Busy, Busy Bees!

This week's discovery: buying a house is not for the faint of heart!!

Last week turned out to be an incredibly busy week. Partly because house hunting is new to us, and partly because work and outside activities kept us on our toes all week.

On the housing front, we currently possess in our hot little hands, a mortgage pre-approval from Bank of America. YAY! We looked around at different lenders and thought about going through our credit union, but were surprised to find out that we could actually get a much better deal through BofA. Fine with us. When we walked through the approval process with our representative, Kim, both Kevin and I were a bit nervous, but everything went through just fine. An amusing anecdote: in obtaining our information, Kim said she had to run something called a 'debt merge' on her computer. The process seemed to take forever, which made us a bit apprehensive - until Kim finally laughed and said, 'my manager says to tell you both congratulations! You have no debt!' Interest rates are amazingly low at the moment, but we won't be locking in a rate until we actually offer on a house and begin the process.

Another interesting thing is that we've already changed realtors! The first realtor we chose was recommended by my friend, Linda. She'd helped her daughter and her husband purchase a house this past summer and Linda said she was really good. We talked to her on Tuesday, but she said that she was really busy and would be out of town for the weekend, so the earliest we could meet with her would be this upcoming Wednesday. Hmmmm ... that seemed like an awfully long time to us - especially if a listing came on the market that we were interesting in seeing. Well, that's exactly what happened. She said we had plenty of time and could wait until this week when she could show us the house. We disagreed. Both Kevin and I feel that if something good comes on the market in our price range, we want to jump on it. So ... we found a new realtor. This time a recommendation from my friend Michael. He said she was great! She helped Michael and his wife Amy buy a house a few years ago and, though she was busy, Michael said she made them feel like they were her only client. We thought we'd give her a try. We asked to see a house that just came on the market on Friday; by Saturday afternoon, Kathleen had made an appointment for us to see the house that day!

Unfortunately, the house wasn't what we were looking for, so the search continues. I won't go in to the interesting mix of folks there to look at the house, but suffice it to say that this initial round of house hunting opened our eyes a bit to who - and what - lies ahead. However, I will say that it's nice to know that we have someone who is as excited about finding a house for us as we are!