We Did It!...Finally.

Filed Under : by MJ

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

We bought a house. Yes we bought it...it's ours, we officially closed yesterday. It's been a whirlwind of a month and I may or may not have asked Brett at least once per day, "are we losing the house?" Okay Okay, it was mostly when we hit snags (I'm not THAT horrible)...but we may or may not have hit a snag just about every day since we first saw the home.

Long story short the house was originally built in 1973, purchased in 2007 or '08 by a builder/investor who unfortunately (for him, maybe not so much for us) went bankrupt. The investor had began a large scale remodel, including gutting the entire house and adding to the garage, adding an entirely new master suite, as well as pushing out the kitchen an extra few feet. The entire exterior was redone with brick masonry and stucco, as well as prepped for stone in some areas, the house really did look fantastic despite it's obvious need for finishing. Turns out it was owned by Fannie Mae, and they had an OBSCENELY awesome deal on the home because of it's current state. So here's how it happened.

Monday March 29th: MJ spots the home via the internet, curiously cheap price for a home in Alpine...she must see it. Luckily the realtor is able to show the home that very day at 3pm...Brett meets her...the following transpires after the walk through.

   MJ: "We have to have it."
   Brett: "Yes I like it too."
   MJ: "We have to put an offer in tomorrow, I have to have it, someone else will steal it!!"
   Brett: "Ok we can."
   MJ: "Oh yeah and if we buy a house we might want to get married."
   Brett: "*Sigh* I guess" ;)

And we did...well we aren't married yet. Friday the 13th of August peeps...save the date!

Tuesday March 30th: Put offer in for full asking price (yeah...it was THAT good)
Wed March 31st: MJ found the plans for the renovations at Alpine City...those plans explained a lot..A LOT
Thursday April 1st: They accepted our offer....now moving to funding.
Friday April 2nd - Monday May 17th: Snag, snag, hiccup, snag, wrench, wrench, snag, snag, wrench, hiccup, snag....EVERY DAY (in that order, over and over again)
Monday May 17th: CLOSING DAY!!!

I won't go into detail about the series of misfortunes along the way because in the grand scheme of things, everything worked out perfectly. Everything fell into perfect place and anyone who has ever bought a home knows it's no quick and easy process. I may never want to sign my name again, but that's a small price to pay. Oh yeah and somewhere between all of that keep in mind we are planning a wedding.

So on to the purpose of this blog. A lot of people, including myself, want to see a record of how far we have come and what is to come next. So this is devoted to our progress. I'm going to post a bunch of pictures more than anything else...and hopefully capture most of the tantrums (I already had one today...staples in the concrete board), the ah-ha's, the progress, the good, the bad, the excitement, joy and the 'I'm going to burn this house down before we finish it' moments for everyone to see.

I hope you enjoy it...and if you want to help that would be cool too, if you can do any kind of masonry, carpentry, drywall, flooring, etc etc etc...or even if all you can do is manual labor, we can put you to work. If you want....please help us...please :)

I won't post every room/photo. Here are the main areas, there are a bunch of bedrooms and a basement too. The house is 5056 square feet or so on a .70 acre lot. Yeah, it's way too big for the both of us but I'm telling you...the deal was THAT good, by the time we're finished we'll have half the equity in our home. HUZZAH! I don't have pics of the basement because we don't have power but I'll get some later.

Our New Home