The Search For My First House

I began searching for a house in early 2005. My fiancé and I were tired of living above a couple of smokers in the middle of the city and wanted a slightly larger place. When I moved to Maine after graduating college, my plan had been to move into a house when I was ready to move out of the apartment that I had gotten, so we decided to start looking.

We found a great real estate agent that knew the area really well and worked with us for a long time to find the right house for us. The biggest problem was that we were not really willing to live in anything that was in the price range that we set forth as what we were willing to pay.

Add to that the fact that you needed to put an offer in over the asking price on the day a house went on the market (or the day after) in order to have a chance of getting a place and it seemed as though we would never find a house.

We went under contract once last September, but the house had too many structural problems and the septic tank was non-existant. Since we could not afford to buy the house and to make all of the improvements to it, we just had to cut our losses on the inspection fees and keep looking.

I basically gave up on finding a house, and was starting to look for a new apartment. I still went to open houses and still drove by a half dozen houses every week or two to see if they were worth looking inside, but it did not seem like we would find anything.

Of course, that was when we found the house that we wound up buying. I came to look at the house with our realtor and I really liked it. The house seemed to be in pretty good shape, it seemed to be in a good neighborhood, and it had a lot of potential for improvements. I came to look at it a second time with my fiancé, and she felt the same way. The inspection went through fine, and 3 weeks later we closed.

It was not quite as simple as all of that, but this is a brief overview of how we found the house.