House Hunting Again

Two years after my last post, we have a two-year-old, and we're looking for houses again!  I post about Micah on Facebook, so in this blog entry I'll just focus on the house saga.

Grandma will eventually need to be moved into an assisted care facility, although we are not sure when, so we have been exploring housing options off and on.  Last weekend we found a house. Actually, we found 3 houses.  We had a terrible time deciding which one to put an offer on.  Stephen loved this house, I loved that house, we both liked this house...

After asking for advice from various places, we ended up going with the one we both liked.  It seemed to be the best compromise.  We offered asking price if they paid closing costs. They counter-offered us $1000 over asking price and up to $3000 closing costs.  After another tortuous decision-making time, we decided to take the offer.

Then we got the paperwork for the roof, and found out it's a 10-year roof that has been there for 17 years. (We were told it was a 25-year roof and had been on there for 5 years... >:-/ ) Stephen got cold feet and wanted to back out, but our realtor convinced him to do the inspections and find out what exactly we're dealing with.  So we have two roof inspectors coming next week who can also quote us the cost of replacing it if necessary, in addition to the general house inspection later that week.

And that's where we're at.

The house is a 3-bedroom, 2 bath house built in the 70s with a great-sized, totally fenced, private back yard.  The kitchen is really nice and the house has overall been kept in really good shape.  The bedrooms are kind of small.  The big detractor is that the roof is flat.  Well, it slopes up a little and then is flat.  Not a great choice for a place where it rains half the year.  Those 60s/70s homebuilders... Sometimes I just wonder what was going on in their heads.  BUT other than the roof, it's a nice house.

The other thing about the house is that it is a 40+ minute commute to Stephen's work.  Right now he has a 25-minute commute.  This is going to be a problem with any of the houses we are looking at; we got priced out of the big metropolitan hub.  Stephen is looking for jobs closer, but we may just have to deal with the long commute.