And So It Begins....

Last night Blake and I went to his Uncle’s house to start looking for houses. Luckily for us his Uncle is an appraiser and also has his realtor’s license, so we are thrilled to have his help!

After a great dinner and some chitchat we sat down at the computer. At first, we were content to look at houses in a radius of the East Lansing area, since that’s where Blake’s work is. Even just a 10 mile radius gave us a listing of over 500 houses for sale. Sweet. So after a quick discussion we eliminated a few areas where we would prefer not to buy - Lansing mainly - and narrowed it down by school district. Granted, it will hopefully be at least 7 years before we have to worry about schools so it’s not a deciding factor, but at least it’s easier to narrow down the areas that we’re interested in.

After narrowing it down we had about 180 homes to look at and narrowed it down even further by using the “garage” criteria - If it doesn’t have a garage, we aren’t interested. Yeah, yeah, it’s probably not the best thing to use to help us narrow the search, but we’re really really really tired of scraping snow and ice in the winter. That gave us a pool of about 130 houses which we felt we could handle.

When looking at house info we checked off houses we might be interested in based on… well, anything. Square footage made us pass up some houses. Others didn’t show well on camera - especially kitchens - and were eliminated. Some were even too far away from Blake’s work and he wasn’t willing to drive that far. After a while we had a list of 80 and we decided that we would go from there.

So now begins the laborious process of sorting through the listings that we have and deciding what we’re still interested in. Then we group by location and go see some houses! We’re really in no rush but it would be nice to be eligible for that tax credit - though there have been rumors of it being extended too, so I guess we’ll see. I’m planning on taking a notebook and camera with me to keep track of everything that we look at, so updates will be posted as time allows. Hopefully we’ll find at least one that we like!!