where have you been all my life?

In a buyer's market, it's hard to believe you could spend five months looking for a house, but I have. I saw probably forty houses and made four offers. Today, I'm finally "under contract."



Is it a perfect house? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. It's down in a family neighborhood blocks from the lake, instead of up on the hill blocks from the clubs, where I wanted to be. Though it was built in 1900 almost all of its original character - save its high ceilings - has been remodeled over. It needs leveling, a new roof, appliances, bathrooms, a kitchen, central air & heat, electrical, plumbing.. And that's just to make it inhabitable. Once that's done, it needs the various linoleum and laminate substrates that have been layered over (hopefully) the original floors removed. It needs paint. It needs crown molding or something to make the high, featureless walls feel more stately and less institutional.

But it has good points, too. The lot is big, on a corner with alley access. It's four blocks from downtown and right around the corner from any number of bouncy castle outlets. The windows are new. There are three porches, two in the grand Southern style you'd expect in Texas. At 1,900 square feet, it's more than twice the size of my current apartment. And the price is $30,000 less than the appraised value. It may not be a perfect house, but it's a hell of an investment.

Being realistic, though, for the next year I expect it to be simply a Hell.

Five years or so ago in Seattle I was approved for a $600,000 mortgage. I was making less than I make now and my expenses were more, but that was the market then. The broker I met with explained all kinds of exotic loan options available for someone like me, who just woke up one morning and decided she wanted to buy a house she hadn't saved up for. You could get money at that point just for showing up. Now it's different.

My current broker advises me to be very cautious about how I even apply for home equity loans to fix up this house. He says almost no one is doing them in the first place. In the second place is what everyone already knows, that the market for those secondary loans is highly unstable right now. I'm lucky in that I have family who can act in a bank's stead, should I need that assistance. Still, few 30-year-olds want to borrow money from their folks if they don't have to, so I plan to investigate my options once the mortgage is in place and I don't have to worry about hits to my credit report from inquiries.

After all this searching, after offering and being turned down or told I'm too late, this feels both sudden and not. With very little to hope for in an inspection, I'm ready - even anxious - to get to the part where I pull my work gloves on and finally begin.