As of Monday, I do

8/16/2005 6:43:31 PM

2 seconds from signing with my fiancee... glad I didn't cause we're not together anymore.

Close call. I will eventually. I just signed a year lease at, *sigh* yet another apartment.

Congrats though looks like a fun house.

[Edited on August 16, 2005 at 6:44 PM. Reason : .]

8/16/2005 6:44:35 PM

its a beautiful house

i'd need a bigger yard than that

but wow, congratulations

8/16/2005 6:45:23 PM

yo girl, let me stay there with you

8/16/2005 6:57:53 PM

can i start a garage punk band in it?

8/16/2005 7:06:52 PM

housing bubble!

8/16/2005 7:25:47 PM

yep, it still needs work though

8/16/2005 8:19:13 PM

I'm betting either 80/20 loan OR rich husband/fiance OR a combination of the two

either way, she's not putting 20% downpayment on that shit by herself

8/16/2005 8:22:32 PM

yeah... I own a condo near the ebach where I live.. it's cool, small, but you know what? my butt can afford it!

8/16/2005 8:38:33 PM

I am just getting started...met with a broker this week...but I am planning on late spring/summer to close...

congrats though!!! Great house

8/16/2005 9:15:45 PM

I should buying a house considering I pay 1k+ rent/month anyway.

That's a really pretty nice house. I do prefer all brick though, not a big fan of siding.

8/16/2005 9:34:56 PM

My girlfriend and I ordered plans early in the summer -- mid-May or early June at the latest -- and we still haven't found a contractor in the Lenoir/Pitt County area that'll give us a reasonable bid. So if anyone knows of a good contractor looking for work in that area (doubtful), I'd be interested.

8/16/2005 10:42:35 PM

yup closed apr 29

this is from may31


lot different now

8/17/2005 7:12:24 AM

[Edited on August 17, 2005 at 10:23 AM. Reason : .]

8/17/2005 10:18:51 AM

yup, ive had mine for about 1.5 months now.



ive got so much land, i dont know what to do with it!

congrats dzandrea

8/17/2005 10:22:28 AM

double

[Edited on August 17, 2005 at 10:22 AM. Reason : df]

8/17/2005 10:22:28 AM

i'm closing Sept. 8th

8/17/2005 10:28:47 AM

yes, going on two years now

8/17/2005 10:33:10 AM

It's a 10 year old picture from the tax record, so the front yard looks a lot different now. The house is still kind of the same though.

8/17/2005 10:40:01 AM

Closed on June 31st!

I love it. Living alone is weird, though.

8/17/2005 10:48:31 AM

Thank you all! It's so exciting to walk in and say " wow, this is acutally mine"

Quote :

"i'd need a bigger yard than that"

It's actually a corner lot, so the backyard is a lot larger than the front, and theres a about 20ft of sideyard not in the picture. I'll have to get a picture of it

Quote :

"I'm betting either 80/20 loan OR rich husband/fiance OR a combination of the two either way, she's not putting 20% downpayment on that shit by herself"

You'd be surprised what a little saving from a good job can do.

Quote :

"I do prefer all brick though, not a big fan of siding."

Actually, me too But, I opted for the Hardi Plank since I love the neighborhood style so much. It's based on 50's Craftsman style so there's a very classic feel to it. I'm a sucker for a big porches.

8/17/2005 12:12:45 PM

yep, here's mine



you are definitely right. a little saving does go a long way. we paid 20% no problem.

nice house! congrats!

[Edited on August 17, 2005 at 1:44 PM. Reason : i need to upload better pics]

8/17/2005 1:42:48 PM

i too did a little saving...actually ALOT of saving...but it was still no where near 20% + closing costs.

god damn expensive housing.

8/17/2005 1:43:56 PM

NoVA= No home in the cards for me

8/17/2005 1:53:17 PM

im about to be a homeowner in the near future

thank goodness for this:

http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/2728981p-9166363c.html

8/17/2005 2:37:22 PM

me and the bank do! the bank owns most of it.

8/17/2005 2:45:36 PM

Our lease is up in like 9-10 months and we are probobly going to buy a house. How long did it take all of you to find one you liked?

8/17/2005 2:46:42 PM

I'll have a kick ass condo once they finish the damn Paramount. I can't move in until October.

8/17/2005 2:48:56 PM

^^probably 3 months of looking. then from the time we made our offer to the time we signed it was like 1.5 months.

8/17/2005 2:53:54 PM

we looked for about an hour.

we bought the 2nd house we looked at.

8/17/2005 2:54:37 PM

Powelton Avenue, bitch

8/17/2005 2:56:39 PM

^^WOW! we looked A LOT online. and then on saturdays and sunday's we would go look at places. there were a lot of houses for us to choose from within our price range. i wish we could have found one that fast!

8/17/2005 2:58:54 PM

well, maybe it was a little longer then that....it only took at hour once we started looking inside houses.

we started off making a list of all the houses in the areas we wanted and in the price range we wanted from an online listing...we came up with about 30 or so. (we did this on a wednesday afternoon)

then the next afternoon (thurs), we drove around to every house to see which streets we liked the best (we bought in the city, so no real neighborhoods) and narrowed it down to 8 that we wanted to see the insides of.

on saturday, we went and started looking inside. the 2nd house we looked at was #1 on our list, and we really really liked it and its location...so we contacted the selling agent to find out its status. it turns out someone else was putting an offer in that afternoon, so if we wanted it, we would have to put an offer in as well. we went back to the realtors office, wrote up an offer, and we found out that evening that we had "won"

so it took 3 days from when we first looked on the internet, to when they accepted our offer...it was amazingly fast (only about an hour of actual looking).... almost too fast as this was the first house i bought and i wasnt sure what to expect.

8/17/2005 3:08:51 PM

Quote :

"we contacted the selling agent to find out its status. it turns out someone else was putting an offer in that afternoon,"

thats the oldest trick in the book

I bought a house in N. Raleigh 2 years ago and have not regretted it.

8/17/2005 3:14:49 PM

does anyone know what good websites there are for buying houses?

i figure just realtor websites, but i dunno... i'm at least 5 years away from buying my house (gotta get out of grad school and start work) but it's never too early to start planning

8/17/2005 3:55:15 PM

I looked for about three months and ended up buying one of the first ones I had actually looked at.

8/17/2005 4:05:34 PM

wow, theres very little chance of that happening around here.

if its on the market for more then 2 weeks, something is probably wrong with it.

8/17/2005 4:10:45 PM

where do you live sober?

is there good cell phone service there?

8/17/2005 4:26:45 PM

We bought the 4th house we looked at. Took us about 6 weeks of looking. We put offers on the 2nd and 3rd house only to have them both bought out from under us.

^^^^ Honestly if you aren't going to be in the market for 5 more years, there's no point in looking now unless you are just curious of house prices. A lot will change in 5 years...

If you are really curious though, go to http://www.realtor.com That is one of the best for just general looking. Once you get a realtor, they often have a nicer web site that gives you a lot more info on each house (usually with more pics too).

8/17/2005 5:27:36 PM

I built my home from the ground up, so my experience is a little different on looking. I got a list of all the local builders in my area and did research on their quality, reputation, and also looked for online complaints etc. I went to their building neigborhoods and looked at the product quality and things like that. I picked one and two weeks later they were named "America's Best Builder"
Whoopiedoo, but it made me feel good

Building from scratch lets you pick your exact location and lot, as well as the floor plan and entire design of the home. This was a custom home builder, meaning that I could edit the plan. So I added a walk in closet, an extended deck, and a screen porch. The flexibility of that was important to me, and it took me about a month of good research and looking at options to decide to contract with that builder.

8/17/2005 9:15:16 PM

None of you really own your homes untill atleast 25 more years!

8/17/2005 10:00:11 PM

Quote :

"where do you live sober? is there good cell phone service there? "

baltimore.

...and yes, its a city, so the cell phone service is grrreeeeaaattt.

Quote :

"I built my home from the ground up, so my experience is a little different on looking"

i bet that would be awesome. unfortunately building a new house up in the baltimore area will probably start in the $750s....and thats a tad too much for me right now. we have an unfinished basement that we hope to finish one day...so thats about as much "building" as i will get control over.

[Edited on August 18, 2005 at 8:43 AM. Reason : f]

8/18/2005 8:41:25 AM

borkas getting fat

8/18/2005 9:15:27 AM

How much are these homes running ya?

8/21/2005 1:44:09 AM

sober, that's nuts that you got it that fast. we started looking for a condo in arlington in Jan, and didn't get in one until June. But after all the frustration we endured, we wound up with exactly what we were looking for (no thanks to our so called agent, who we didn't use for the place we bought.

8/21/2005 1:50:30 PM

come thursday, i will

8/21/2005 2:40:16 PM

since last april 20th we, um er bank of america does...

built it from scratch, brought our own floor plan and everything, got to take our picks of the lot and basically was involved in every decision made, and that's the only way I'll ever do it. All of the "pre-made" houses we looked at were nowhere near what we wanted. our home is truely custom, based on what we wanted. after all that's the most important thing!




[Edited on August 23, 2005 at 10:59 AM. Reason : ]

8/23/2005 10:57:13 AM

I don't plan to buy a house 'til I can afford not to get a mortgage (without help from my parents, which would be cheating).

Plus, the property market has peaked here. Wrong time to buy.

[Edited on August 23, 2005 at 7:59 PM. Reason : .]

8/23/2005 7:59:18 PM

Quote :

"I don't plan to buy a house 'til I can afford not to get a mortgage (without help from my parents, which would be cheating)."

bad reason

Quote :

"Plus, the property market has peaked here. Wrong time to buy."

good reason

8/23/2005 8:41:11 PM

Quote :

"I don't plan to buy a house 'til I can afford not to get a mortgage"

that is dumb as shit. means you're throwing 100 times as much money down the black hole of rent as you'd be throwing down the black hole of interest payments.

8/24/2005 8:30:05 AM