Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. This weekend just gone, Cal and I decided to put a toe in the water of house-hunting. We’ve been saving up a deposit for a wee while, and although we love our apartment we’ve been talking in general terms about looking to buy.
We do some reviewing of the house listings (well, Cal’s been checking them regularly for a while and showing me the choice cuts) and find a few open homes to check out. We’re thinking suburbia, and our price range is telling us the same thing, so we decide on Sunday to check out a few spots in the Hutt Valley.
Spot one – open home is cancelled. (This was the one we were very keen on.) Spot three – smaller and less cool than expected. Spot two, however, was nicer than we were expecting. It ticked all our boxes. It needs work, but not crazy work, and it felt good. We spent about twenty minutes looking around it.
So we decided to make an offer.
And here we are, three days into househunting and we’re already heading into a meeting with the real estate agents for negotiations. We’re acting in good faith – we could live there, and three days of reflecting on it hasn’t changed that view. But we’re in no hurry. We’re not madly in love with the house, we won’t do anything to get it. We could let it go, spend another 6 months to a year in our apartment and be pretty comfortable with that. That’s something in our favour. (Also in our favour: my brother is a lawyer who does this sorta thing all the time. Cheers big bro for the advice so far.)
But despite this, I am a bit unnerved. It seems incredible and ridiculous to me that you can get this deep into real serious financial process based on twenty minutes of walking through an empty house. Man, I take longer than that to pick a library book. But this, apparently, is how it’s done.
So, internets – advise me. What do we need to know?
And what the heck are we getting ourselves into?
And does quoting Bill and Ted make me more or less qualified as a potential home-owner?