I've decided to start a blog about this house hunting process. Not exactly sure why, or if I'll be good at it, but here goes nothing...
So a quick review on how we got here: Several months ago, must have been back in April or May we saw a house for sale in town, we'll just call it the "wood", just up the street from us. We had been toying with the idea of wanting to move for quite some time (okay at least 3 years as this was supposed to be our 5 year home, now going on 8 years...), so we decided to check out this house. It was big, on a great lot and they decided to drop the price 100 grand to make it the steal of the year and yet we waited too long and lost it. Before we could even put an offer on it someone else jumped on the opportunity and as it turns out she's a flipper. Anyway, that got the ball rolling and we put the house on the market. For the first month not a single showing. We went on a vacation and I kindly asked our realtor to work his magic while we had the house empty for a week and get a few showings in... as it turns out he had some good magic and we got an offer a week after our vacation! (Might need to remember that in case we need to sell another house in the future... go on vacation and it will sell. Ha ha.) Not only did we sell our house quickly, we got a sweet offer of staying in the house and renting until July! Which was/is a great deal as we have not found our house, hence the blog.
And here we are... searching...
We looked at all homes for sale in the wood and have exhausted the inventory thus far. So we started venturing out into other surrounding towns. The question is, can we really leave the wood? There are major parts of me that say NO, but then a loud one that says BUT I WANT A 4 BEDROOM HOUSE AND MORE SPACE! It might be hard to find what we want here in the wood, as I am learning.
I find it crazy that we could get almost 2x the square footage for the same price, and yet I'm not sure I want to leave this place.
Although....
We recently went to C'ville and looked at 6 homes, of the 6 we liked 2. One was a speck home by one of my favorite builders in the area (not your total cookie cutter home), so that was really exciting. It was so nice to walk into a new home, clean, empty, all new appliances, brand new carpet and SPACE. Not to mention the quality of the home, new windows, insulated walls... I was ready to make an offer, I mean it wasn't perfect but it had almost everything we needed and could and would enjoy. The neighborhood had little to be desired though, no trees, no parks, no pool, just houses.
The other home was built in 1996 and was a custom build, a bit contemporary. The decorating was misguided to say the least, but getting past that, the house had everything we needed and a little more. However the build seems to be a bit too contemporary for us, and the kitchen certainly needs updated. The other downer was the property, it had a lot of trees and very little grass/play area. So, we left c'ville and looked at one more house in the wood. That was a bit of a mistake because it opened my eyes to the quality of the homes here in the wood. They are old, and when I say old, I mean OLD. Now, I realize you can fix up old homes and I'm not afraid of doing such a thing as we almost bought the one mentioned earlier, however it seems that the homes on the market right now have been "fixed up" and I put that in quotes because the quality is well, sad! Sometimes I'd just like to ask the owner " do you not see that gap in the floor from the bedroom to the bathroom?" or "does your hairbrush roll down the sink counter as it is not level?"
I went to a few open houses on Sunday locally to try and get excited about homes in the wood and what I found just made me cry. Someone was asking $400,000 and for the square footage that might be accurate, but for the quality, are you kidding me. I mean there were major cracks in the wall, dents and paint chips, cabinets hung askew and the front door looked like someone tried to break in! Did she think because she can decorate well people wouldn't notice these things, or do people NOT notice these things because it is the wood?
All this and it's only my first entry!
