Finally....

Finally we are done with the kitchen (almost), bathroom, moving and unpacking. March was exhausting!Thanks to our friends and family that offered a helping hand in the whole process! We appreciate you!  We finally have internet! Hooray! I can now update and blog! Coming soon on our blog: Kitchen, Powder Room, Carpet , etc! Stay tuned :)

Signing closing documents soon hopefully...

Hopefully we will be signing final docs soon! We are keeping our fingers and toes crossed that we can sign tomorrow before we leave for vacation! In the mean time we have been busy figuring out what projects we can tackle now vs sometime in the future. We have also been shopping for carpet and appliances. Trying to balance out our budget with what our needs are is proving to be more difficult than I expected. Do we wait on carpet and live with the wildly hideous bright blue extremely stained carpet and buy used appliances, or invest in new appliances and replace the carpet in the future?  Neither of those options are appealing... buying a house is EXPENSIVE! We cant wait until we have keys in our hands and can start our first few "right away" projects!

Home Inspection!

On Monday, January 30th we got our home inspection done! Our amazing Realtor Dee set up the appointment with Randy from Pillar to Post to do the inspection. He was very professional and thorough! Forty-three pages and three hours later we moved forward with purchase :) Hooray! It was a relief to know that what we will soon call our home is built well with no major issues! We have A LOT of little fixes (hence the forty-three pages) but no major issues!    The anxiety for now has passed... expecting it to return right before we sign all the final papers! For the time being were focused on figuring out what projects need to be done right away vs projects for the future. The house has so much potential, I cant wait to make it ours and put all of our ideas into action!

Tacoma Home and Garden Show

 We decided to check out the Tacoma Home and Garden Show today, it was disappointing at best. We went hoping to gather ideas and check out new products... we ended up with a tour of the same stuff at every booth. Instead of leaving inspired we left with the same ideas we gathered searching our local hardware store, with some ideas of prices and $30dollars lighter....Blarg! The only reason it was not a total waste time is that we did end up leaving with some new really cool wire skewers for shiskabobs!

The process of getting all the mortgage loan paperwork!

In the process of searching for our first home we were a bit naive to the amount of paperwork we would need to have collected! Which if you don't know is A LOT....enter stress now! Included in this list are the past 2 years of W2's, all pages of the past two years tax returns, two months of official bank statements, quarterly asset account statements, copies of social security cards and drivers licenses, and the name of home owner insurance agent.  After you submit all of these it is likely that you will need to submit supporting documents for one or several things...including copies of any checks deposited over $100 dollars into your bank account. With the understanding that we are loaning a lot of money we understood the need for these necessary documents just didn't realize quite how extensive the process would be!

The counter offer!

We put our first offer in on the house on Saturday January 14th! We found out on January 17th that there had been two offers put in on the house, so we had the option to counter offer or hope that our first offer would remain highest and best. We had already decided that if this occurred we would counter and what number would be our highest and best offer. During this whole offer/counter offer process we got hit with a snow/ice/wind storm that resulted in several people without power and add in the fact that the home was a Fannie May/banked owned home... which resulted in waiting what seemed like a forever, sleep deprived, anxiety ridden... extremely long eight days! Finally, on the 24th we got the word that we were highest and best! Wahoo!!

The house search begins!

After searching several websites, for months on end we finally decided to reply to an add on craigslist and schedule a viewing! Which led us to our amazing Realtor Dee Owens with Remax! Upon scheduling a day to go out and view several homes that met our criteria she also suggested a great mortgage company to start the pre-approval process! Mind you we had started this process twice with two unnamed banks and found the process completely discouraging! Not this time, Mick with Cascade Valley Mortgage made the whole process as easy as possible (for those of you who have purchased a home, know this is quite the process... including tons and tons of gathering paperwork) Within a few days we were pre-approved and now had an idea for the price range we should be looking in!  With this in mind we set out on a rainy almost snowing Saturday! We visited two homes in Renton that didn't really strike our fancy... but then we went to OUR house in Maple Valley and another after that and then back to our house!  After visiting the house the second time we went back to the Remax office and decided to make an offer on the house! One of the most nerve racking, exciting, anxiety risen things we have ever done!