The Winding Road to Homeownership

As many of our friends and family know by now, Tom and I are on our way to becoming homeowners.

I have to admit, in the begining we both thought it would be a breeze finding the home we loved, securing the funds needed and everything else that falls in to the catergories of purchasing your first house. We soon found out that it is not that easy and it takes a lot of patience and weekends to figure it all out!

Tom and I live in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S and I still get bitter chills each month when I write my rent check. We are both tired of throwing our money down the drain on a tiny one bedroom apartment, when we could put on money to good use and invest in a home.

We knew going in to the process that we would have to compromise a little on location and size. Our favorite cities, Alexandria, Arlington, DC - simply were out of the picture. Townhomes in these areas (atleast the ones we liked) would be next to impossible to afford. Gotta love living close or in your Nations Capitol!

As I mentioned before it takes a lot of patience....our first weekend we found a house we both LOVED. We soon found out that the house was in short sale and already had multiple offers. We quickly said bye bye to our 'Dream Home'. 

The next house was a cute charming townhouse in a great location....we liked it. We thought this could be home. We really started to think this could be home when the sellers realtor asked us what they could for us to put an offer in. That put a smile on our faces, we thought we had a motivated seller. But what we really had was a motivated seller who wanted to use our offer to bring in higher bids. The seller never responded to our offer. It was a very unfortunate situation but we moved on right away.

We left for our honeymoon and cleared our minds and came back rejuvinated and ready.

We stayed positive and then quickly learned that we had to attack fast! Houses were going off the market left and right. One house we walked in to view and when we walked out another realtor had put a nice 'Under Contract' sign. In a matter of 20 minutes the house was GONE!

I knew right away we needed to be the first and last to view a house if we wanted it to be ours.

The day after our honeymoon we saw another house. And this house was not just any house....it was and is THE House! 3 level townhome, updated appliances, great location, Large Master bedroom.... LOVE! Right away, we put an offer in. And since we did not want to deal with any non-sense, we asked for a response by the end of the night. (Just like they do on HGTV).

All the non-sense, all the waiting, and all our patience paid off. The seller accepted our offer within a few hours. We are still in the process of closing and doing all the Mortgage stuff and actually getting approved for our Mortgage. After it is all said and DONE, we are VERY excited to wrap up the rest of this and become homeowners!

See below for some great views of our (fingers crossed) New Home!