tdelatte's Blog

For the past few months my husband and I have been working with a great real estate agent (Bruce Turner, Ebby in Richardson) to find our first home. Despite all that we've heard about it being a buyer's market, we've faced quite a bit of competition. But we think we may have finally found the perfect house.

We started touring homes about a month ago. It took us a while to figure out exactly what we were looking for.

At first we looked at a bunch of foreclosed homes because we thought we could find a deal. There are so many foreclosed homes on the market these days. But we quickly learned that we don't have the type of money saved up that we would need to invest in a foreclosed home. I've never seen so many homes that were in such horrible shape and I can't imagine how anyone could destroy a home in such ways.

Next we looked at bunch of homes that were in newer subdivisions. But, we hated the idea that we would move into a place where the back yard was no bigger than the drive way and bedrooms could barely fit a full-size bed. We looked at older houses. Many needed new roofs or had ancient kitchen appliances. We learned about all the foundation problems in this area.

Eventually we found an area of Plano that we really liked. We started finding houses we really liked with big bedrooms, big back yards and homeowners who seemed to really care for the condition of their homes. But that's when we ran into the problem of finding a house that wasn't already under contract after being on the market for just a few days.

Thursday I toured a house that popped up on the market that morning. I loved it. My husband and I made an offer on it Thursday evening. We had hoped to hear back from the seller before the weekend. Friday afternoon our agent told us the buyers had verbally accepted our offer, unfortunately there was additional paperwork we had to submit. Now we won't get anything in writing until Monday. And, we are extremely nervous and afraid someone will find our house over the weekend and snatch it up with a better offer before Monday.

I'm crossing my fingers, saying prayers and taking superstitious precautions. I used to think saving the money to buy my first home would be the hard part!