As I’ve alluded to recently, Adam and I have decided to start house-hunting in earnest. We’ve been keeping an eye on the market for over a year, but with our lease up at the end of April, we decided to actually get ourselves a real estate agent, a mortgage broker, and a pre-approval and start taking things seriously this winter. So far, we seem to be on the same page on what our priorities are – big enough kitchen that both of us can fit in at the same time (we cook together a lot) and can store all of our kitchen items (right now, we have stuff in our linen closet and the closet in our spare bedroom); a bedroom that we can keep all of our clothes in, so once of us doesn’t have to always go to an office/spare bedroom to get dressed (seems a little silly, but we expect that one day those spare rooms are going to house kid(s) with clothes of their own, and then what?); a place where we can have more than two people over to hang out at a time; metro-accessible (either actual metro or a short bus ride away) so we don’t have to buy a second car and Adam doesn’t have to commute an hour each way; I don’t want my commute to get any worse than it already is. Ideally, we’d like to be close to a bike path so we can continue to easily do our long runs and Adam can continue to bike to work when the weather is nice, but it isn’t a dealbreaker if we’re not.
We’ve seen a few places that we’ve liked, but nothing that we’ve loved. We’re lucky that we can go month-to-month at the end of April and that we like our current place a lot – we can afford to be picky, and we are in a situation where we can jump if the right place for us shows up on the market. Which is good, because the great houses are on the market less than a week around here. Hopefully once its spring and more homes go on the market, the prices will come down a bit. Right now, the three bedrooms in the neighborhoods we are looking at are at the top of what we’re comfortable spending, which means there isn’t money left over to make the house “ours.” I’m not talking major renovations, but odds are we’ll want to paint, replace carpets, possibly fix up some bathrooms (there’s a lot of pink or mint green tile around here).
So, that’s where we are. We may be putting in an offer this weekend, or we may be waiting until September, or maybe until next year. And in the meantime, we’ll keep stalking the real estate websites like its our job.
Completely Irrelevant 