Days turn to weeks and weeks to a year.

At the risk of boring everyone to death, I am going to recap the more major happenings of the past year. But, I will at least pay you the courtesy of breaking it into small segments...hehe.

In April of 2012, one of my coworkers convinced me that we should buy a house. At first we thought it was crazy. Then it consumed us. We were pre-approved with the help of my parents, and from that point on became obsessed. In retrospect, things actually moved pretty quickly for us, considering that we became home owners on August 20th, 2012. However, it was the longest and most emotional Summer of my life. Here's why:

Summer is when everyone buys.
We were determined to move into a house before we started school on August 22nd because a) our apartment lease was  up in the middle of July, b) we wanted a fixer-upper and wanted to get some projects done while we had time before the homework and projects set in, and c) we were bright-eyed and eager to have a house. Little did we know, that's how lots of people feel (minus the homework part... I'd say we're pretty freakin' lucky/blessed to be students and have a house.). So we had a lot of competition.

Our price range was pretty low.
Since we're still students, the idea was to buy a house that we would pay about the same in monthly mortgage payments as we would be paying for rent anyway, do some fun projects to raise the resale value while finishing school, and then get the heck out. And, as unfortunate as the housing market crash was, we greatly benefitted from the crazy low house prices. As a result, we figured that $120,000 or less would get us a nice little house without having too high of a monthly payment. Unfortunately, lots of people just have that amount of cash lying around and like to buy houses with it. We put 8 offers on 8 different houses (all at or as high as $15,000 over the asking price); probably half of those offers were turned down for cash offers. It was a jungle. But it's cool, because the house we ended up with was $117,000 ($5,000 over the asking price) and we locked in at an interest rate of 3.25%, baby! For those of you like the year-and-a-half younger version of myself who don't really know what that means, it's crazy low.

We had somewhat specific needs.
In moving into a house, we all decided that it would be advantageous and fun for Tyler, Karina, and Polly to move into the house with us. In order to avoid the typical roommate conflict, we wanted a house with 2 living rooms and somewhat decent sized bedrooms. Also, because of the dogs and because, despite my black thumb, we love the idea of green grass and flower beds, we wanted a nice sized yard. In Fresno, everyone has a swimming pool in their backyard, and when you're dealing with a 6,000 sq foot lot, that means you have no yard. Just open the back door and jump from the house into the pool. So our selection was even more limited than the price range restricted us to.

We really should have ditched our realtor. And the loan officer, for that matter. But definitely the realtor.
Both the realtor and the loan officer came recommended by the coworker who talked me into buying a house. All the while, we had people and blogs and Yahoo! articles telling us to try out different realtors for a good fit and not be afraid to ditch them. However, at the beginning, I didn't realize he was a terrible realtor. Also, I knew he had a family and I didn't want to drag him along and then kick him to the curb! And most of all, we thought the process would be short and sweet and that it wouldn't make much of a difference because we were incredibly motivated buyers. WRONG! If I've learned one thing from the process of buying a house, it is that the realtor can make all the difference. I was the one looking up houses for us to go see, calling him to schedule showings, texting and calling him constantly to ask whether or not he had submitted our offers, etc. Several times we saw houses without him contacting the seller to find out if an offer had already been accepted. I would often leave him messages and he wouldn't call back, so after 24 hours, I'd try again. And, as soon as we had an offer accepted, he dumped us onto his assistant without really communicating to us about his actions. His name is nearly a profanity in our household, and I kind of wish that every time he took a step, his foot would land in poo. For the record, he's not an awful person; I think he just spreads himself too thin, and since our price range was relatively low, we weren't a high priority. But we have friends who bought houses around the same time we did who had a much less stressful experience in part because of a higher price range, but mostly because their realtor was communicating with them.

(Do you see how much longer that last section was than the rest of them? Can you tell how passionately I feel about our experience with the realtor??)

This is not the offer we made on our actual house; after the first 2 offers we made, I stopped documenting it to prevent myself from getting my hopes up, haha.

In the end, we did get into the house 2 days before the start of the semester. And it has 2 living areas on opposite sides of the house. It's basically perfect for our living situation, because the two sides of the house each have a full bathroom and a bedroom (one side has 2 bedrooms) and they are joined in the middle by the dining room and kitchen area. It's a 1652 square foot house on an 8,100 square foot lot. And guess what! No pool! Score!!

Cue the happy dance!

It was a crazy Summer, and the first couple of months of the semester were crazy, but we're a couple of lucky Bs.

 PS- This is how we lived from the time our apartment lease was up until we were FINALLY able to move into the house. We all crammed into a one bedroom apartment with ALL of our stuff. We lived this way for a week!

No, this is not an episode of Hoarders. Sadly.