We bought a house!!

I keep pinching myself to make sure this is for real! I can't believe we have a house! Well, almost. :) We should close within the next week or two. We are soooo excited to have our very own house and not share walls anymore. Apartment living has been good to us and definitely has it's perks but we are ready for the challenge of being homeowners. It should be a fun learning experience. So here's the new digs...

We are in love. It's funny because at first I thought it was cute but I had another house that I was still in love with. But as we toured the inside it really grew on me. Plus it had air conditioning (the other house didn't) which was huge for us. We also loved the big yard.

So here's the story of how our trip went and how we ended up finding our perfect house in 2 and a half days. It's kind of a miracle how it all came together for us so quickly.
We left Lucy with our friends the McAllisters and we took the Rubster the help us house hunt. It was a good 5-hour drive which went by surprisingly fast. Ruby was such a good girly. It was nice to be able to sit by her so I could entertain and give her food. We rolled into Cleveland at 12:30pm and met up with our realtor MaryLou. She started taking us around to houses that were on the low end of what our budget was. I should have taken pictures of how bad they were. The first few were super dirty and run down. They were major fixer uppers. Yeah, no thank you. We decided to re-evaluate our budget and figured out we could afford a higher price range than we originally thought. We gave her the new range and it totally changed the game. We found houses in much better shape and more like what we were looking for. We found 2 that were possibilities but one needed quite a bit of work, a little more than we were looking to do. The other one was beautiful on the outside and the first and second and third floors were awesome. But the basement had exposed pipes that were hanging super low and it didn't have a/c and the heating system was steam which we're not real familiar with. But we felt like that was the one to beat. The next day we looked in University Heights. Day one we just limited ourselves to Shaker Heights because a lot of people we have talked to live there and love it. We decided to try the next suburb over which was closer to the hospital and a shopping center. We found some cute houses that could work but for some reason we just kept going back to that other house. We looked through a ton of houses, including Dominique Moceanu's (crazy right?), and as we were trying to decide what to do as our 2nd day was winding down, MaryLou remembered there was one more house that had only been on the market for a few days that we could try to get in. It was totally last minute and we said, sure why not. She called the other agent who had listed the property, who happened to be at her same office (Howard Hanna), and she was able to get in. Trey fell in love with it the moment he saw it but I needed more convincing. We went inside and saw this...

Living room - love the beautiful wood floors



The dining room - love the curved archway

 French doors in living room

 

Playroom! This room screams 70s so we'll probably get some new curtains to cute it up in there. Possibly paint the wood paneling too. I love how bright this room is and that it has carpet for the kiddies to play around on.

 Kitchen with breakfast nook. So cute!

We don't love the cabinets so we might paint them to go better with all the white appliances.

 And around the corner you'll find...

The tiny half bathroom and mini triangle sink. Totally one of my favorite parts of this house.

 Then you turn the corner and it takes you to the stairs which leads you to this...

Yeah. Wow. We will be putting carpet over the vinyl flooring and painting all that knotty pine white. It should brighten things right up in there.

Bathroom on 2nd floor

The wall tile will be painted because let's be honest, it's kind of hideous. I like the floor tile though. :)

 Bedroom #1

 Bedroom #2

 Bedroom #3 - The master

 All of the doorknobs look like this! Another one of my favorite features.

 3rd floor bedroom aka "the guest room". Check out the hobbit windows!

 And it comes with a bathroom. And carpet. Yum.

 Awesome cat claw tub!

We were pretty excited as we were getting ready to leave. Just as we were leaving another couple was walking in to look at the place. Trey and I chatted about it and decided to start the paper work to put an offer on the house. We got it all finished by 5pm and decided we would send it over the next morning after we slept on it and talked some more to make sure that we for sure wanted to do it.
We went back to the place we were staying and all the anesthesia residents and their families put together a little get together for us, which was so so nice! We were telling everyone about this house and how we'd put the offer on it tomorrow and at about 9pm MaryLou called me and said "You are not going to believe this. Right after you left the office someone put an offer on the house." Whaaaaat? It was totally that couple that we passed as we were leaving! They must have worked fast. So basically we had a bidding war going on, which is not what we wanted at all. We were totally bummed and thought there was no way we could win. We both had a horrible nights sleep and were trying to decide what we were going to do. The next day we decided we loved the house enough that we wanted to fight for it so Trey talked to the guy handling our mortgage and they figured out what we could afford and so we offered that and with a little help from our realtor we ended up winning!!! Success! And that's how you find your perfect first house in 2 and a half days, Banbury style.

We are itching to get in there! 2 more weeks! And I'm itching to get my hands on that hideous basement. That will definitely be the first project. Then painting the bathroom tile and a bunch of furniture we got on craigslist.