Day One: Searching For A Home

Yesterday was the very first day that we went out and looked at houses here with a realtor. We were able to look at five houses in the morning and another three in the evening. Lisa had her binder in hand and was taking meticulous notes on seemingly every tiny detail. We saw a lot of good things and a lot of bad things. By the time we arrived at the last house at around 6:30, we were ready to go home. Things changed.

I recently read something that because we are in a buyer's market, buyers are going through homes looking for things wrong in order to eliminate the house from the vast list of potential homes they have. That is what we were doing throughout the day. Trying to find things that were wrong. Some of these included: smell, dog next door, worn carpet, old kitchen counters, paint color, price vs size, backyard size, dated plumbing fixtures, old light fixtures, etc. We had a hard time finding things wrong with the last one we looked at. We really liked this one. Our realtor, perhaps jokingly, said that she had paperwork in the car if we wanted to make an offer. Since it was nighttime we could not get a good view of the outside or what the inside looked like with sunlight. We thought that it would be better to sleep on it and come back and see it in the morning.

Our realtor called the sellers' agent to see if there were any offers in the works. He said that there were people who had already seen the property three times. He was waiting to hear something back from them. This house had only been on the market for five days (a very short time compared to all of the others we had seen). It was definitely priced to sell at $315k. We felt that we needed to decide quickly.

Lisa and I were married less than a year after meeting each other. Lisa became a Catholic less than a year after first stepping into a Catholic church after we were married (I followed three years later). Our decision to homeschool was fairly impulsive after I attended a homeschool convention (on the spur of the moment). We decided to make this move to Colorado Springs after spending only three days here this past August. So, as with other important life changing decisions Lisa and I make, we took another leap of faith.

We decided to make an offer on the spot. It was a good thing that we did. Early this morning, the sellers received another offer (presumably from the people who looked three times). The sellers were able to look at both offers. We offered $5k below their listing price and the others offered list price with a $5k credit for closing costs. Basically the same bottom line, but the sellers accepted ours, even with the contingency of the closing on the selling of our home, scheduled for February 9th.

Hopefully everything will work out in the end. If it does, then we can move in on February 28th! We thank all those who have been praying for us.

This house was built in 1996 and has 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, a finished walk-out basement, 3040 sqft (about 1000 on each level), a huge 13598 sqft lot, incredible views of the mountains & the city, and is very clean & well kept (and on and on and on). I 'borrowed' the following photo from the realtor's listing: