Offer Made, Declined, Countered, Accepted

We've done it. We have succeeded in finding a house that both Trey and I agree on. Never thought it could happen. Trey with his huge requirements, meaning that there are 4 walls a roof that doesn't leak most of the time, and mine with the house being something that meets our family's needs. What can I say, I'm crazy like that. ha ha

I kid you not when I say that we have looked at every available house in our price range in Athens and the surrounding areas and nothing was promising. Finally, after lowering our sq. ft requirement, we found a newer development in Gun Barrel City that has houses that were built in the last 2 years or so, and have been done very nicely.

So, on Monday afternoon, we traveled out to Gun Barrel and went in 3 houses in this development. The first one was nice, but needed some work, the second was awesome, and just a bit more that we wanted to spend. The third was the cheapest and brand new just like the second, but they made some unfortunate choices in tile color for the floor, and that would take some undoing.

Sooooo... after seeing the disappointing 3rd house, we decided that we would choose door #2. We went straight from the house back to our realtor's office to put in the offer. After looking at price comparisons and considering that state of the housing market, we put in an offer that was nicely in the middle of what the others were going for and the asking price. We left the office cautiously optimistic for several reasons. While we knew that our first offer would not be accepted we were happy that we found something that was in a nice and livable condition. It had everything we needed and even many things that we wanted. Definitely icing on the cake.

Early Tuesday morning, our offer was declined and we were told that the seller/builder would lower the cost $500. Whoop-dee-doo... ha ha... And despite the seller saying that they would take a VA loan which requires that seller to pay the closing costs, he would not do this, and we would have to tack them on to the asking price of the house. Bummer...

After talking with our lender, we knew that we could afford it, but did we really want to do this. Well, as of noon we did not, and decided to put an offer in for the first house we saw instead. Yes, the one that needed a good scrubbing. Trey and I spent a good part of the afternoon crunching the numbers to find a way that we could make all of this work out to our advantage.

At four, we showed up, kids in tow, to the realtor's office once again. Can you say deja vu? Well, it was definitely that. We were met with the realtor telling us that he had just spoken to the realtor of the house we were going to put an offer into and that they had just received a contract on it, and we were back to the drawing board. We were making plans to go out on the hunt again and see the last couple of houses in the neighborhood left for Sunday afternoon. After talking about the other prospects, Trey and I both decided that we really wanted to house that we put the original offer on.

The house is worth the price that was being asked. It had everything that we would want to change in the other houses already done. We figured out that we were fighting with an extra $100 a month by giving the seller the price he wanted. We decided that we'd rather spend the extra $100 on the house we wanted than trying to fix a house over a long period of time to make it look like the house we really wanted in the first place.

We signed all of our amended paperwork for the contract and then drove the 5 minutes home to wait to hear back the next day. We weren't even home 10 minutes when the realtor called Trey to tell him that the seller accepted our offer. While we are happy, we are kicking ourselves just because only we could pay a seller more than his asking price in a buyers market. ha ha...

Now we wait. We have a VA appraisal to go through, various inspections, and we still have to get the financing to finish going through. We have been this far before. Last year we almost bought a house in New Mexico only to have the deal fall through the day of closing, because our lender couldn't get everything worked out despite assuring us for months that we were in good shape and we were ready to go. So, as I said before we are choosing to be cautiously optimistic. If all goes through as planned, we are to close around Wednesday, October 15th.


Here's the listing on the house, and be sure to check out the pics. I'll post more pics as we do inspections, etc.


QUALITY NEW CONSTRUCTION. THIS 3-2-2 BRICK & STONE HAS BEAUTIFUL TILE IN LIVING, KITCHEN, BATHS & UTILITY, BULLNOSE CORNERS, VAULTED CEILING, OPEN DESIGN, PRETTY KITCHEN W/CUSTOM CABINETS & STARION COUNTERTOPS, PANTRY, GORGEOUS MASTER BATH W/JACUZZI TUB & SEPARATE SHOWER, WALK-IN, 10 YEAR WARRANTY.

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