The Price is Right: Our First House

Brian was offered a permanent position at Adobe at the end of 2011 and we knew that we would make San Jose our permanent residence for awhile. We didn't want to have to pay rent anymore (especially with how expensive it is in the bay area) and interest rates were way low so we decided to start looking into buying a house. We began by doing a little bit of browsing on the internet to see what type of homes were in our price range. We met with a realtor at the end of January and began our search. We spent hours (mostly Saturdays but also some week days) looking at homes.

I really enjoyed looking at different houses and I learned a lot about what I wanted in a home. However, shortly after beginning our search we realized that we would probably not be able to get everything we wanted in a home. We were looking for something that had room for our family to grow, we wanted a home that didn't require too many renovations, and we wanted a nice yard. We found some homes that we really loved that met our requirements and we put offers on them. The only problems was that we were competing against several others that wanted the same homes, many of which were investors with lots of cash. We just couldn't compete with them and we ended up putting offers on 10 homes that we didn't get. It was such a hard process. I would fall in love with a home and picture our family there, we would put in a really strong offer and then we would find out we were rejected again. We looked at over 80 homes (maybe even closer to 100) which took up a lot of time. We started believing that we were going to have to settle for something that we didn't necessarily like but that we could live with for awhile, or we would need to keep paying rent.

One day we received a phone call from our realtor telling us that she had called about a home that had a for sale sign in front of it. We had driven by it a couple days earlier when we were looking at a different home but we didn't think much of it. That home had not yet been listed on the market but our realtor knew the realtor that was listed on the sign so she asked about it. She found out that the owner of the home wanted to sell it but her son that was living in it at the time was not being cooperative and he did not want to show it to buyers. Our realtor was able to work out a time for us to go see the home. It was kind of last minute and I had already committed to watching my friends kids so Brian went to look at it by himself. It was the first house that I had not been to. Our realtor informed us that the family was going to list it as a short sale but if we could offer a little more money they could sell it to us as a regular sale. The only thing was that we had to make an offer right away before I was able to see it.

Brian gave me a very detailed description of the house and even drew a picture of the layout for me. The owner had suffered a stroke and was unable to take care of the home and her son that was living in it didn't take very good care of it so it had a lot of clutter and garbage in it and the back yard had a huge junk pile in it. He kept the home very dark and their was a foul smell coming from it. The yard was also in terrible shape and would need tons of work. None of that sounds too appealing, right? Well, the great part about the house was that they had done a major renovation 4 years earlier. They had redone the kitchen, the bathrooms, they put a new roof on, new windows, and new plumbing. It was larger than most of the other homes that we had looked at and it was in a great neighborhood and it was located in the boundaries for one of the best schools in the area. This was our chance to put an offer on a home without having to compete. I was a little skeptical but the pros outweighed the cons so we decided to go ahead and put an offer on the house. We found out the next day that our offer had been accepted and it would be our home if inspections and everything else went well.

To make an already long story shorter than it could be, the inspections went well and we decided to go ahead with the purchase and everything worked out great. Like I mentioned before, the previous owners had a lot of junk in their home, garage, and in the backyard. We had a feeling that they would not take everything with them when they moved out and we were right. Our realtor decided to hire a company to come and haul away all of their junk for us so that we didn't have to deal with it. She is an amazing realtor and we were so grateful for that gift to us! We did need to have the house fumigated due to termites and rodents (but that is pretty common for this area) and we did a few repairs, some painting, and replaced some carpet. We also had a cleaning company come in and clean it really well for us. We still have some work to do inside the home and a lot of work in the yard but we are slowly making progress and turning it into our home.

We didn't take very many pictures before we moved in or even after we moved in but here are a few I found:

This is a picture of it while it was being fumigated. They put these large tents over the homes.

This is a picture of the living room

And another of the living room with Hannah and princess

This is a picture of the kitchen right after we moved in. It's not the best angle and it's obviously full of junk.

The remaining pictures are of the yard. These are pictures that we took after we had already done a lot of work removing weeds, plants, etc. We have already made a lot of improvements since these pictures and we still have lots of work to do. I will add another post with pictures when we have finished more of our projects.