryway is also really nice….

Ultimately, the tradition 2 story won out.  I will recap everything from our list tomorrow, but it scored VERY well

Tri-level Triumph?

With Modern Style houses basically off the table, we moved to our next style of house, the Tri-Level.  These houses are a blend between traditional 2 stories and the more modern architecture of houses.  Tri-Levels can be many types of houses, but the most common floor plan that we looked at was where you walk in on the “main level” without having to go up or down any of the stairs.  From there, you generally go  up a few steps to get to the formal living room and then up a few more steps to get to the bedrooms.  Generally, the kitchen is in some configuration in the back middle of the house (on the same level as the formal living room, but up a few steps from the family room and entrance level.  There is also usually a finished basement of sorts down a few stairs off the family room.  It is a pretty efficient way to pack a lot of square footage into less space.

We visited several of these style houses, probably 12 or so in all, and we really found that in the Omaha area, there was generally little difference between the total floor plan.  It mostly boiled down to location, how recently the house had been updated, and personal preference for the kitchen layout, etc.  I thought I would take you on a tour through our favorite of the tri-levels to give you an idea of the layout.  This layout was fairly new to me when we started the house hunt, but I feel pretty well versed in the area now.

I figured I would walk you through one of our favorite tri-levels from the hunt.  All photos came from here.
This is what you see when you open the front door.  The formal living room is to the left and the family room is straight ahead
This is the formal living room.  You can see the stairs up to the 3 bedrooms in the middle, the formal dining room is on the left and the stairs from the front door are on the right
Here is the dining room, you can see the formal living room on the right and the kitchen on the left of the picture.  This particular house has tray ceilings in the dining room which is a nice feature to make it feel more open.
We are now in the kitchen…pretty standard set-up…to the left (not pictured here) is a gazebo eating area.  You can also see into the family room.
Gazebo eating nook and the family room is on the right side of the screen
Here is the family room from the opposite side.  The sliding door goes out to the patio and the steps go back into the kitchen/eating area.  If you exit the family room to the left, you are back in the entry way.
View from the family room to the front door.  The Laundry Room is on the left as well as the entrance to the garage.
And this is the view from the bedrooms looking down into the formal living room.

I will go ahead and spoil the surprise a bit…this is not the house we are in the process of purchasing.  You know the saying, “Everything works out for a reason”.  Well, this house is a prime example of that.  Before we had officially moved to Omaha, I spied this house online and I loved it.  We waited to go visit until we were serious about buying, and to our sad surprise, they had pulled it off the market the week before we started our search.  I got our Realtor to call the former listing agent for the scoop and we learned we were planning to re-list.  This house finally came back on the market after we put in our offer on the house we will hopefully be making ours.  This house has an AWESOME location (less than a half block to a lake with a 7 mile trail) and other great outdoor activities.

We liked most of the tri-levels we visited, and they fared well on our list.  It ultimately came down to that “feeling” that you can’t really put into excel.  We liked them, but something was just missing, they didn’t feel like our perfect house.  Have I built up the suspense enough?  The next category of houses we had left to explore was a traditional 2 story…I think you can guess what style we ended up picking…

So, how do you feel about stairs?

We took our master list and jumped headfirst into house hunting.  We asked our Realtor to take us to several houses the first Saturday we started looking, 11 to be exact.  We picked houses in different areas of town, we picked different floor plans, and ultimately ended up with a next mix across the board.  After our first house hunting trip, we were able to really get a feel for what type of floor plan we would like.  The types of houses we visited fell into 3 main types – Modern Styling, Tri-Level, and Traditional 2 story.

The first type of house we visited were the “modern” houses, these all were pretty square outside, lots of crazy stairs and levels inside, and they gave me that sense of fun I was looking for.

Here is a sampling of what we toured in the “modern” category: Source
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So lets check them again the list, shall we?  (Missed the list?  check it out here)  All of the houses met our minimum bedroom requirements, bathrooms met our minimum requirements, the kitchens were a little hit and miss (but underwhelming), the garages were all under the the master bedroom, some yards were stellar and some were pretty small.  We loved the open feeling in all of these houses.  The designers did an excellent job of making sure the house centered on natural light.  They were all very bright and inviting, which we really loved.  The 3rd house we looked at had a 3 story fireplace, yes, that’s right, one in the master, one in the living room, and one in the basement.  They were an entire column throughout the house which we also thought was pretty cool.

The downsides?  They were all in need of some updating, for being “modern” they were pretty stuck in the 70′s.  We were a little concerned about how much they would need in the way of updating and a lot of it was big stuff that we wouldn’t be able to do ourselves.  Ultimately, our practical side won out and the future considerations of carrying a vacuum up and down all those stairs, future kiddos with all of the stairs, and general resale value, we just weren’t in love enough to pull the trigger on a modern style house.  We checked this style of potentials off the list and moved on to our next set of houses.

**I am not a licensed real estate agent.  Everything in this post is my own opinion and should not be considered sales material.  I have copied the photos off of the credited websites. **

The Search is On

Armed with my new house buying info, we were ready to commence the search.  We had a few ideas of what we wanted, but we decided to start going to as many open houses as we could to narrow it down a bit more.  After going to several open houses at many different price points, we came up with the following lists of must haves and wants.
Must Haves
Bathroom -
minimum of one for each floor
minimum of 2 bathrooms for the whole house
all bathrooms had to have a door (or the ability to add a door…I can’t tell you how many master baths that we saw without doors)
Bedroom -
minimum of 3 bedrooms
all bedrooms must be able to fit a queen size bed comfortably
all should have overhead lighting (or the ability for us to get in the crawl space and add in overhead lighting…this is a HUGE issue in St. Louis, I didn’t live in a single place my entire time there that had overhead lighting in the bedrooms)
Kitchen -
LOTS AND LOTS of counter space
Flexible layout
Plenty of cabinet space for storage
Overall Features-
2 Story (no split level or garage under the house)
Neighborhood with unique/varied houses
3 car garage
Trees
Fenced Yard
Deck/Patio
Big enough to grow into for the next 10-15 years

Wants (this list was QUITE a bit longer)
Basement-
Storage Area
Walk Out Basement
Finished Basement
Bathrooms-
Shower heads tall enough for us
Master Bath with Dual Sinks
No “toilet rooms” (you know, where the toilet closes off from the rest of the bathroom)
Tile Floor
Newer Vanities
No odd colored tile walls
Bedroom-
Walk in closet
Have a Master Bath
Kitchen-
Cabinets – anything but oak
Newer Appliances
Newer Countertops/sinks
Tile floors
Laundry-
2nd floor laundry (but definitely NOT in the basement)
Exterior-
Vinyl Siding
Newer Roof
No large tree in the front yard (I hate when it blocks the house and you can’t see it!)
Flat yard
Deck
Flat Driveway
South facing ideally, west-facing would also be okay
Concrete in good shape
Garage
Insulated
Overall Features
Space for an office
Fireplace
Mudroom off the garage

Once we were able to narrow down our list, we put it straight into excel.  We then took our list and put in our comments/ratings of houses we visited.  We decided that houses would get 2 points if they had something for our “Must” list and 1 point if they had something from our “Wish” list.  It was definitely helpful in keeping us focused on the task at hand!  Next up, we start our hunt!

Lets kick this thing off with some introductions

Hello everyone!  I am so excited to be starting this blog and embarking on the journey of our first house with you.  I will give you a bit of background on us and how we got to where we are.  Steve & I met in St. Louis, MO.  We fell in love over a course of outdoor adventures (mountain biking, camping, geocaching, and adventure racing).  We were recently married (October 2010).  Shortly after our wedding (3 weeks to be exact) we picked up our lives and moved from St. Louis to Omaha, NE.  We wanted to be closer to our families and find a smaller town to plant our roots and raise a family.

We arrived in Omaha with a job for the Hubs, and unemployment for me.  We weren’t sure what to expect with the current job market, so rather than risk getting over our heads, we rented an apartment with the intent of staying in it for a year.  I was EXTREMELY lucky and I found a job within 2 months of moving here.  We found our plans quickly changing…we have 2 mutts, 60 lbs and 30 lbs and with no yard and their first Nebraska winter.  We’re all a bit cooped up in the one bedroom apartment and collectively are driving each other a bit nuts.  We went through our budget and found that a house was easily doable for us with our dual incomes and the awesome interests rates right now.  The Omaha housing market hasn’t been hit as hard as other places, so home values have held relatively steady, and the job market here is strong as well.  Overall, we feel like we’re in a good position to move forward with finding a house.

We were excited to jump in, but weren’t really sure what to expect and figured we would learn a lot along the way!  As a perpetual reader, the very first thing I did was head to the library to check out all the books I could find on how to buy a house.  I read several books, but one of my favorite books was Tips and Traps when Buying a Home, by Robert Iriwn.  The book can be found here on amazon.com (or of course at your local library!)  This book did a great job of giving guidance on all of the things to think about as you are looking for a house…features, dislikes, etc.  It also had great information on foreclosures as well.

The Everything Homebuying Book by Mark Weiss and Ruth Rejnis was also a great book to helping me really understand the mortgage process.  I was having a hard time grasping the process of what happens after you find a house, and this was an excellent book for walking me step-by-step through the process.  I referred back to this book several times during the mortgage process to validate what I had heard or what we were thinking.

If you are a reader type of person like me, these books will definitely help you feel at ease.

After I did my reading, Hubs and I sat down to start to make our list for our future house.  We knew we wanted a fenced in yard for the dogs to run, we wanted to have 3-4 bedrooms so it would be a house we could grow into, and we wanted a bigger kitchen (our apartment kitchen has NO storage or counter space and only one of us can fit in it at a time).  We were also hoping for a large 2 car garage or a 3 car garage to allow us some workshop space for all of our projects in addition to our cars.  With this minimal criteria, we set off to check out some open houses.  Next up– we start our search!