The House Hunt

So we arrived at Jeff's parents' house in Kaysville on Monday the 16th. Tuesday the 17th we stayed home and recovered a bit from the traveling and move-related stress. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we dove back into stress--the house hunt. Jeff's parents made it significantly easier by taking care of the big boys, thank goodness. We had done some legwork ahead of time on the Internet and driving through neighborhoods, which helped narrow things down a little. Of course our price range narrowed things quite a bit to begin with, since homes cost just about double what they were in Texas. Luckily Jeff and I also have mostly similar ideas about what we want in a house, so our criteria haven't been too difficult to determine. There are several towns in Utah County that we could live in, but it's important to both of us to live within 10 miles of Jeff's job so he can continue to commute on his bike, weather permitting. Considering the roads he'd have to ride on, we decided to start looking in Pleasant Grove, Orem, and west Provo.


Day 1
On Wednesday we drove to Provo (65 miles) with the baby to meet with our real estate agent. We spent the whole day looking at homes in Pleasant Grove and Orem--probably 15 of them. The one that had looked best to us on paper was a disappointment--foundation problems to the point where the floors literally sloped. Jeff dropped a round cat toy in the kitchen and it rolled to the sliding glass door to the backyard. I would've felt worse about it if we hadn't seen some other good possibilities. It was a long day before we made it back to Kaysville.

Day 2
Thursday morning found us headed back down to look at a few homes in West Provo. As I was putting Dallin into the agent's car, he accidently put it in gear and rolled onto my foot with the rear tire. I had tire marks on my foot all day, but luckily the pain was minimal and went away quickly. He felt really bad and made sure I knew he had insurance in case I needed to get it taken care of. I would have had it x-rayed if the pain hadn't gone away, but I haven't had a bit of trouble with it since. Anyway, after freeing me from beneath the tire, we continued on and saw 4 or 5 homes before we had to call it quits. The evening was reserved for unloading our belongings from the moving truck into a storage unit in Orem in 100 degree heat. It took almost five hours, but would have taken much longer without the help of my aunt and three willing cousins and Jeff's brother. Thank goodness for them. We treated them to pizza afterward and made it home just before midnight.

Day 3
By Friday I was really tired of looking at homes. We caught a few that we hadn't seen earlier, then went back through the three that we had liked the most that we thought we could realistically afford. (The ones we couldn't afford were the ones we really liked the best, of course.) We decided to spend the weekend calling on "for sale by owners," just to make sure we didn't miss out on "our" house because it wasn't listed. However, as Jeff and I talked about it on the drive home, I realized he was anxious to just make a decision and get on with the buying process before he had to start worrying about work. I wasn't quite so anxious, but I had also reached saturation point and was willing to stop looking.

Day 4 and beyond
We called our agent Saturday morning to let him know we wanted to make an offer on one of the homes we had looked at in Pleasant Grove. Thus began the negotiation process--ugh--my least favorite part. Jeff and I proceeded to demonstrate our complete lack of bargaining skills. To put a positive spin on it, I guess we are just nice. We'd rather play it straight and fair. In the end, we probably didn't get as many concessions from the seller as we could have, and we didn't get the high-efficiency furnace I really wanted, but we do have a new furnace in a decent house in what we think is going to be a good place to raise our kids (that's the part I've really been praying for). The haggling is over, the loan is locked, the homeowner's insurance is all but set up. We close on the 22nd and hope to move in the following weekend. And best of all, I think I'm mostly done making phone calls. I think we used almost twice the number of minutes on our cell phone than we do in a normal month.

I've spared a lot of the gory details of the hunt that I was going to write, but I decided I didn't want to relive them all, and you probably didn't want to hear them anyway.

As for the house itself, it's a 5-bedroom rambler with a basement. There are three bedrooms, a bathroom, and the kitchen and living room upstairs. In the basement are a family room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, two unfinished storage rooms, and a laundry room. One storage room has shelves built in for food storage. The other could be finished as another small bedroom. It's on a quarter acre lot with mature landscaping including two apple trees, grape vines, and a place to put a garden. I won't have any more excuses for not exercising my green...er, brown...thumb. The biggest negative is no garage or carport. We'll feel that this winter, but there is room to build one on at some point. I'm not really fond of the floorplan of the house itself--it feels small, even though it's actually a little bigger than our home in Texas. But I think the location will make up for the things I don't like. It's on a cul-de-sac at the end of a dead-end street, within walking distance of the elementary school, the high school, a park, the community swimming pool, and a new city rec center that is being built. As we drove through the neighborhood we had half a dozen people or so wave to us. Actually wave! Our church building is less than a mile away, and shopping isn't too far either. And it's about 6 1/2 miles on good roads for Jeff to bike to work--just what he was looking for. It's not our dream house, but we're happy with it so far and we're looking forward to making it our home.