Since I started this blog there have been so many things I’ve wanted to write about. Somehow there never seems to be enough time to sit down and write down my thoughts. Since October 4 there is one thing in particular that I’ve wanted to write about. On October 4th Kamil and I put an offer in on a house. I was hesitant to write about it because I was nervous I would jinx it. Now, I’m not a superstitious person but I wanted this house so badly that I was willing to go to the extremes. We put an offer in on another house this past summer and didn’t get it and were devastated. We had both already moved in, in our minds and when we were outbid we had to emotionally move out. It wasn’t something I wanted to do again.
Buying a house is sort of like finding your partner. You have to make sure it’s a good fit. You don’t want to marry the person and then realize after you get married that you can’t stand them, or that you settled. Buying a house is the same thing. Kamil and I both wanted a house we could live in for many years down the road, rather than a starter home we could fix up and then sell in a few years. With this market it’s too unpredictable to know whether we would be able to do that in a few years.
Kamil and I had seen 4 houses the day we first saw this house. Kamil had found the open house and I wasn’t too keen on going since it was further away than we had planned on living originally. I really didn’t want to live any further than an hour outside of NYC since I’m commuting daily and have to be at work at 8:30. This house is an hour and a half to Penn Station. We decided to see it anyway since it was on our way back to Kamil’s mom’s house.
When we pulled up it was a house out of a fairytale, somewhere I’d always dreamed of living. Although I loved it from the outside I still wasn’t convinced. It was on a busy street and with the whole issue from being so far away from the city I was more skeptical than anything. It wasn’t until we got to the second floor that I fell in love. I got to the top of the staircase and saw that there was a second staircase and a 3rd story!!!
Since I was little I’ve always enjoyed looking at houses. I remember going to a few open houses as a child and picture living there, where my room would be, etc. I lived in the same house from the time I was born until I moved to NYC (excluding college), so I never had the opportunity to move and live in another house. I always thought it would be fun. Yet, if my parents ever sold my house I would be SO upset. It is such a huge part of our family. My parents put so much work into it over the past 30 years.
Anyway, After seeing the 3rd story Kamil and I decided that we loved the house and really wanted his mom to see it. We left the open house, picked her up and headed back. The couple who was selling it had raised 3 children there and it had very positive vibes. Kamil’s mom loved it, which to me was a very good sign. She hadn’t liked much that we had seen since she was looking out for us and wanted us to find the very best house.
After sleeping on it we decided we loved it enough to put in an offer. The whole process of buying a house took many months for us. First there was negotiating a price, which took about a month. After that we had to negotiate about the oil tank that was in in the ground. Most old houses in Smithtown have oil tanks in the ground. Having an oil tank in the ground isn’t good for the environment since there is a chance they can begin leaking oil into the ground. We wanted to have the oil tank abandoned since it made us nervous to buy a house with such an oil tank. This whole process took another month. And then there was the whole mortgage process, which I think was the most painful process. We never spoke to our loan processor and he wrote the same thing to every email we wrote: “Forwarded to underwriting. TX.” We could have written “You’re an idiot and suck at your job” and he would have still written “Forwarded to underwriting. TX.”
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