Hi everyone! My name is Chelsea, though I go by Chel for short. I am currently 31 years old and am about to purchase my very first home in my home town, St. Petersburg, Florida. I am SO excited to finally do this, mostly because it means that I can paint whatever color I want annnnnd because we will finally be adopting a dog!
Who is this "we" I speak of? I have a boyfriend! His name is Christian, however, I call him Monkey - you can, too. We've been together for almost 10 years now, so I guess we like eachother enough to take this next step in our relationship.
Anyhoo, we close on the house in 11 days, as we approach July 31st I can't help but get the song "Closing Time" by Semisonic stuck in my head, pretty much non-stop. It's not the worst song ever, so I shouldn't complain too much. I had the idea to start blogging because I feel like there were so many things that I was unprepared for, even just when we were shopping for the right house to purchase. Luckily, I have some really great friends and a great Realtor who was recommended to me - I feel like he really "gets us" and he wasn't afraid to tell it like it is, especially when I was getting all crazy and in my head with everything.
After putting in THREE other offers to houses, we finally snagged the fourth one. We probably looked at about 20 houses total. It seems like it's a hot time to buy right now, so we were outbid on the other 3 houses we put an offer in on.
I was actually pretty hesitant to even look at the house we picked in the first place. While it met the 3 Bedroom + 2 Bathroom criteria, it was only 1,088 square feet, which was a bit smaller than we had wanted. Since we both have some pretty space-consuming hobbies, we wanted to make sure that we'd have enough space for our current items, plus a little to grow. From the pictures, the inside of the house looked nice though and the kitchen had recently been updated with all new cabinets and appliances. Since we had literally just "lost" the 3rd house the night before, we decided that it can't hurt to go look at it anyways, just in case... the inside of the house did look pretty nice after all.
We walked into the house and were instantly shocked at how huge it was! The Living, Kitchen, and Dining Areas are all open floor plan so it's the perfect house for entertaining - which I loooooove to do, mainly for holidays and game nights. Every house we had visited so far, Monkey was pretty critical of the floors, so I expected that to be the case here, instead, he loved them! He found a few flaws, however, it wasn't anything that he couldn't fix himself (he has about 22yrs of flooring experience). We continued to walk through the house with smiles on our faces. The rooms were all a good size and we couldn't really find anything that we didn't like about the house. After walking through the house a few times, checking out the backyard, and whispering back and forth to each other, we decided to put an offer in right away!
On our way home, we couldn't help but be excited about the house, we started talking about all the things we could do to enhance the house and really make it a home for us. We heard back from our Realtor, Jason, the following day. He starts to say that the seller received multiple offers on the house, at this point, my heart sank AGAIN... This again, we're losing yet another house... Jason continued to go on though and said that we were the FIRST offer on the house though, and the seller's Realtor preferred to work with the first offer because they obviously believe in the golden rule of "first come, first served" - YES! We might be getting a home!! Everything was finally going our way, we signed all the paper work that night and started getting our ducks in a row.
Once everything was signed, we setup the inspections, first Home Inspection, then Termite. We also had to make a deposit into the Escrow Account.
The home inspection passed with flying colors, the inspector was actually shocked at how well it went, given that the house was a bit older.
The Termite inspection was clean-ish. They found some signs that at some point, there was some termites and there was a small amount of damage to the soffit. He found some wings and dead termites, but apparently this is pretty normal for Florida.
We received all the documentation the following day from each Inspector and then we were able to write up our "List of Demands" for the seller. Most of the stuff was little, though we definitely wanted the house tented - this would have been the largest/most expensive request. She agreed to our terms and then we had to schedule the Appraisal in order to see if they required any additional repairs.
This is where things started to go a little South for us. The appraisal came in at a lower amount than what we had offered. We knew that our offer was a bit higher, however, we did that in order to have the seller agree to pay the closing costs. At this point, we had to lower our offer, which meant that the seller was no longer willing to pay closing costs... however, we would be paying less for the house - so like, win/lose? In addition to the lack of closing costs, she backed out of the repairs we asked for.
List of requested repairs:
Okay, so now I am freaking out, crying, yelling, and about to give up altogether because the "cash to close" amount literally just doubled and she was no longer willing to do ANY of the repairs. This seemed like a dealbreaker for us, but we were able to negotiate a little more and ended up getting her to agree to still do the termite fumigation for us. So, we were once again going to buy this house! After all, if we stayed in our rental for another year, the rent would go up for the 3rd time and we already felt as though we were paying more for rent than what the house is worth.
After borrowing some money from my 401k, we finally had the rest of the money we needed to move forward. So that's where we are now! I keep going back and forth between being a nervous wreck and being super excited, but I've been on the upswing for about a week now, so I hope to keep this mood going, at least until after we close in 11 days.
Thanks for stopping by, I look forward to sharing our adventures with you!
~Chel
Who is this "we" I speak of? I have a boyfriend! His name is Christian, however, I call him Monkey - you can, too. We've been together for almost 10 years now, so I guess we like eachother enough to take this next step in our relationship.
Anyhoo, we close on the house in 11 days, as we approach July 31st I can't help but get the song "Closing Time" by Semisonic stuck in my head, pretty much non-stop. It's not the worst song ever, so I shouldn't complain too much. I had the idea to start blogging because I feel like there were so many things that I was unprepared for, even just when we were shopping for the right house to purchase. Luckily, I have some really great friends and a great Realtor who was recommended to me - I feel like he really "gets us" and he wasn't afraid to tell it like it is, especially when I was getting all crazy and in my head with everything.
After putting in THREE other offers to houses, we finally snagged the fourth one. We probably looked at about 20 houses total. It seems like it's a hot time to buy right now, so we were outbid on the other 3 houses we put an offer in on.
I was actually pretty hesitant to even look at the house we picked in the first place. While it met the 3 Bedroom + 2 Bathroom criteria, it was only 1,088 square feet, which was a bit smaller than we had wanted. Since we both have some pretty space-consuming hobbies, we wanted to make sure that we'd have enough space for our current items, plus a little to grow. From the pictures, the inside of the house looked nice though and the kitchen had recently been updated with all new cabinets and appliances. Since we had literally just "lost" the 3rd house the night before, we decided that it can't hurt to go look at it anyways, just in case... the inside of the house did look pretty nice after all.
We walked into the house and were instantly shocked at how huge it was! The Living, Kitchen, and Dining Areas are all open floor plan so it's the perfect house for entertaining - which I loooooove to do, mainly for holidays and game nights. Every house we had visited so far, Monkey was pretty critical of the floors, so I expected that to be the case here, instead, he loved them! He found a few flaws, however, it wasn't anything that he couldn't fix himself (he has about 22yrs of flooring experience). We continued to walk through the house with smiles on our faces. The rooms were all a good size and we couldn't really find anything that we didn't like about the house. After walking through the house a few times, checking out the backyard, and whispering back and forth to each other, we decided to put an offer in right away!
On our way home, we couldn't help but be excited about the house, we started talking about all the things we could do to enhance the house and really make it a home for us. We heard back from our Realtor, Jason, the following day. He starts to say that the seller received multiple offers on the house, at this point, my heart sank AGAIN... This again, we're losing yet another house... Jason continued to go on though and said that we were the FIRST offer on the house though, and the seller's Realtor preferred to work with the first offer because they obviously believe in the golden rule of "first come, first served" - YES! We might be getting a home!! Everything was finally going our way, we signed all the paper work that night and started getting our ducks in a row.
Once everything was signed, we setup the inspections, first Home Inspection, then Termite. We also had to make a deposit into the Escrow Account.
- Escrow Deposit: $2,000
- Home Inspection: $325
- Termite Inspection: $95
The home inspection passed with flying colors, the inspector was actually shocked at how well it went, given that the house was a bit older.
The Termite inspection was clean-ish. They found some signs that at some point, there was some termites and there was a small amount of damage to the soffit. He found some wings and dead termites, but apparently this is pretty normal for Florida.
We received all the documentation the following day from each Inspector and then we were able to write up our "List of Demands" for the seller. Most of the stuff was little, though we definitely wanted the house tented - this would have been the largest/most expensive request. She agreed to our terms and then we had to schedule the Appraisal in order to see if they required any additional repairs.
- Home Appraisal: $550
This is where things started to go a little South for us. The appraisal came in at a lower amount than what we had offered. We knew that our offer was a bit higher, however, we did that in order to have the seller agree to pay the closing costs. At this point, we had to lower our offer, which meant that the seller was no longer willing to pay closing costs... however, we would be paying less for the house - so like, win/lose? In addition to the lack of closing costs, she backed out of the repairs we asked for.
List of requested repairs:
- Trim Trees that were hanging on the roof.
- Add boot to vent pipe on roof & caulk.
- Reverse hot/cold water on bathroom and kitchen sinks because they were setup wrong.
- Replace small section of screen in soffit where there was a hole.
- Replace section of soffit that had some mild water damage.
- Replace back door frame where there was some mild water damage from not properly painting/sealing the door.
- Termite Fumigation, just to be safe.
Okay, so now I am freaking out, crying, yelling, and about to give up altogether because the "cash to close" amount literally just doubled and she was no longer willing to do ANY of the repairs. This seemed like a dealbreaker for us, but we were able to negotiate a little more and ended up getting her to agree to still do the termite fumigation for us. So, we were once again going to buy this house! After all, if we stayed in our rental for another year, the rent would go up for the 3rd time and we already felt as though we were paying more for rent than what the house is worth.
After borrowing some money from my 401k, we finally had the rest of the money we needed to move forward. So that's where we are now! I keep going back and forth between being a nervous wreck and being super excited, but I've been on the upswing for about a week now, so I hope to keep this mood going, at least until after we close in 11 days.
Thanks for stopping by, I look forward to sharing our adventures with you!
~Chel
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