Buying a home
Heather and I spent the day looking at homes again.
I realized that the act of buying a home isn’t as bad as I had previously thought.
At this stage in my life I don’t see much wisdom in purchasing a pre-owned home. First we need to find one and both agree upon it (not a simple feat). Then we need to tender an offer and wait for it to be accepted. This creates a problem for us since we are currently leasing a town home and need some idea of a date to transition from one dwelling to the next. Once this is all done then we get to invest a bunch of time, effort, and money into changing things around (Heather watches a lot of HGTV) since the odds of finding a “perfect” house are on par with me winning the lottery.
For these reasons we decided that custom homes make a lot of sense for us since they provide the benefits of new construction and customization without the hassles of making all the arrangements ourselves. We decided to go look at some custom home developments we had looked at back in early February.
After spending a good part of the afternoon looking we have decided to purchase an Arbor custom home in Beaverton, OR. We found a floor plan we both could agree upon and the price was within our reach. We sat down with their finance guy and found out that my credit worthiness is much better than I had thought. We can easily get a mortgage for the amount we would need to get the home. We didn’t have the needed paperwork to actually apply for a loan, however, based on our credit score and our income it should be a done deal.
We put in a tentative offer in order to secure a lot since the current phase of the community is almost sold out and future phases will cost more money. Our offer is contingent on us successfully securing the financing for our home purchase. I want to see if my employer can offer us a better mortgage package than the builder’s finance people.
So today I’m 90% of the way to owning a home. Assuming we go through with everything it looks as if our new home will be complete in early November just in time for Heather’s birthday.
Congratulations on your upcoming home purchase! I’m glad everything looks like its going good. Let us know more details of your new place when you can. It would be really cool if you post photos of your house before, during, and after construction. I think you are taking the smart route and building a new one. Its nice that you can decide just how you want it and a new house will also be a lot more energy efficient and save you a lot of time and money because you won’t need to fix it up.
So how big is your biggest bathroom or closet? I’m wondering if its comparable in size to my apartment here in Nagoya.
I plan on photoblogging about it throughout all of the phases of construction. Since it will be the biggest purchase of my life (at least until the next house) I’ll probably write about it until you are sick of reading about it. Our master bedroom closet looks pretty large - I might be able to give your apartment a run for its money.
I’ll post some pictures of the generic floor plans tonight. Right now we are trying to figure out what “custom” options we would like and what we can afford.
Hey congrats man. Thats…what do the kids say? “Tight as shit!”? Or something.
But yeah thats great. Just can’t wait to see what sound/TV system you get set up in that bad boy.
Thanks Adam.
There are a ton of cool options I can do to pre-wire the house for A/V during construction. We were talking about getting in-room speakers built into the kitchen / living room.
Granted I won’t be able to afford a new sound / TV for a while.
Your new house (well, not so new anymore) looks great. I’m wondering how your experience was dealing with Arbor. I’ve got an offer in on a home in Arbor Gardens but have 2 1/2 weeks to back out of it. I’m a bit nervous, since I can’t really find much feedback positive or negative about the builder. Are you both happy with the experience? What about the community? Do you think its holding up over time? Any info/feedback you can give would be great!
Thanks,
Karen
Hi Karen,
Heather and I have had an extremely pleasant experience dealing with Arbor. I was a bit nervous when we first put our offer in on our home; however, the agent we worked with was both helpful and understanding of our questions as first time home buyers. Throughout the process they communicated clearly with us and actually finished construction earlier than projected.
After living in our hose for a while I can say I am satisfied with the quality of materials and workmanship. The two issues we have had since moving in were both fixed promptly. I think our community is quite nice and has improved over time (our house was in the tail end of the first phase of development).
Overall I would say we are happy home owners. I would consider purchasing another home from them in the future when the time comes. If you want some additional feedback drop me an email.
Good luck!