We Have a House!

Well.... kinda. I've been waiting to post about this until some things were confirmed. We had found some houses and put bids on them, but were either out bid or the sellers decided not to sell any more. Since we'd had that experience, I wanted to make sure that things wouldn't fall through, although they still can. We put in an offer, and after a few counters with the bank, settled on a price and a contract. This is amazing because banks don't usually counter and deal, they just say yes or no.

On Tuesday we had the inspection. The inspector found problems with the roof, which is not a surprise. All the houses we were looking at need a new roof within 2 years, even most of the houses above our price range need a new roof. It needs a new furnace, but that can wait about a year. There is no oven and the refrigerator and stove are broken and most of the window shades are gone. The inspector also found some plumbing problems.
We had a roofer out this week and got an estimate. It was less than I expected, but more than

Micah expected :) We had a plumber come out and look things over. It was a lot less than we both expected!! He gave us an estimate on everything involving plumbing, but some of that we won't have him do - for example, replace the kitchen faucet and install a new dishwasher. Some of the things we've been looking at are getting the dishwasher installed for free as part of the store's incentive to buy from them.

Still up is having an electrician come out and look at the fuse box. We have a friend who had the exact same problem and waited a year to fix it, so we're hoping we can do that. We are also considering having a Sears repairman come out and look at the refrigerator and dishwasher. We're hoping that they can be repaired and used for a couple more years before we need new ones. We're also going to have a contractor come and give us an estimate on bringing a gas line up from the basement to the kitchen, because we'd much rather have a gas stove than an electric one.

We have spent a lot of time at Lowe's and Home Depot looking at prices of different things. We have a priority list of the things we need to do. We close on June 18th and don't have to be out of the apartment until July 18th, so that will give us time to paint and fix some things before we live there.

I know that this sounds like a lot of things to do, but there are a lot of things that we don't need to do. The floors just need to be cleaned, but not replaced. The siding and windows are new and energy efficient and the siding is easy to care for. The water heater is new and very large (I forget the exact size.) In addition to that, it has a 2 car garage, 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a family room, a living room, and a dining room.

We'll update as we hear more.