Buying our Home in Kansas: The First Few Steps

Two months from right now our hands will surely be hurting from signing a 6″ tall stack of papers, but I know that our excitement will be through the roof. We’ll be closing on our next home and officially starting our lives in Kansas!

There’s plenty of work that needs to be done between now and then though. I’ve been interest rate shopping this morning and have a stack of paperwork to get together to be mailed off in the next day or two. The whole house inspection is taking place tomorrow morning, and I have a list of things (per my dad) to discuss with the inspector beforehand. We’re busy, but I’m loving it.

We never anticipated buying a house in Manhattan (KS), but the rental market there is shabby. We learned a lot from our first home-buying experience that’s been extremely helpful this time around, so we made the decision to dive it again if we found a house that we loved.

Check out this post about how we got started with the buying process.

On Thursday, I spoke with our realtor and set up appointments for my sister, brother-in-law, and dad to go tour (remember – we’re buying this house “site unseen”). I was excited for them to see these three houses because they were all so different from each other.

• The first house was at the bottom of our price range (!!!), in a decent location, and appeared to only need a little bit of updating here and there. I couldn’t figure out why it was priced so low, so I was anxious for them to scope it out.
• The second house was at the top of our price range, in a great location, has lots of incredible updates, still has room for us to do small updates and increase house value, but again was at the top of our price range.
• The third house was near the bottom of our price range, had a ton of square footage, but needed updates from the inside out (I’m talking carpet in the bathrooms and blue toilets). The potentials were obvious though. The layout was beautiful, and we knew we’d make money on this house if we buckled down for a few years and fixed it up.

They toured the homes while I was at Amy’s bridal luncheon, but I got the full scoop at soon as I got back to the hotel. The first house was completely out of the question; they found lots of reasons why it’s priced so low. The third house was also completely out of the question; they knew I’d be doing absolutely nothing but spending time and money fixing up that house.

They prefaced the second house by asking me if we could even afford it because if not they didn’t even want to tell me about it. I told them that we could, so they all three proceeded to tell me that on a scale of 1-10, it’s an 11. I knew these three would be very critical of these homes, so the fact that they were all practically bouncing off the walls about it made me very excited. I talked to Jamie (he’d already seen it the night before online), and he was on board.

After an 11 minute conversation with them and briefly talking with Jamie, we developed an offer and put it in with our realtor.

The next day (Saturday), while getting ready for Amy’s wedding, I got a call from the realtor at 11 a.m. that the sellers had countered (which we figured they would). We didn’t like their counter, so we countered back. An hour later, we got word that they’d countered again. Good grief!

We were about to accept their counter offer, but I called my dad just to talk it through with him one more time.

He started presenting me with doubts about the house. Jenn got on the phone and she too started giving me doubts. They never expected us to put in an offer yesterday, and Jennifer especially was feeling a tremendous amount of pressure that we were about to buy a house that we’d never seen based on their opinion of it. I completely understood her anxiousness, but I was also confused. I didn’t know it they were looking for things to complain about or if they’d really stopped to take the time to think about it and came up with a list of legit negatives.

So I called the realtor back and told her that we needed to put on the brakes for a minute. Jenn, Josh, and dad went back to the house that night at 7:30 to tour it one more time. Sure enough, they couldn’t find a single thing wrong with it.

The next morning (Sunday), I texted our realtor that we were going to accept their counter. Jamie and I electronically signed a few documents, and it was done!

On Monday I wired over our earnest money. We also got the home inspection set up for tomorrow (Thursday).

So things are rolling right along! I can’t wait to throw some paint on the walls and really start making it our own.

Actually, I just can’t wait to see it in person. 🙂