Over the past month or so, my fiance and I have gone through the motions of buying our first house. Let’s just say, it’s been a complete emotional roller coaster for both of us. First, my fiance wanted a townhouse in Frederick. I completely objected because why should we pay the same amount or more for less space than a house? I also brought up the point that since he lives and works in Frederick currently, it wouldn’t be fair to me that I would have to do most of the traveling. We both agreed (meaning I won that argument) that getting a house would probably be the best investment. Our criteria was that we wanted a garage or carpad so we didn’t have to park on the street, relatively newer house, in a desirable neighborhood, central AC, electric or gas heat, at least some appliances, and a backyard. All those amenities within a price range between 140K to 170K. So Frederick was crossed off our list – it’s too expensive and we weren’t getting any bang for our buck.
We enlisted the help of a realtor, which was a friend of a friend of my fiance’s mother. He was nice, but he wasn’t aggressive at all when it came to finding us a house. We had to do all the searching and then he would just make the appointments to see the house. Because it’s a buyer’s market right now, you gotta be aggressive when getting a home.
We tried looking in a ton of areas all around central and western Maryland – places that would be about equal distance for both of us to commute. We found this one house in Brunswick, which literally was perfect for us and it met all our criteria. Unfortunately, because our realtor wasn’t aggressive, we lost the home to another buyer. We found another home in Hagerstown. It was smaller than the first one but it had a huge fenced in backyard, which would give us room to expand on the house if we wanted to, and it had a garage. Yet again, we lost the house because we followed the advice of our sucky realtor. After that blow, we were devastated. We lost 2 houses in a month. My mom suggested that we try Charles Town, WV and she found us a very aggressive realtor. We fired our old one that day.
Our new realtor sent us a bunch of listings at least twice or sometimes three times a day. We met on a Saturday to go searching in WV. Charles Town is about 45 mins from Frederick, 15 mins or so from Leesburg, VA and about an hour from Washington D.C. It’s an ideal location for both of us. We went through about 15 houses that day. It was exhausting but we narrowed our search down to two beautiful houses in the same neighborhood. One was like a dream house 4 bedroom 3 and half bath, huge kitchen and living room with a detached garage. But it was $189,000 – a little out of our price range. The house down the street was just as nice – 3 bedrooms 2 and a half bathrooms, a little smaller square footage, a semi-finished basement but no garage, just a car pad. This house was $169,000.
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Here’s a couple pictures of the house that we are in contract with:
Settlement was supposed to be this past Friday but it got pushed to tomorrow. Hopefully, by noon, we will be officially homeowners!
