Home Sweet House
Ok, how do people buy houses? Kyle and I know a ton of people who have bought a house this year to cash in on that first time home buyer credit, but I seriously do not know how they did it.
Let me rephrase…I get the technical stuff. I understand about down payments and closing costs and mortgages and all of the real nuts and bolts of completing the transaction. What I don’t get, however, is how people find a house they want to buy. Either we’re the pickiest people on the face of the planet, or I’m missing something big here.
We have looked at so many houses. Soooo many houses. So why are we nowhere closer to closing the deal? Well, they’re just all so…meh. I figured that we’d find some place that really spoke to us and was completely perfect, but no matter where we go we seem to find places where the yard is too small or the stairs are too narrow or the basement is a funny shape or the bedrooms don’t have great windows. We’ve seen cabinets that are too shallow, we’ve seen lawns that are too big, and we’ve seen bathrooms that make me want to kill myself.
You could argue that we must be looking in a particular price range to be seeing only crappy houses and I suppose that’s probably true, but I think our price range is pretty standard for our age. All of the houses that have been bought by our friends and family are probably in the same $200,000 to $300,000 spectrum. And they’re all really happy. Inexplicably.
Besides, even outside of the picky details, we just can’t settle on a location. Kyle works up at the top of the valley where the University of Utah is, but all of the homes in that area are really old, small, and overpriced because they’re full of students and faculty. We don’t want to live downtown where everyone owns little apartments or condos with almost no parking. We don’t want to live in Holladay (where I grew up) because it’s nothing but senior citizens and strip malls. Kyle doesn’t want to buy a house on the major fault line, which wipes out about 50% of the valley. I don’t want to buy a house in West Valley, which takes out another 25%. And, when we looked at houses near here in the new Daybreak community, we realized that Kyle would always face a commute that was at least an hour one way, which seemed like a real pain.
I know that there’s some house out there that would be perfect for us, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen before the tax credit expires. So, the pressure is sort of off for us to buy something. Should we be looking at rentals then? Freedom to move later and being able to call in for whatever repairs the place needs is a huge plus…but it comes with pet restrictions, noisy neighbors, and a year of spending money on housing without putting it towards anything of our own. Le sigh…I thought nesting and all that was supposed to be fun when you’re still newly married. This is a total bitch.
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Home Sweet House
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