It's the lack of communication that gets to me.

Have you ever played the game telephone or gossip? You sit in a circle and the first person whispers a message into their neighbors ear, and the message then moves around the circle, and the end message is completely different than the one that started? A message like "Can you jump rope with me?" turns into "Kangaroos jump in Tennessee." You can see how the sound of the message is similar, but what it is communicated is completely different than what the original intent was.

That is how I feel like this house buying process is going. With one big exception. I don't get to hear what the end message is. You would think the message shouldn't change that much. We told our agent what we wanted. We watched him put it into a written contract, that we signed. He then faxed the contract to the sellers agent. So you would think the seller would know exactly what we want, and there should be no confusion right? Wrong. We were supposed to hear back from them as to weather they would take our offer or give us a counter offer by 5:00 on Wednesday. We received a call from our agent shortly after that time saying he hadn't heard anything from the other agent, other than that they had received our offer. He then went to work trying to find out what was going on. After this the best he could tell us that in his opinion the sellers had not had the deadline communicated to them. So now I want to know, what else wasn't communicated to them? What is their agent hiding trying to make a bigger profit for himself, or because he doesn't really know what he is doing?

Then yesterday, we got a call from our agent telling us there had been another offer, this one a for sale by owner offer, which was allowed by the sellers contract. However as far as we can tell this offer is just verbal. However it is high enough that it matches the amount the seller would get if we offered full price. We have also been told that the seller is interested in our offer, and is preparing a counter offer. Which by the way, we have yet to see. And that we will have a deadline to let them know, if we will take the counter offer, by Monday. Is it just me or is there something smelly about this whole deal?

Now I like this house, and I feel good about this house, but I'm not in love with this house. If it falls through I know there are other houses out there. But I am in love with the timing that this house offers. If this one falls through, I won't be able to do any in person looking until the beginning of March. Which will delay how soon we can get into a house considerably. I would like to be settled or at least start moving in, by the time my husband starts his new job on the 1st of April. And if that isn't possible, I would at least like to be moved in to the point that I'm not living out of boxes by the time the baby comes in May. So I am struggling with not being frustrated.

I know that it is all in the Lord's hands, and if this is supposed to happen it will. And if it doesn't, there is something else out there for us. I just have a hard time believing that sometimes when I am stuck waiting, wondering what the seller has even been told.

Oh well this too shall pass.

Saturday- Making an offer, and a trip to the Temple

On Saturday we went and looked a a couple more houses that aren't worth mentioning, and then we decided to make an offer on house #2. From this point on, I have been very glad we have an agent. The only down side I see is that we have had no direct communication from the sellers of the home. I hate having to go through a chain of 4 people to get anything done. I wish I could just sit down with the current owners, with our agents there to cover the legal stuff, and talk it all out. However being long distance, that isn't really much of an option anyway. We should hopefully hear back sometime today as to whether or not they accept our offer, or want to negotiate. I'm guessing they will want to negotiate. We offered $10,000 less than their asking price.

We got done making the offer just in time to go back to my parents house, change our clothes, eat some dinner, and go with my brother and his girlfriend to the Draper Temple open house. This is when a temple has just been built, before it is dedicated they allow people to go in the temple on a tour, so that people can better understand what a Temple is, and why it is so important to the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I really enjoyed going, but wished that (except for the fact that it was like 9:00 at night,) we had the kids with us.

A house hunt: Houses #3-6

I don't know that there was much to mention about the other houses we looked at. They didn't really strike me.

House 3- There was some miscommunication and the owner wasn't expecting us. So we didn't see any more than the front room of the house.

House 4- A short sale, (meaning it is being foreclosed and you are trying to buy it before it does. This can take quite a while from what I understand. We don't really have a while right now with Sleeping Beauty coming in May). Would need paint and minor work before moving in.

House 5- Foreclosed and trashed. I was willing to give it a look, and even tried to look past holes in the walls, and carpet and linoleum that would need to be replaced. But when I saw mold in the master bathroom, I was done looking at that one.

House 6- This house was small. It had 4 bedrooms, but everything in the house was on a really small scale. The hallways were too narrow for more than one person to walk down it at a time. The bathrooms were narrow, and the living area was small. Other than that, the house seemed nice and in good repair.

After we saw house number 6, we ended our day of house hunting. My husband was flying in that evening, so I made appointments with our agent to bring my husband by homes 1 and 2 the next day.

A house hunt: House #2

Then we moved on to house #2.

This house was one that hadn't really appealed to me much just by looking at the outside. However the back yard had appealed to my husband, and the pictures of the kitchen appealed to me. So I figured it was worth it to take a look. And I am glad I did.

Just walking into this house you could tell it had a nice feel about it. It is a house that is almost as old as me, but you could tell that the owners have taken really good care of it. It has only had one set of owners, and everything appeared to be in good condition. It had a nice sized living room, kitchen and dinning area, and family room downstairs. This house also had large bookcases in the family room that the current residents are planning on leaving behind.

There were a few downsides to this house as well.

There were 6 bedrooms, but they were smaller rooms. The master was large enough to fit probably any size of bed comfortably, but wasn't much larger than that. All of the other bedrooms are probably not big enough to fit more than one twin bed in each, except for maybe in the instance of a crib or toddler bed. But because there are 6 rooms we felt like that was workable.

There are 2 bathrooms. One upstairs and one down. Neither are really large, but they aren't really small either. The upstairs one is accessible off the hallway and master bedroom.

There is not much space provided for food storage. The area under the stairs had shelves that can be used, and there were a lot of cabinets in the kitchen. But there was no pantry or room that could be used conveniently for storage. To make up for this however, there were a lot shelves in the garage. Not a place you would want to store food, but you could probably store just about anything else you want to store, in there.

There were also quite a few trees in both the front and back yard that looked like a decorative crab apple, that could have the potential to make quite a mess in the fall and winter.

Structurally, the house had aluminum siding, which isn't one of the best options, but I don't know that it is one of the worst either.

A house hunt: House #1

Our agent sent me some house listing to look over and I let him know which ones we were interested in. He then set up appointments for me to look at those homes on my second day there. My mother and sister joined me in my house hunt. We started with a house that was just two doors down from where my grandparents live. This house had a lot of things I had liked about it before even really seeing it. Of course the location being as close as it is to family was a plus. Also this house was one that my grandfather had built, so I knew that it had been built well. Also looking at the pictures that were posted online, it had a lot of features that really appealed to us in a house. The one downside that we could foresee was that they were asking quite a bit more that what we really felt like we could afford.

Going into this house, I was really impressed. It was really well taken care of. It had a really nice living area. Great kitchen cabinets, built in bookcases, and tons of storage. It had a work room off the garage that was really nice as well. The backyard was really well landscaped, and had a sandbox and swings. Then we looked at the basement. It was clear that the people who lived there previously had not spent a lot of time in the basement for a long time. There was one room that was in really good condition. The office. The other rooms were nice rooms, but would need a lot of work to make it livable for my family. So it was a house that would work, but would also require a lot of work.

A house hunt: A real estate agent?

All of our married life we have lived in apartments and have finally reached a point in our lives where we are really tired of renting and feel like we can afford to buy a house. However we don't know much about buying a house, and so it has been a learning experience for us.

We weren't sure at first if we wanted to go with a real estate agent or not. We didn't want to have to pay extensive costs, but at the same time, there is only so much you can do by yourself long distance in the process of buying a home. We were referred to my husbands cousin's husband (did you follow that?) who is an agent, and decided it might be beneficial to go through him. Now that I am back home again, and needing to do everything long distance, I am glad that we chose to go through him.