Nearly Perfect House Offer #3

Here's the latest house we've been considering...

Fri 5/11: Look at the house with our Realtor. I wasn't wowed at first, but I did think it had a sensible layout (bedrooms together on one side, and public areas together on the other, more or less). House was located in the slightly less "hot" area of the city (read= slightly less desirable), which probably contributed to my luke warm initial opinion of the house. But we asked our Realtor to get us a link to the Disclosure Package so we could look it over.

Sat 5/12: Finally got a chance to read over the Disclosure Package. This seller had all their ducks lined up because all the parts were ready, including the Property Inspection. The house looks like it is in pretty decent shape, just the usual things to repair, nothing really major. The bathrooms could use updating, but it's not a deal breaker.

Sun 5/13: We decided to take a second look at the house during the weekend Open House. We liked it more. Oddly enough they got a staging company to furnish the house; the house was completely empty/unfurnished when we saw it on Friday. We were amazed at how quickly that could be arranged for the Sat/Sun Open House. The house showed much better with the furniture in place.

We met the Selling Agent, who was present at the Open House. She mentioned that offers are due on Thurs 5/17 at 1 PM.

Mon 5/14: Our Realtor confirms that offers are due on Thurs at 1 PM.

Tues 5/15: Met with Realtor in the morning to sign all the paper work involved in making an offer. Here we go again. We're getting quite good at this now and can do it blind folded, lol. Our Realtor is going to submit our offer on Thursday when we might have a better idea of how many other interested parties there are, that way we can better decide on an offer price. There were currently 4 interested parties, including ourselves, at the time we met our Realtor.

Thurs 5/17 12:15 PM: DH calls me to let me know he just spoke to our Realtor. The Selling Agent claims that there are 5 interested parties in the house (including us), but also mentioned that, "the phones are ringing off the hook." Not sure what to make of that. How would you interpret that? Anyhowz, 5 is a good number to us since the last several houses we were interested had 10 to 15 interested parties. The lower number no doubt had something to do with the slightly less desirable part of town.

Now the rule of thumb for offer price is generally 1% over asking price per offer. So that would be 5% over asking price. We wanted to pad this a little more to give us that extra edge we may need, so we offered somewhere between 7% and 8% -- thank goodness we weren't doing 10% or more, like all the other houses we were looking at were going for -- with an easy "as is" (no contingency) type offer.

Our Realtor had an appt at 1:45 PM with the Selling Agent to present our offer. I know, she said they were due at 1 PM. Not sure how that is going to work.

Thurs 5/17 3:15 PM: DH calls me to inform me that the Sellers were considering our offer and 2 of the other offers, but eventually accepted ours. Huh? What was that? I had to have him repeat that cuz I wasn't sure I heard that correctly. Our offer was actually accepted!!!! Woo hoo!!!! No more spending time looking at houses. Yay!!! Don't have any other details right now, but I am relieved that this part of the journey is over. Now it's the whole rush to close escrow part that is coming up. Having never bought a house before, I'm not quite sure what this involves.... but it'll be a welcome change. I think...

Now I can really start planning more fun stuff. Window coverings ... furniture arrangement ... knitting stash hiding places ... etc...

The house is on what looks like a quiet cul-de-sac. It's a 4 bedroom, 2 bath, 1831 sq ft house.

No carpeting anywhere, it's all wood, so I guess I better start knitting a bunch of swiffer mop covers. The closet floors are some rough unfinished wood type surface, need to figure out what to put in there. Maybe small rectangular patches of carpeting?

There is an electric stove. I've always had gas stoves so it'll take some time learning how to cook on one of these. I hope the cookware I have will work OK.

The garden is medium maintenance. I have a brown thumb. I will need to learn how to do some gardening and not kill everything that is back there. I think there was a lemon tree and orange tree.

Need to decide whether to remodel the hallway bath. It's a weird setup where you walk in and there is a sink. Then you walk through a second door where you will find another(!) sink, the toilet, and bathtub/shower. Is it better to keep two sinks in the bathroom, or get rid of one? And how much would it cost to get rid of the plumbing of one sink?

The tub is a whirlpool type, and there is a sliding door. I really hate those types of sliding doors because crud gets into the track and it is a pain to keep clean. The tub is also high, so even without the door, it would definitely be awkward to kneel on the floor to give M a bath in that tub. We're thinking of replacing the tub too.

DH wants to get both bathrooms redone. They seem to bother him more than they bother me. They're not ideal, but I think I can live with them for a while. I'm just concerned about the cost of remodeling 2 bathrooms.

Oh, there is also a door in the hallway bathroom (in that second section) that leads into the back yard. That was kinda strange. We're not sure whether we want to keep the door there, or replace it with a wall.


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