My So Called Grown Up Life: Buying a house...?

So, as I mentioned before we are buying a house... or should I say we are in the long, overwhelming, confusing process of trying to buy a house. I am pretty sure everyone should have to take a home buying class in high school or college or something!

We stumbled upon the house buying because we have been looking at houses online for 6+months but never actually went to get pre-approved or any of that because we knew we had the wedding to deal with. Then in January we made the decision not to have the wedding (but to still get married of course). A few weeks later I ran across this amazingly priced foreclosure and we quickly jumped on board and started bidding... a little too quickly and in the end we did not win the house. Then we got serious about continuing to look. We looked at another house in Staunton... that literally had houses all around it. Andy & I fortunately grew up with some land around us and that spoiled us. The foreclosure we looked at had 5 acres (more than we actually needed but we were fine with more!), all of houses we liked in our price range had more like .40 acres... ugh.

Since we have looked at houses online for the last 6+ months basically we knew what there was in our price range that we liked. We didn't need a realtor to send us listings to match what we want because I checked 3-4 sites a week to see if anything new was up. There was one house on the market that we had drove by last summer while house sitting for Andy's cousin. This house was gorgeous with about an acre of land but at the very, very high end of our price range. We kept coming back to it being the most practical house for us. Other houses we loved the house but the land would be .35 and well we have two boxers, they need a little more than that. Also, we wanted to not be stacked against each other. Another problem was we wanted something in the county... a lot of things in our price range were located in Staunton City. We wanted at least 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. And this list went on and on... we were are picky! So we finally decided to ask the realtor to show us the house that met our needs but was a little high in price.

We loved the house and decided to place an offer (what could it hurt!). This started a lengthly process of offering, counter offering, etc... and since our seller is not in the United States it made the process even longer. Finally, this past weekend our contract was signed by the seller and we now have a home inspection set for this Saturday! Again, we are still trying to get through this whole process... but if we do, by April 15 we will be homeowners!

Here are a few pictures of the house...