This post will be entirely text. I was thinking about adding pictures of the houses we were looking at, but they really don’t matter.
So. Anyone that looks forward to buying a house someday, has no idea what the process is like. Our lease ends in July, so, we decided that we wanted to move out of our current apartment, into something new. (We have been in this one for 2 years, and I’m sick of working with a 5x10 kitchen with no storage space) So, we thought that the smart thing to do would be to buy a house. We started looking around the Boone area, and these dang people are INSANE. They want $125,000 for a trailer on a .25 acre lot. I kid you not, there is a listing for a house here, about 5 miles from where we live now. It’s not a trailer, it’s a 850 square foot house. 1 Bedroom, 1 bath(kind of). The toilet doesn’t work. The guy uses a hole in the back yard as his toilet. Listing price? $96,000. That house single handedly explains the Boone housing market. So, we started looking in other places. We looked at a cute cabin about 12 miles down the road, the asking price was $125,000 so that wasn’t too bad. Then, we looked inside. The whole place is covered with smoke damage. There is a gas log fireplace, and the cabin was a rental unit for vacationers. It looks like someone put a real log into the gas log fireplace. So, in order to fix the smoke damage, all of the drywall would have to come out, the insulation would have to come out, and all new insulation and drywall would be needed. Our friend Josh put in an offer on that house of $80,000. They guy’s response was “If he expects me to make a counter offer, he’s got to do better than that.” .. So, the seller is a moron. Come to find out, in 2007, the seller paid $70k for the cabin. So, that place is out of the question. Nothing else in Boone really caught our eye, so we started looking outside of Boone again. We ended up looking in Lenoir, which is about 30 miles down the road. We found a couple of really nice houses, and Josh and I went to look at a bunch. Josh and I looked at about 12 houses in one day. After looking, we narrowed the choices down to about 5. Others were weeded out because of location, barking dogs, one had a neighbor with a 30 foot flagpole flying a Confederate flag. So, after narrowing the list down, Virginia and I went to look at the remaining ones. Three of the houses turned out to be really nice. One wasn’t as great as I expected, and one that I expected to be really nice had a leaky foundation and a basement full of mold.
After Virginia and I looked at these houses, we had a nice talk on the way home. It’d be about a 45 minute commute each way, twice a day. We’d have to wake up earlier, spend more on gas, and all of that good stuff. Plus, we don’t know what’s going to happen with the market; everyone says that this is the perfect time to buy, but I see a lot of houses getting listed, and not many selling. Also, I graduate in 2 years. What if the housing market around here is horrible in 2 years? Then, we’ll have to sell the house and move.
So. We’re going to rent for the next two years. We’ll let everyone know when we get a new address.
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