Friday, July 18, 2014

Our First Home In Pleasant Grove

Last September Steve and I started realizing that we could possible buy a home. We were tried of renting and knew we wanted to raise our family in Utah. Steve's job lets him live anywhere he wants so why rent when you can buy and make an investment.

We just started him doing conventions in September and have been trying to do at least one a month. That brings in some great money and he makes pretty much as much as I do and sometimes more in 3 days at a convention. But these conventions are not as easy as they sound. They are exhausting! You wake up early in the morning every day, you have to set up, take down, have good energy even if you having a bad sales day, you eat granola bars and Gatorade all day, you can't really leave your table (and these are 8 to 11 hour days), and you are fighting not to fall asleep. The thing that gets me through when I go is knowing we get to go out to eat after. I use to try to go to all of them with him but they are out of state and I don't want to take the time off work and it cost us more money for me to go too. So I just go to the Utah ones and there are three of them and that is more then enough for me. I don't know how Steve does them, but we did just get him a portable tablet so he just works while he is there and brings a monitor so everyone can see how he does his work.

That being said in November we put in an offer and was accepted on a townhome before we had all the money we needed thinking we would get it by the time we closed. That didn't happen so we had to back out. It was hard but there was no way it was going to work out. I wasn't as sad as I thought I would be but we decided we would try again in about a year from then. We did our calculations and decided on September as the time we would have the money we needed to buy our first home. I never stopped looking at homes. I kept watching so I could get an idea of the market and what was a good deal.

In March this townhome in the same place as the last one came on the market. I had a list of homes I liked as they came up just encase any would be for sale when the time came for us to buy. I liked this home but I knew it would most likely sale before we had a chance. As time went on they started dropping the price. Then in June it went down the lowest I had seen for that area. That day I showed Steve and asked if we should go see it, maybe they would take a 90 day contract. I called them Monday June 16th to get a time to see it and told them what are situation was. We got there and loved it and the lady gave us different options to help us see if we could close in 30 days. The seller wouldn't accept a longer contract. So I talked to my family friend Julie. We spent all night trying everything to make it work. Finally after making some calls we where able to find I way to get our money in time. We put in our offer that night. We found out the lady selling it was 92 years old and didn't want to sell it but couldn't use stairs anymore cause of surgery and a heart attack. They had 3 offers come in in the beginning but she wasn't ready to sell. When they finally found her a place and moved her in, she finally was ready to accept an offer. The only thing was the other offers had expired. She had dropped the price 5,000 dollars so she could sell it as soon as possible. The day my realtor took our offer for the seller to look at another offer came in offering the same amount as us but she had already left so it was too late. They had just barely missed their chance for her to take their offer with her to show the seller.

As we started the process working towards closing everything went so smoothly. Our loan got approved in 2 and a half business days with no conditions! That is very rare! In all it took us 3 weeks from the day we saw it to close. That didn't stop me from stressing or not sleeping good at night lol. The only problem was Steve was going to be gone during the weekend we were to move in. So I called up all the people I could and got 9 people to load the truck and 4 people to unload it. I was really scared to drive the truck and leave others to organize it, but it all worked out. Then my family came over and we got everything unpacked and in it's place that day (I can't stand having things in boxes and would have stayed up all night until it was done). We know we are meant to start our family and life here in this home. There has to be a reason why everything worked so smoothly.

So far we are loving every minute of it and can't wait to make some upgrades. Just knowing it's our makes all the difference! It amazing how much better you take care of a place knowing it's yours vs. renting. I also learned that moving in 95 degree weather isn't my favorite thing.