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All the stuff pictured in the last post has now been stuffed into our house. Much of it has taken up residence in the garage, pending final distribution to various cupboards and shelves. It’s odd, actually, because even though the house has 1.5 times the square footage of our apartment, it seems like there is not enough room. Hopefully over the next few weeks things will find a place and I will be able to clear out that garage. I cringe every time I see a garage stuffed with boxes of crap and I refuse to be forced to park my car in the driveway all the time.

After officially living in the house now since last Saturday, we’ve found a few things that need to be fixed that we didn’t know about ahead of time. The most nagging one is the sprinkler system, which was reportedly fixed just before the previous owners left the place, but is still not in working order. We’ve been using a hose and small sprinkler to water the lawn, which also now needs to be cut. Funny how that works.

One thing I hadn’t counted on was how gingerly I would find myself walking around on the floor. Let me explain: we’ve been living for our entire married lives in apartments built on concrete slab floors and our house has a normal floor with a crawlspace underneath, so every creak and squeak seems awfully loud!

We closed on our house on wednesday and so far no one has come beating down our door demanding to know how we, of all people, managed to qualify for a mortgage. So, I guess I’m now a home owner. The American Dream, right? Today is the first day of moving and I proudly present many of the items that fit under the category of “Things that kept us from buying a house,” or “Stuff that, had we not bought it, would have seen to it that we owned a house two years ago when interest rates were still good and before the market bubble.”

Erica has been packing since the night we found out they had accepted our offer and she started with all the stuff that she figured we wouldn’t need easy access to in the next few weeks. In an ideal world, we would sell it all on eBay.

I just gave our loan officer the go ahead on the mortgage for our house, so the first stressful thing is out of the way for me, at least for a day or two. Hopefully I won’t be second guessing myself on it. He gave us what seemed to be the best combination of payment/interest rate/closing costs and a loan program/process that I was sure I completely understood. At this point in our lives my two most important concerns were the monthly payment and the closing costs cause things are going to be a little tight on both of those. Things like whether we have to pay mortgage insurance, etc., were of high but slightly secondary importance. Next time around when we have some equity in our house and hopefully a more liquid situation in general I’ll spend more time finagling to get the very best deal.
I also scheduled an appointment with a Home Inspector. He will be at the house at 9am tomorrow and will be calling me to come hear his report and do a walk through about 3 hours after that. Hopefully he doesn’t give us anything new to stress about.

I’ve also talked to a representative from the Utah Department of Transporation about plans for development in the area where the house is located. He told me that they are in the planning stages of a freeway widening project as well as a rebuild of the interchange that is about half a mile south of the house. The widening project he estimates won’t be done before about 10 years from now, so it will impact us little, if at all. The interchange project may be sooner than that, but the associated Environmental Impact Study has not even been started yet, so any actual construction will be at the very least 2-3 years from now. The current interchange only provides on and off ramps on the east side of the freeway, and our house is on the west, so it would be nice to have better access. The area is quite close to Utah Lake so the tree huggers will definitely have a lot to say about any proposed development. I’m pretty excited to be moving to an area with nature so close again. Here’s a link to google maps showing the area:

http://maps.google.com/

Our house is on one of the east-west streets toward the top of the image. You can see how close we are to the lake and lots and lots of open ground. Some of it is already earmarked for development (and already subdivided in the county records parcel map) but much of it will remain protected wetland perfect for exploration.

They accepted our offer on the house Friday night at about 8:30. As it turns out there were three offers that day and the offering prices were all about the same. The other two offers asked the sellers to pay their closing costs, though, and we did not, so they chose ours. So now we get to run around like chickens with our heads cut off for the next few weeks dotting Is and crossing Ts. Joy. My wife is uber-excited. She has already started packing up our apartment, which is nice for me, since cleaning goes along with that process and she is doing it while I am at work. I’m farly certain, though, that she’ll have posted a list of things for me do to when I get home this afternoon.

Well, we just made an offer on a house. It’s not a perfect house, the chief downside being that it is farther south than we would ideally like to live, but we have looked at umpteen thousand houses in the past month and it is the best one we’ve seen so far, so we jumped on it pretty quick. Do you always feel railroaded when dealing with a Real Estate Agent? The one we worked with on the offer is even a guy that is friends with and well trusted by my wife’s grandparents, and even though he deferred to us on everything, I still felt a bit railroaded. We set a very short expiration on our offer, so of we don’t hear that they have accepted it by late tonight then I will breathe a little easier, because at least then I won’t be locked into anything until we make another offer. Erica really loves the house and it seems that she has completely forgotten about how much she hates driving long distances (it’s not really that long a distance, but when you have to do it every day it gets to feel like it). We’ll see how it turns out. I suppose if we get the house and hate it enough we can turn around and sell it after a few months or a year. I’ve heard of buyers remorse but is there such a thing as offerer’s remorse?

We’re rapidly finding that we can’t afford what we want in a house, and we don’t want what we can afford. Or, at least, to be able to afford what we want in a house we will have to make major changes to our lifestyle, grit our teeth, tighten up our belts and in general prepare to weather a storm. The most enlightening thing is finding out just how little you get for how much money some of these trash heaps are listed at. I thought we had it all figured out about a year ago when I sat down and looked at prices. Now, of course, the houses we thought we would be able to afford in a year have appreciated by about $20,000.

We met with a lender back at the beginning of March, and found that we could qualify for a much larger mortgage than we had figured out that we could pay for. In fact, he told us we could qualify for approximately 33% more money than we thought we’d want to spend. I suppose that is good in that it means our credit is in decent shape. The trouble is that in this market we are having a difficult time finding a house that we feel like we can be comfortable in, given our monetary constraints.

Erica has historically had a difficult time finding her way around, which is ironic since she grew up in Utah and most Utah towns are layed out on a very simple grid system: 350 N 400 W, for example, instead of 13 Fred’s Corner. She has begun to face her inadequacies, however, in the interest of being able to find her way to homes listed on the internet by address. The other night she enlisted Google Maps and about two dozen sheets of paper and constructed a map that covers the areas we are looking in:

She’s hung the map on the wall and figures the route to each house she wants to see before heading out the door. In her words: “I need to see how it all works together.”

We’d ideally like to be somewhere more or less in the middle of that area, because it puts us close to where we both work and where Jonathan will be going to school. Unfortunately, the middle of that includes the two most inflated real estate markets in the area. I know that our housing prices are nothing compared to some of the areas around the country… $1,000,000 for a two bedroom bungalow, etc., but nor are the salaries in this area as large as what some of my esteemed colleagues around the country are taking home. In particular, one of the drawbacks of working for a small company, as I do, is that you end up getting payed somewhat less than you are probably worth. There are many intangible, or at best non-short term, benefits that can help make up for this deficit, but it’s difficult to wave your Stock Options at a bill collector and have him take any notice, if you take my meaning.

We’ve found one place that is extremely attractive. It’s in a good area and is in quite good shape. It’s a foreclosed property and the listing agent listed it for about $15000 less than the bank probably wants for it, and now we have to make an offer to the bank and sit back and wait while our offer battles it out with all the sharks looking for a deal and the other honest folks looking for a place to live. Erica seems to have fallen in love with the house and is now using it as a yardstick against which she measures every other place she sees. I’d love to be able to swoop in and make an offer that would satisfy the bank and still allow us to have some instant equity in the property, and I think I even know about where that sweet spot would be. The trouble is I can’t make the numbers come anywhere close to working in my budget. And so the search goes on.

Looks like the plan is to stick it out in our current quarters, notwithstanding the increase in rent. It may set us back a few months in our plans, but it is unlikely that we would be able to find anywhere cheaper to live. Besides, I really don’t want to move twice in a year. It’s possible that with some fairly serious belt tightening we may be able to make up some of the lost dollars. I’ve adopted a sort of nonchalant attitude toward the whole thing, especially after reading the text of Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech, which my brother Andy forwarded to me this morning. As Jobs puts it, this may just be a dot in our lives whose connections will later become more apparent. I’ve also spent some time talking with my sister, Heather, who works for a mortgage company. She clued me into the fact that we are not as bad off either cashflow- or credit-wise than I thought we were. As she puts it, all sorts of losers out there have houses, so it shouldn’t be too big a deal for us to get one. She’s concise, yet precise.

As I’ve mentioned before, we have been trying to gear up toward buying a house. This involves paying off debts, saving money, etc., etc., and was supposed to be a gradual process that would culminate in having enough money available each month to be able to afford an adequate dwelling place. The plan was that approximately six to nine months from now we would be able to start really looking for our next place to live. Well, it seems our plans have been moved up in the form of a visit from our land lord this morning. He showed up to tell my wife that he is giving our job of managing the place to his granddaughter, who needs some extra money. Of course I can understand that, and I don’t begrudge him for putting family first, I would too, but it kind of throws a wrench into our precisely oiled, if slowly turning machinery. So, we now face the choice of renewing our rental contract at the end of August at the full monthly rent, which is doable, but would seriously hurt, as in setting back our grand design by at least a year, I would guess, or finding somewhere cheaper to live. We don’t have enough soluble cash flow on a monthly basis to be able to afford much of a house at all at this point, so it’s unlikely we’d be able to go that route without an interest only loan, which I refuse to even consider. I don’t want that monkey on my back, thank you very much. So the next few days promise to be interesting, at least, as we try to figure out what to do.

It is finally time to start, evidently, because though we still can not afford it, Erica keeps pestering me to go looking at houses. Should never have shown her utahrealestate.com. Oh well. Tonight we are officially going to drive around and look at houses. We’ll mostly be trying to get an idea for which neighborhoods we like, I think, because any houses on the market right now are likely not going to be when we can actually buy, but at least we can get an idea of what is available in our price range. Looks like we will be living in the south part of the valley, because Jonathan is going to be going to school next year at Reagan Academy, which is a brand new chartered public school in Springville. We’re excited to finally have him into a charter school. Too bad it is so far away from where we currently live. Of course I will make regular updates as we hunt for a place to live and then (oh the terror) get a mortgage. My brother just finished that process and from what I could see of it I am not looking forward. My sister is even in that industry and it still was a bit of a fiasco for him.