HOME BUYING: 5 Home Buying Tips

House buying can be a scary thing for any buyer, yet alone a couple of first time buyers out of their depth and pretty much on their own both financially and with regards to knowing what the hell goes on with trying to buy a house. Granted out first attempt was a bit of a fail we kind of learnt things the hard way, but we learnt a lot of things to take forward.

1 // Relationships
Whether it's your mortgage adviser or your relator/estate agent work with people you can get on with, that you can bounce ideas off, who are willing to give you their full attention and won't mind you ringing them with a random question at 9.30PM. It's their job to work for you. You don't need to be best friends but it certainly pays off to have people that you get on with that's for sure.

2// Home Inspections
You might remember my post about our home inspection - but they are key in giving that extra insight into a home you've stuck your bid on. Skipping a house inspection may risk you buying a money pit that leaks money rather than enjoyment and can get you in a better position for adjusting the buying price.

3 // Conditional offers
Make sure all your offers are condition - conditional upon the mortgage being approved, conditional on the home inspection and upon the appraisal. Unconditional offers can put you in a tricky corner if things don't work out and luckily helped us get out of our contract.

4 // Buy an electrical ground tester
If you're planning at looking and buying an older home, often electric switches aren't grounded which for some can be a deal breaker (it won't fail a house/FHA inspection it's more down to preferences especially if you have a lot of high end appliances). Joe spotted our home inspector using one and for our second and third round of looking for a house we decided to purchase one - they cost like $11 from Home Depot. While it's not a deal breaker for us, it's nice knowing which rooms are/aren't grounded.

5 // Pay attention
It's a bit of a novel feeling looking around houses but I admit to not paying enough attention on the houses we were looking at, like not noticing the lack of gutters, or there being a hole in the ceiling of the garage to how messy the hardwood flooring was on the first floor. Print off your house viewing scheduling, take notes, take photographs to write your first impressions, the pros and cons.

What would be your house buying tips?

LIFE: Packing and More Packing

There's currently a human life size game of tertis going on in what was our dining space, what with piles of boxes and bags for moving. I actually didn't think we had that much stuff, apparently most of it's been hiding in cupboards and closets and is only just coming to life. It's actually got to the point of having to break down the next three or so weeks down with tasks to have achieved to feel like i'm getting somewhere with the packing, it's slow work!

You start on a mission to fill up every inch of a box, you come up with random code letters for the final dumping ground, and you realise you never ever have enough boxes. Cats start to think your piling up all these boxes just so they have a new kitty tower. One kitty Ed, being perfectly happy just to make the large box at the bottom her new sleeping and sitting ground, the other - Smokey a nosey tiny kitty loving the challenge of being able to sleep up high. Stacking even more boxes doesn't deter her nosiness, she just loves to sleep even higher.

And don't get me started on packing up the vinyl. 800 plus vinyl aren't the easiest thing to move when you're pretty short on boxes. Inventive we must become methinks. The dinning room table has been taken apart, all my vintage compacts are safety piled away and the nails are being pulled out of the wall - although my embroidery hoop collection will be one of the last things to be taken down, I hate how stark the walls look without them.

It's not that we even particularly know when we're moving per say, although we do have a closing date of mid May. After the home inspection not going as well as we hoped, we came up with the list of the items (major issues) that needed fixing - all 14 of them (electrical, gutters, raising concrete, fixing the garage etc), the seller actually agreed - even though it took them over a week to think about it. There's still a bit of a way to go, the closing date is in a little under three weeks but there are still some hurdles for the house and paperwork to jump though, but maybe, just maybe everything is working out!

If you have any packing tips - I'm all ears!

HOME BUYING: What I've Learnt So Far

Source

We're about a month into our full ongoing first home search and it's probably about time for an update. I've learnt a lot, both about myself, and the process of buying your first house. It's all been about home buying classes, mortgages, visiting places and waiting.

So what have we learnt and what you don't see on home buying shows;

• I have zero patience, like none whatsoever
• Joe is as cool as a cucumber 
• I get too emotionally attached to a house but then I struggle with the concept of not having any attachment when you're going to be spending so much money and will be living in said home for an extended period
• Insomnia is a regular occurrence, although it's been getting better
• Try and attend a home buying course - you might think you know everything about home buying or mortgages, you probably don't
• Black mold of doom really is a thing and mortgage lenders don't like mold
• There's more to just "sticking in an offer on a house" dam you TV house buying shows - they never show you all the paperwork - like 20 pages of contracts to sign
• Basements seem to leak, quite often and mortgage lenders don't like that either
• Don't assume a house has gutters - oops
• Some houses have really odd layouts
• Some houses are missing their basements, they had them once, you can still see the original windows, yet you can't find the way to get into them .... are their bodies hidden inside?!
• Bungalows with tight, steep spiral staircases are scary to get down
• Hardwood floors are the in thing right now
• Oh and I have lots of blog posts about home buying lined up - but I a) feel like it's tempting fate to publish them and b) that they won't be of interest to people - le sigh!

So we found a house, it had a great living space, was one short on the number of bedrooms we wanted but it had an open "living" space upstairs so it was workable. It's basically been a flip house, it's had some work to it but there's a lot of things that could be added to, a project house but it looked okay and okay enough for us to tackle. The way things work in Michigan is that you see a house stick a bid in and then do the home inspection but the contracts are written in a way that you see the results of the inspection and then ask the seller to fix them, ask for a lower price or walk away.   

I guess we weren't expecting there to be so many issues. Like big electrical safely hazard kind of issues, like exposed wires, and missing circuit breakers and ungrounded plugs in the kitchen of all places. So we sent off a list of 14 things that need fixing before we'd consider moving forward.

This is where home inspections are worth their money in gold (ours cost around $350), I was a little on the fence about them prior to this I will admit. We went through the Buyer Projection Group (who were recommended to us through a lady at the home buyers course and who we'll certainly be using again if the occasion arises) who offer a really thorough attic to basement plus exterior inspection and you'll end up with a number of reports filled with advice, photographs and actions that should be taken or considered. Big tip is to always tag along and attend the inspection too (although I was out with the lurgy so only Joe attending ours).

So here is a snap shot taken from our home report which was comprised of two thorough room by room inspection reports, this part being from the electric panels inspection which as you can see, has some rather interesting issues.

The home inspection was especially helpful for us as we're inexperienced first time buyers doing this alone, I wouldn't have known the fume was missing a screw or to have looked that the bedroom ceiling fan was incorrectly fitted. To be honest I'm glad we didn't even touch let alone look inside the electric box after seeing how dangerous it is as it currently stands.

So the inspection helps you the buyer know what to do next - to carry on with the sale, back out or ask for changes. For us, right now it's in the sellers hands, we've sent what we want changing, it's up to them. Nevertheless with the majority of the issues being dangerous and electrical all these concerns are going to come up again with another buyer if we back out, it's probably in their own interests to get it fixed. Also as a side note, any buyer that backs out of a sale, this report has to be passed on to any future buyer by the seller.

This whole house buying malarkey is certainly a huge learning curve. If things don't work out with this house, knowing what we know now about the process of sticking in bid and all the paperwork that goes into it alongside what we should look out more for from doing this inspection it will have been worth it.

Every had a home inspection turn up anything funky? What did you learn when you were buying a house?