It was sometime around September/October 2020 when Mark started talking to me seriously about wanting to buy a house. We'd had some short-lived discussions in early 2020, around the time we had to renew our apartment lease, but I wasn't really interested, and he let it go, and we stayed at Stadium View. But in October, I was more receptive, though it still took me longer to warm up to the idea.
One thing that's held us back before is that we've never been sure how long we'd stay in BG. But at this point, several things started to add up and nudge us in the home-buying direction. For one, we'd been cooped up in our apartment for months, both mostly working from home. Despite the largest clean out and reorganization we'd done since moving to the SV apartment in 2012, it still felt a bit tight. Mark was especially low on space in his studio, and realizing again how restricted he felt about being able to actually practice and play there--too much concern about disrupting the neighbors. And the complex had been sold. Some changes from the new management were fine or even positive, but we'd also seen some things we didn't like--the worst of which was the layoffs of the two fantastic women who worked in the office. This took away some major incentives that had kept me from wanting to leave the apartment before. I was also getting ready to apply for a Faculty Improvement Leave, which, if granted, would allow me to work on a project during Spring 2022 instead of the usual teaching/service assignments. It comes with some strings attached, though, including a commitment to stay at BGSU for a full year after the leave. So between that, Mark's continuing job at BGSU with the drumline, and the worse-than-ever academic job market, it seemed safe to say that we'd be staying put in BG for at least a couple more years. With all of that in mind, Mark won me over--it was time to look into buying a house.
Of course, I wanted to gather lots of info first: I really had no idea where to start, and I like to be well-informed about what I'm getting myself into! So I called some family and friends to talk about what their house hunting experiences had been like, Mark did a ton of research on the local housing market, I called the credit union about mortgages, and we lined up meetings with three realtors. After those meetings, it was pretty easy to choose our realtor, Donna Friesner with Danberry. And she was amazing at every step of the process! We also decided to work with a local mortgage broker, Michelle at Evans Home Loan, who was also great. We figured if we wanted to be moving out before our lease expired at the end of April, we'd need to start seriously house hunting by late December/early January. As the semester wrapped up, we were eager to get on with it! We scheduled showings for 4 houses that were on the market in mid-December so we could get a better handle on reality vs. the pics in the listings. Then we got our preapproval taken care of just before Christmas. From there, the search began in earnest.
We knew that the market was intense, and we'd need to be prepared to see houses the first day they were active listings, and be ready to make a same-day offer on anything we were seriously interested in. Otherwise, we'd miss out. (Yep, throughout the whole search, houses were selling that quickly--and some even before they were officially on the market!). One of our main criteria was getting a better studio space for Mark, which could come in a variety of forms: a finished basement, a separate living/dining room, etc. Because there were so few listings available, we started looking at anything within 15 miles of BG. We both wanted to stay in BG if possible, but we were trying to be flexible and realistic. But even then, we knew moving out of town would mean getting a second car, which was a complication we weren't excited about.
We toured a few more houses between Christmas and New Year's. One of those was in Haskins, a very small town just about 10 minutes northwest of BG. It was a pretty good house, with a tri-level floorplan that would have been great for Mark's studio, at a reasonable price. But I had a really hard time with it. There were some cosmetic issues that I struggled to see past, but ultimately, it was the location. I just couldn't picture us moving to a smaller small town (Mark already thinks BG is too small), and I really didn't want the commute and second car. It turned out that this was the house that revealed I wasn't actually flexible on location, and I'd rather wait it out longer to find something in town. This wasn't an easy moment in the journey, but it was important!
 |
| the Haskins house |
After that, we stopped touring homes outside of BG. And it wasn't long till we came across the Madison house...it came on the market late in the afternoon on Monday, January 11, the first day of classes. Our realtor set up a showing for Tuesday afternoon. I had a very sleepless night between--I was a bit hyped-up after teaching my first remote Methods class on Monday night and also kept thinking about the house, which seemed like it had so much potential. So we saw it on Tuesday and went straight to the realtor's office after to write up our offer. She checked with the seller's agent and we knew they had other offers already, so we included an escalation clause to try to make ours competitive (that basically says our offer is X, but we're willing to beat any other offers by Y up to Z). No word on Wednesday, but we heard first thing that Thursday morning that the sellers accepted our offer! We were so excited--and overwhelmed! This was all happening fast, and during my first week of classes. But it was time to keep moving--scheduling the inspection, paying the earnest money, and getting the financing arranged (including the appraisal and locking in an interest rate).
 |
| the Madison house |
We had the inspection on January 21, and that's where things started to go south. Our amazing inspector, Jordan with Erie Inspections, turned up a long list of issues. Some were minor, of course, but there were also a few big (potentially expensive) items: serious cracks in the garage floor, an issue with the fireplace, a leaky toilet (which turned out to have ruined the whole subfloor in the bathroom), and rotten trim/Masonite board on the exterior. This was all on top of the things we could easily tell needed work when we toured the house: a very outdated kitchen with old appliances, poorly installed trim/baseboards throughout, and some minor issues. So I was already getting overwhelmed (this is my adjective for the whole house hunting experience!) thinking about how these things could add up in time, energy, and money. But we wrote up an inspection addendum asking the sellers to repair some items before closing and pay some closing costs to help us address other items. We started getting quotes for those things to get a better idea of what we'd be getting into. The sellers took ages to get back to us--on the 27th. And their reply wasn't good: they only wanted to agree to about a quarter of what we asked for. Our realtor was kind of shocked by their response and suggested we try one more round of negotiating. So we did, but as we gathered more info about the costs for some of the needed repairs, we were really getting concerned. Meanwhile, the appraisal took place, and the house did appraise for our purchase price (which the sellers had been worried about, so we hoped that might lead to better negotiations). On February 2, the sellers asked to extend our negotiations again, for one more week. We agreed, but we were not feeling good about the whole thing at this point. The next day, we got the estimate back (finally!) for the work on the exterior, and it was much higher than we'd thought it would be. It was the last straw--we decided we wanted to find a way out of the deal. And the next morning, it came: a reply from the sellers about the inspection issues that was still far too little...so we could reject it and walk away. By that point, we were so disappointed, but also relived. We'd started to wonder if we were getting a money pit (our realtor even used that expression once toward the end of the process!). Unfortunately, this meant we were out the money for the inspection and appraisal, not to mention all the time, energy, and emotion we'd invested. But all of that paled in comparison to the risk of taking on a house that needed more work than we were up for (or could afford!). Still, we were pretty devastated that it hadn't worked out. And also very thankful for the effort and expertise of our realtor--she worked so hard for us and helped us so well along the way.
That brought us to early February, and back to the drawing board. We kept a close eye on the listings, scheduled showings as soon as possible, and got an updated preapproval letter. We knew, again, we'd have to be ready to make an offer right away when we saw something that would work. And that's what we did...when we saw the Fort house on March 6. This one was a tri-level with the nicest kitchen of any we'd seen. We made our best offer, but didn't get it. We were pretty frustrated to find out later that the sale price was actually lower than our offer, but our realtor thinks it might have been cash (and people are also doing things like waiving inspections and appraisals, which we just weren't willing to do). For Mark, I think this will always be the house that got away! (And I liked it a lot, too!)
 |
| the Fort house |
From there, the ups and downs continued. We'd go for a stretch without any listings to see, then we'd check things out that didn't work for us, then we'd wait some more. There were a few houses we really deliberated about, but we knew they weren't really what we were looking for.
We nudged our budget up a bit and toured some homes that were more than we really wanted to spend, which added a few more options. We even made an offer on one of those, the Conneaut house on March 26. Since asking price was above what we'd been hoping to spend, that's all we offered--we knew it might not be super competitive if they had multiple offers (which they did). So we weren't surprised that we didn't get this one, but still disappointed. |
| the Conneaut house |
 |
| the Ontario house |
 |
| the Revere house |
 |
| the Prospect house |
Over the next few days, we got the inspection scheduled and the financing rolling. We had our same fantastic inspector (with the repeat customer discount!) and were delighted that this inspection report was much better! There's always a few things, but nothing to scare us off this time. We negotiated a few small items with the seller but decided to work through most of it on our own (again--nothing major, so that was all fine). The appraisal also got scheduled in record time, and our lender asked if we were interested in closing early! We had been aiming for mid-May, but once we got the final loan approval, we were able to schedule closing for April 30.
Meanwhile, all of this was happening during the last weeks of the semester, so it was a pretty intense stretch. And since the house was move-in ready, we wanted to keep things going quickly. We booked our U-Haul for May 6, the day after grades were due, and gave notice at our apartment that we'd be out a week later, on the 13th. It was a lot to juggle, but we were also thrilled that we'd be able to move so quickly, and it was worth working hard to make it happen!
I was a bit anxious all the way up to closing, but sure enough, after an hour or so of signing paperwork, the house was ours on April 30. And now we've been here for a month already! We've got a ways to go, but we are more and more settled each day. And so, so thankful to have found a house and actually purchased it after our roller coaster house hunt (just over 20 showings all together!). We really appreciate the great people we worked with along the way and all the encouragement from friends and family. And we're both thrilled that we're not house hunting any more!
Note: all photos in this post downloaded from the listings on realtor.com
No comments:
Post a Comment