Story of our house

The Search

Everyone knows that finding a house is a lengthy and time consuming process. Initially, it’s quite exciting to be involved in the process of finding houses in neighborhoods that you think you like and visiting these homes. Once the novelty of house searching wears off, the reality of the situation settles in.

This is when you start focusing on getting your pre-approval done to realize how much of a loan you can afford to borrow, which directly impacts the price of your future home. The other big step is to narrow down the cities and towns that you search for homes. This is a key point in the search process.

We began our house hunting process back in Nov of 2003. Initially, we just looked around and tried to learn about different towns and what they had to offer as far as community, commuting and other aspects. With the understanding that it would be convenient to find homes that were easily accessible from some major highway we set out to make a list of towns that would satisfy our needs.

The Winter months are usually a tough time to find homes as they are in short supply. Homeowners, incapable of showing of all the nice features of the house delay till the Spring to put their houses onto the market. We got pre-approved fairly early in our house hunting process so that we knew what our upper limit was going to be. There isn’t any sense in looking at homes out of ones reach without realizing that basic fact.

We managed to find some house listings through web searches and did the customary drive-by to see if the location was acceptable to us. After looking at homes just from the outside we decided that it was time to start looking seriously. At this time we contacted a Realtor to help us with our search.

With our Realtor in tow we visited many houses over the course many months. Having been through the house hunting process once before with my parents place, I realized that there will be that one house that will just jump out at you and make you feel like you are home. Unfortunately, we looked at many homes and not one leapt at us. More often than, we leapt back in horror after looking at some of the houses.

Our Realtor never lost hope and continued to line up houses that were our interest, within our budget and guidelines. But it began to seem like we were just not going to find the house we wanted for the amount of money we were willing to spend. Were we really being that unreasonable??