Adventures in Home-Buying: Looking, Looking, Looking, Looking…
Looooooooooking! I feel like that’s all we’ve been doing lately, because, well—that’s all we’ve been doing lately! It is really fun to look at different homes, but man, is it exhausting sometimes. And it really makes your brain work overtime!
Here are a few of the homes we’ve looked at over the past two weeks [all of them have been blurred for privacy’s sake]:
3 beds, 2 baths. One of the best floorplans we’ve seen. Needs paint (the ENTIRE house—I mean even the switchplates!—is stenciled)
4 bed, 2.5 bath foreclosure. Definitely needs some cosmetic help—new fixtures, updates in the kitchen, etc.
3 bed, 2 bath on a quiet cul-de-sac. Weird layout though.
3 bed, 2 bath. Tastefully decorated, needs really no updating.
3 bed, 1.5 bath. Older home, but on one of the most beautiful streets I’ve ever seen.
3 bed, 1.5 bath. The pictures made it look like it had a lot of character, but it turns out it just looked outdated and kind of cheap.
It’s been a whirlwind few weeks of looking at homes. We’ve seen at least 5 or 6 more than the ones I’ve shown here, and that doesn’t include our first night of looking when we saw 3 others. I am cautiously optimistic about 2 of these homes, but I’m trying not to get my hopes up…I learned my lesson about that last time!
So, that’s where we are on our house hunt. If you’ve purchased a home, how many did you look at before you bought?
See all my Adventures in Home-Buying posts here:
The Pre-Approval Process
The Beginning Stages of the House Hunt
Finding a Realtor
Dealing with Disappointment
The second to last one looks super nice and for some reason the kind of house I always imagined would be awesome to live in as a kid but they really do not make them like that in Southern California!
OMG Amy, we looked for over 6 months for houses, probably looked at 20-30 houses, put offers in on about 5…before we finally found one. we close march 30th and can not wait! You will finally find the right one, it may seem like it will never come and you will start to despise looking at houses but it finally pays off.
We looked at about 25 houses in a month. We had it narrowed down to three very different homes. One huge house that needed updating and had a tiny kitchen, one totally remodeled townhouse, and one newly remodeled Victorian. We ended up with the Victorian!
We’ve seen over 20 in the past year (hundreds if browsing on the internet counts) and are taking our time. I love trying to guess where these houses are in the county. I grew up in the north suburbs with tons of trees and parks so I’m partial to wooded lots and streets lined with oaks and maples. Given, I hated raking in the autumn – the trees made everything so beautiful.
(Which is probably counter productive here in Florida where you can find beautiful live oaks and magnolias – but they don’t bode too well during hurricane season!)
Amy – Jeff and I looked at close to 40! Also putting offers in on two in a similar situation to yours; very frustrating! When we bought it close to 5 years ago it was perfect for us but now we’ve started to outgrow it and will probably be back in the house hunting whirlwind shortly. Good luck!