Hi! This is my newest blog! I plan on writing about our home building & buying process!
First, how did we end up building a house instead of buying a house that is already built? It's kind of a complicated matter; but i'll start from the beginning.
Chris & I decided in October that we were ready to buy a house. After crunching numbers, writing everything out, oh plus ODrama is giving out 8k so that's always a bonus ... side note: the 8k really has nothing to do w/ why we are buying. If we couldn't afford it we surely wouldn't be buying a house just for 8k.
My mom got us in touch with a mortgage broker, who was sort of helpful. He ran our credit, where we re-learned that someone had crossed Chris' name with someone else' name. great. I say "re-learned" because we had previously pulled Chris' credit and we saw this one there. We wrote to Trans-union to have it taken care of, and it obviously wasn't. So we had to call trans union and dispute all 20something accounts that were not his. There were credit card accounts on there that were opened before he was even born. Three seperate mortgages, one of them was almost 1million dollars! The ladies name was very similar to Chris' first & Last name. With some googling my mom found all the ladies information. Google is a dangerous tool!
30 days later Chris' credit was clear and we could proceed with the home buying search.
We found a real-estate agent and we were off. We scoured the internet looking for potential houses in our price range of 125K. We are
kinda picky.
We didn't really have a big list of
MUST HAVE's but we had a few: 3 br/ 2 bath , enclosed garage. Big kitchen. Beyond that we would make adjustments and deal with certain things.
The things that we would
not tolerate: huge subdivision with thousands of houses packed in their like sardines; and that was pretty much our NO list. ... and that made things QUITE difficult.
We were looking in Clermont, and uhm, if you've been to Clermont lately, or in the last 10 years, you know that it is alot of HUGE subdivisions packed together. Older homes are their, but not for sale, and if they are they will cost you an arm & a leg, and possibly your kidneys! =)
Our poor realtor. So we ventured out on a nasty nasty rainy cold Saturday to look at some houses. We had found one that we absolutely loved. It was a mid 90's home, it was in a subdivision, BUT it was an older subdivision , it was well established, and had high standards for the homes there. All the construction was done, and there was no room for expansion. This was satisfiable.
My dad joined us to look at this house.. one word. dump. the pictures were very very deceiving, as we learned was the case with most of the houses that we looked at. Boo. I was pretty upset, I really loved this house; from the pictures. Next. - - - I think we looked at about 4 houses that day. Then we started to head home. During our day we had talked w/ our realtor about this one house we saw online, but it wasn't in our list of houses to look at , and I guess I had forgotten to send her the house. So after much searching on my Blackberry I was able to locate the house. We got all the way back to Davenport when the realtor called and said we could look at the house.
We turned around & went back. The house was SO adorable. It was built in the early 1900s. The kitchen wasn't what I wanted, the appliances were old as dirt, the siding was rotten in some places, the house had settled so it was kind of sloping, the bricks on the fire place were cracking, there was only one full bathroom and the rooms were small... other then that we loved the house! ... obviously we had to think about this. I wasn't sold on it. We needed to look at more houses.
Fast forward to the next Tuesday. Chris comes home and tells me he thinks he's getting transferred to Tampa. UHM!? We need to know
for sure, seeing as how we are looking to buy a house in Clermont.
Wednesday comes & goes. Thursday Chris finds out from his boss, yes, they are going to transfer him to Tampa.
Well- alright then.
Change of plans. My dad has a house that he was building in Hernando Beach that he's been hounding us to buy for a while now. Looks like the opportunity is here, and we are taking it.
So that's how we ended up in Hernando Beach!
