SYNRGYdesign

As a potential home buyer in a buyers market, I always wonder why it has to be such a process.  I’ve only bought 2 other homes in the past 8 years so I don’t have as much experience.  Our first home purchase was pretty easy.  I really don’t remember it being such a process.  We put in an offer right before our wedding.  Escrow started just days before our wedding and with us leaving for our honeymoon.  We scrambled to do the home inspection before we left.  I remember we cam back and signed the papers and somehow, somewhere, we got the keys to the house.  Our first house was a fixer.  It used to be a rental and it still had everything original from when it first was built.  Ironically it was the same age as Jon.  I don’t remember even turning on the utilities.  I remember the first night we had the keys, we went to the house to change the locks and take a look at it.  I remember almost getting locked in the garage but that’s about it.  The whole process of buying the house seemed relatively simple.

Fast forward 8 years and 2 kids later, the process isn’t quite so simple.  Just looking at houses now is very different.  We have 2 kids to think about.  8 years ago we weren’t thinking about school district or lot size.  We just wanted to get a house so we could be out on our own.  There was something about being married and having a house that seemed to fit together.  Now I’ve spent months researching schools and school districts.  I’ve tried to figure out the school boundaries and looked through dozens of forums to try to find out which school is good and which neighborhoods feed into those schools.  Something I didn’t do 8 years ago.

A year ago, we bought a house with my parents, in a really nice neighborhood and good schools.  After having spent probably 6 months of looking at houses on the internet and in different cities, it was nice to finally settle down.  Of course I should have known better.  Things happened, people changed, needless to say, we had to move again after 7 months.  I was back to looking at schools, neighborhoods, and packing up.  I was starting to get the hang of the packing, but the actual moving part wasn’t easy.  So we decided to find a place near work so that we wouldn’t be too far from the kids when they’re at school.  The housing markets in our favor and since we didn’t want to rush into anything, we decided to rent.

Since we are temporarily renting a house now to get a feel for the area, I’ve sort of had a dry run when it comes to setting up utilities and such.  It’s not always the easiest thing to do as one might think.  Also, since we had to move to the rental, I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to move with 2 kids.  Definitely not easy but can be accomplished with some help.  But all of that is just the prep work for the whole house buying saga.  We’ve been looking now for 6 months and the whole process hasn’t even started.  We’ve barely gotten our foot in the doors.  So I guess that’s where the house buying saga continues…

Trackback URI | Comments RSS