The house hunt

Mark and I started our house hunt on a whim. We had pretty much decided we would stay in our rental apartment for another year and buy in 2014 until we stumbled onto the topic one night at Andrea's house in McKinney. That's where it all started.

The next day, I called our bank and got pre-approved for a loan. Then, I began the online home search. We had been recommended to a realtor before, but they wanted to postpone our search until later in the month. 

Anyone who knows me knows that I like to do it my way, so of course if I found any homes I liked, I put in a general request for a showing. That's how we found our realtor, Greg. 

Greg is great. He is super knowledgable, smart, patient, and puts up with my incessant questions! He knew a lot about the more technical parts of the houses like electrical panels, air conditioning, water heaters,etc so we wouldn't be surprised with issues should we choose to buy a home. 

We looked at about 20 homes, I'm guessing. We probably didn't NEED to see all of those homes, but it was good because it made us realize what mattered most to us. We knew we wanted a good neighborhood and after looking at all of those homes we both realized how important a large shaded lot was to us. 

We put in our first offer on the third weekend that we had been looking. It was a nice updated ranch style mid century home with two living rooms and a fully updated kitchen. It was, however, priced a little higher than where we were comfortable. We offered $10k under list price and then played the waiting game. That's when we learned our lesson: the sellers ended up accepting an offer $20,000 more than our offer and didn't even bother to give us the opportunity to counter. The loss was disappointing but we both realized we wouldn't have been able to counter much higher than our original offer. Plus, the house was still in Dallas ISD and fed into the worst high school in the area. Not great for us or for resale. So, we moved on.

The next weekend we had 8 houses on our list to check out and they were all in Richardson  and all at least $20k under our max budget. That weekend is when we found "the one".....