We, unfortunately, couldn’t get the financing that we needed to move forward on the house so we’re basically back to square one. We’re out of the contract, we need to get our $1,000 (good grace payment) back from the realtor. I’m disappointed because I really had my heart set on this house. I had it completely decorated in my head and knew exactly where everything was going to go, what furniture I needed to buy… the works…. but the ‘powers that be’ made it damn-near impossible for us to get into this house, and I want to assume it was for a good reason. If there wasn’t? I just don’t appreciate being messed with.
The upside, after discussing everything, Sean and I decided that going after a house on leased-land makes absolutely no sense when you factor in that Rehoboth has probably the highest lot rent in the entire state. This complex was going to charge us $580 a month for the land-lease, and then on top of that it would have been about $700 a month for the mortgage on the house itself. Coming up with $1300 a month where you don’t even OWN the property that you’re paying for, really doesn’t make sense to either one of us.
So we went back to the drawing board, and have been looking for houses under $250,000 (which aren’t hard to find around here). We’ve found one that’s really cute, it’s an Estate Sale, the owners children have control of it now and they desperately want out. Case and point… the house was on the market for $269,900 initially, in the past two years of it just sitting there it’s now down to $155,000. It’s on it’s own property, 3 bed, two bath, family room, dining room, large kitchen, living room, sun porch, 24×28 garage, a big shed, semi-wrap around deck, and the property is massive at half an acre. I know that doesn’t seem like much, but I grew up in New York – the only grass I ever saw was a two foot patch off the curb, so this is a clear upgrade. The other upgrade is the huge wrap-around drive-way with an island filled with all kinds of flowers. I like the idea of a wrap-around driveway, never owned one before but I feel it would be beneficial cause I can pretty much come and go without having to move a car. Granted, we only have one right now – but even still… I’d never have to move. It’s in a really cute little community, the neighbors seem nice. And by “nice” I mean that they didn’t call the cops while I was poking around on the property to get a feel for the place (without a realtor).
The landscaping has massively overgrown in the past two years, but when looking at older pictures of the home (including the Google Street View) you can see that the owners, at one time, took really good care of the property. The plus – on the ariel view there was an existing pool in the back yard. That’s one of my stipulations for owning a home, there either needs to be an existing pool or room for one. In this case, there’s already a deck in place, it’s just the matter of buying the pool and setting it up. That would obviously be something we do in the future, but it’s good to know it’s a possibility. So we’re taking the massive undertaking of landscape removal into consideration on our offer.
So I’ve already got a call in with the broker letting him know that we’re changing up the game and won’t need a manufactured loan, we’ll need a conventional mortgage. He’s already got all of our information, so it’s just the matter of him crunching the numbers. If we can be approved for the price-range that we’re looking for then I think we should be pretty good. As soon as I know something from him I’ll get in touch with a realtor and do a walk through. I know by default the house is going to require a lot of work, but that’s something we can work on over the course of time because we won’t have a complex manager knocking on our door to tell us the weeds are getting too high. We’ll be able to do what we please, when we please and that’s fine by me.
There, unfortunately, is an HOA but for the $150 a year price tag I’m not going to worry about it. There are houses in there that look like complete and total shit, the owners did not maintain them well at all, so clearly the HOA doesn’t really bother anyone. Big thing for me would be cleaning up the front yard (at least) by this upcoming Summer (if we take the house, of course). This way there’s at least some curb appeal so I don’t have to worry about them being dickwads about how the property looks. If you’re snooping around in my backyard you’re trespassing and I should have position to beat your ass anyway.
So we’ll see how it goes, maybe within the next 24 hours we can start the process of pursuing this house. We’ve looked at numerous ones, done drive-bys just about everywhere. This is the only area where I can honestly say that I like the house, it’s close enough to everything where I don’t feel like I’m in the boonies, and it’s still close enough the water so I can at least enjoy the bay – there’s a fishing pier not even 5 minutes from the house. The concern there is flooding issues based on how close to the water we are, but I’ll obviously get more information from the neighbors before even considering putting in an offer.
The pictures online are never 100% telling on how a house really is. The one thing realtors really don’t do for pre-owned homes is provide some type of a drawing for the floor plan. The biggest gripe I have with that, if you can’t provide the drawing that’s fine but could you at least freaking give us the dimensions of the rooms? We did a walk through of one house that was listed as 1600sqft with a ‘master suite’ that I couldn’t even fit a god damn twin sized bed into, let alone my king sized. They should have put less effort into making the bathroom as big as it was, and pop out the wall so you could fit a freaking bed in there.
Based on the photos, however, it looks to be a similar floor plan to a house that Sean and I already did the walk-thru on. We didn’t like the community, or the community rules, so we just let it go. If it’s the same floor plan then I can pretty much get a feel for things. There’s a lot of windows for natural light, I do know that the AC unit would probably need to be replaced, the damn thing looks ancient, and there’s two big propane tanks off the back of the house for the forced air heat and the gas fire place in the family room (which is actually nicely surrounded by stone).
Regardless of it needing work, I know that we’d have at least the rest of our lives to make it work so it’ll definitely be worth looking into.
I’m starting to get a little excited again…