A house to call home

So I mentioned last week we had been doing some house hunting lately.

Well, the house we were planning on making an offer on... our realtor called us this past week to inform us of the situation with that one... apparently there's been several offers on it, all over $70k, however the bank that owns it has been taking so long - up to at least 3 months - to get back to anyone on it so people keep backing out. He said there is currently 1 offer on the house, however it's possible they too will back out after waiting more than a month or 2 on the bank so if we put an offer in now we'd be the back-up, however who knows how long it would take for the bank to get back to us and we're trying to find something within 90 days of when we got pre-approved so we don't have to re-run the credit again so we risk cutting it close. He said he doesn't want to tell us what to do, but he did say it could take months for our offer to get accepted due to how slow the bank that owns it is being.

The other house I mentioned, that we first saw at an open house, well, like I mentioned they went ahead and bumped the price up almost $10k more and started finishing the basement off. While we like the house and the features, we were hoping to get something closer to $70k to keep our payments down and we really doubt we could talk them back down to $75k with the finished basement, as $75k was the original price without the basement finished. Even $80k would be pushing it we think...

Quite possibly our new home come April/May

So we thought about it, and honestly, the first house we saw that we really liked, the only major thing I wasn't fond of was that the main floor only has 2 bedrooms, with the 3rd being in the basement. But right now, anything is better and bigger than our 1 bedroom apartment and we really need to find something and move soon as things are just too cramped here - with all Jay's baby stuff, we're running out of room and he really needs a room of his own too. Thinking about it, it's nice for our first home - a 1 car attached garage with an additional parking spot in the driveway, a fenced backyard with a deck and a decent sized yard with a firepit, a kitchen with a stove, microwave and dishwasher, a pantry and nice counterspace, 2 full bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, a finished basement with a bar... move-in ready with us only needing to purchase a fridge, washer and dryer and eventually more furniture - not bad at all actually! And our realtor informed us the other day that the price dropped too.

We had him draft up an offer - we're starting with $65k, thinking we'd be able to get it for close to $70k if they counter-offer. He wrote in a closing date of April 15 and said this company that owns the property is usually very good about getting back to people within a few days too. We just have a few things to turn in to the bank lady this week for our loan and I need to get the offer contract back to our realtor as he dropped it off for us to sign and it looks like we're good to go!

Wish us luck!