Reading back on my posts last week, you can tell I was a LITTLE over-eager.  Just a touch excited.  Let’s recap some of my quotes from last week:

“But I totes love the house.  (Don’t tell my realtor I said that.)”

“When we got home after stalking the house/neighborhood for a good half hour tonight…”

“I also just happened to find the house that we’re going to buy today.”

“I found our house.”

“I mean, we haven’t even been in it yet…”

“We drove by it tonight and we’re even more obsessed with it now.”

“It has everything we want.”

WOW!  I need to slow it down a bit.  Good thing I’m married; I would NOT be good at all those dating games people play where they have to wait 3 days to call or wait 2 days to return a call or whatever.

So, here’s what happened this weekend:

Friday: We looked at 6 houses, including our dream house that I drooled all over last week.

Four of the houses were beyond depressing (like, take down your disco ball and remove your TWO 100 gallon, dirty fish tanks that contain “creatures” and have sticky labels attached warning visitors not to “tap on the glass” – WTF people?).

One of those homes was brand-new and beautiful, but had an odd layout and ZERO backyard.

The last house was the one I’d been obsessed with all week.

We definitely liked the house (we’ll call it House #1).  It wasn’t as amazing in person as it seemed in the pictures, but when is that ever the case?

It meets most of our requirements (aside from a finished basement) and the backyard/deck/fenced yard/neighborhood ARE amazing.  We know we can’t change these things, but we can change everything inside.

Saturday: We talked about House #1 all weekend.  Our realtor sent us some comps in the same neighborhood.  (Comps are comparable houses that have sold in the last year or are on the market.)  In our opinion, the comps helped our situation in that many of them sold for way less than their listing price and a couple similar houses sold for less than House #1 is listed at.

Sunday: House #1 just happened to be hosting an open house on Sunday.  I invited my parents to come along with us to the open house since they know way more about this house-buying business than Adam or I do.

We spent a solid hour at the house looking it over with my parents.  I was happy because only 3 other lookers came during the 3-hour open house.  Most of them only stayed for 5-10 minutes, which is also a good sign that no one else is truly interested in it.

(The agents are trying to tell us that there is another interested buyer.  I would think that if there was another interested buyer, they would have been at the open house staking their claim just like we were.  Nope, it was just us.)

While we were in the unfinished basement, we started investigating some cracks in the basement floor.  Cracking in a concrete floor is natural over time, but this house is only 7 years old.  Plus, the cracks are wider than just the normal hairline cracks.

I pulled up the seller’s disclosure while we were there and they did say there were cracks and that they tried to fix these cracks by making perpendicular cuts into the basement floor (which we saw).  The floor also looks like it’s buckling slightly upward which hints to some pressure below the foundation – water possibly.

New homes are built on something called a vapor barrier, so there isn’t much of a chance of leaking (yet), but if there is water pressure under the house now, there is a chance in the future.

Obviously, this concerns us.

Today: We still really like the house, but this IS a buyer’s market.

Many more homes will start to pop up on the market as the weather gets warmer and I don’t want to feel forced into the first home we love just yet.

The seller’s are motivated and have already moved away for a new job (to Denver actually).  There’s a chance they could keep dropping their price.

If the house is still on the market and they drop their price, we might make our move.  But I want to see what homes come up over the next few weeks/months.

I’m still stalking the house online to see if an offer is made (our realtor will let us know that, too), but I’m not betting on it.  Homes in the price range that this house is in are just not selling right now.

Pictures: I am SO sorry I didn’t get any pictures for you guys!  I would post the ones from the listing on the Internet, but I don’t want to do that in case some creeper can trace the pictures back to their original location.  If we visit the house again, I will definitely get pictures for you.  AND, if we lose out on this house and continue our hunt, I’ll take more pictures of those houses, too.  (Trust me,  you didn’t want to see pictures of the other houses we saw last Friday – they were depressing.)

The house hunt continues!

What do you think about our decision to wait?  Any basement experts out there?

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Check out some of my writing on these fabulous blogs:

Seven Rules for Intentional Love (on Makeunder My Life)

The Tax-Document Checklist; A No-Stress Guide To Filing Your Taxes, Part 1 (on Money Under 30 – the first in a 6-part series on tax prep)