House Hunting: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Part I

Our search for our first home was not finished in a half hour like the shows on HGTV. We were waiting for it to be official that we were getting sent to Ft. Walton, FL. And it was also hard because Stephan was deployed to Iraq most of the time we needed to be looking. We started looking online months ahead on Realtor.com but kept getting setbacks. There was also the time constraint of the $8,000 tax credit.

Every time we would find a house we liked, it would be sold or have some weird thing wrong with it. The first house we loved was cute and had a lake view. It was already under contract when we called to inquire about it but we did like the realtor that we spoke with so she began to help us out. The second house was WAY out of our price range (which we had a hard time figuring out a good price range to begin with). The 3rd had Chinese drywall...so basically it would have to be completely gutted.

Finally, there was the house that the previous owners had decided to knock out a wall and closet between two guest rooms to make one mega room... but didn't decide to finish it. So there was a big gaping whole in the wall. As a girl, I would get emotionally attached to the houses and then get disappointed.

It was starting to not work out with our first realtor due to communication issues (I went up the 8 hours to house hunt ALONE only to find out that our financing was not in place...frustrating.) So Stephan contacted a friend's mother in law who was a realtor in the area. The only problem was, he didn't really "break up" with the first. So now we have two.

Stephan then found out that we could get cash back for using an assigned realtor with or VA loan (a plus side to the Air Force situation). So obviously we were going for that. Now Stephan had to break up with 2 realtors. He let them down easily and honestly...by email. He's a brave one, my hubby.

After we finally got on track with the right realtor and all our financing in order, we looked forward to actually going up to house hunt for real and live out our HGTV Property Virgins fantasy!