Our Home Buying Misadventures - Part Five

As I mentioned in my last post, we had to start back at the beginning of our search.  We were lucky enough to have a little vacation to think about the past few weeks and collect our thoughts.  What came out of it was a letter to our agent.  I've deleted some of the information (because as I have said before, you don't need to know all of my personal financial details) but you get the idea.  Anything in italics was not actually in the letter; just extra info for you :) 

*****

Dear Agent,
     We have done a lot of thinking over the past couple of weeks about our house hunting adventure and will admittedly say that we are a bit frustrated with the entire situation.  We are almost to the point where we are ready to call it quits for a bit. We feel that we are spending entirely too much of our time looking for houses on the internet through the many sites we used including the company's site.  While we know we are pre-qualified for $$$, we have absolutely no intention on spending that much.  We have talked through our budget and will not spend more than $$$ (minus about $25,000 less than what we were approved for) and even still would rather spend around $$$ or less (an additional $15,000 less).  We know that there are several homes out there in the (reasonably priced range for our community) range that would fit our needs and we do not want to look at anything higher than that unless you know the seller is willing to negotiate to our comfort price.  When we hear “highly motivated seller” we expect that they are actually willing to negotiate and not just include items in the property to keep their price high.  (Do the sellers really think by adding a dining room table and a large television...the old school kind, not the flat screen kind...will make me want to pay the full asking price?)  To help aid in the search we have come up with a few items that are “needs” in our home and then a list of “wants.”

NEEDS:
We then included a list of eight needs for our home.

WANTS:
An additional six items that included school district preferences and other things that we could potentially live without in our first home.

     As I mentioned before, it is okay if minimal updates need to be made.  We don’t mind painting or doing minor projects.  We hope that this will help in narrowing down the search.  We hope that this relationship will work out but we are at the point where we need to do what is best for our family.  We need to find a home, within our budget, that meets our needs. We need someone that doesn’t push us to our top dollar but is willing to be our advocate when it comes to negotiations.

*****

Anyway, that's the letter we sent off on Sunday.  Just one day later it felt like we had a new agent.  We visited five houses today that covered most of our "needs" and many of our "wants."  One of them may even be a top contender.  We have a few more to look at tomorrow and then I think we'll try and put in another offer. 

Before I go though, I do have to share one more house with you that has taken the number one spot in "Top 10 Memorable Houses."  Yes, it beat out the "Serial Killer House with a Squatter."  Today's most memorable home...

The partially underground smoker home with an infestation of spiders.  So, we came across this home last week and, again, had high hopes for the house.  It was further out of town than we had originally wanted but it had three bedrooms, two baths, great built in shelves, over 2,300 square feet of space, and sat on two acres of land.  We know it would be hard to maintain that much land but it was mostly wooded and thought it would be enough space for a little boy.  We knew ahead of time that it was definitely dated with the large department store mirrors in the bedroom and wood paneling EVERYWHERE but the price reflected these issues. 

It looks a bit like a dental office from the front.

What I didn't realize, when first looking at this home online, was that the house was built partially underground.  It isn't very noticeable until you of course walk around the property.  When we first walked in the agent said there was definitely and odor to the home.  She couldn't pinpoint whether it was just musty or smoke.  Oh, it was smoke...and not just the casual smoker but the kind that smoked there for so long that when you took the pictures off of the wall you can see the nicotine outline of where it was hanging.  Gross! 

Master Bedroom with department store mirrors.  If you look
just down right of the fan you can see the nicotine stains.
Even further down you can see the water stains.

I didn't pay close attention to the pictures online, but after seeing the home you can clearly see the nicotine stains.  Plus, this is the wall in the ground; throughout the entire room you can see the water stains.  Everything shows up so well on the fabric covered wall!  Fabric...on walls!  After seeing this room I told our agent I was finished looking.  I was not going to waste her time or ours looking at a house that we were not interested in.  Of course, the child and husband rush through the house to see the other "jewels" and I book it out as quickly as possible.

Now, on the way out I come across this lovely creature.

Dead but still nasty.

He was thankfully dead.  Yeah, yeah, tarantulas aren't poisonous...but if you are a spider and you are larger my child's hand...I don't care!  So that creeped me out a little bit but it was really the mass of spider webs that I saw when I exited the house that finished me off.  There was the web attached to the garage that was literally the size of a toddler.  Turning the corner to walk towards the car I noticed some green shrubs that were COVERED with webs.  There was at least four or five feet of thick webs.  Seeing this then reminded me of the story I read yesterday about spiders swarming a village in India.  Check out the article here.  Again, I know they aren't the same spiders but it still creeps me out.  Needless to say, as I was researching tarantulas for this entry I did figure out that the webs we saw were tarantula webs.  So, I guess that is the plus side of the house.  You only have to worry about the large spiders...well, and the black widows and brown recluse spiders that seem to creep up everywhere in this state.