« Mr. and Mrs. Edward David Engelking II | Main | Team Fortress ... It's A Classic »

June 29, 2006

Buying a house

Since Amanda and I are now married, we're moving forward with the next most obvious step: buying a house. For the almost 7 years that we've been together, we have lived many places in both Frankfort and Louisville. Most of these places have been apartments, but on two different occations we have lived in a house.

Now, I grew up living in a home most of my life. From the time that I was 7 or 8 years old till the time that I was 19 years old, I lived at my parents home in Frankfort. For a short period of time, I lived there by myself, responsible for the routine things that come with living at a house: yard work, minor maintenance, etc. I enjoyed doing these things and missed them after moving out. I've wanted to own my own home ever since.

For over 3 and a half years, Amanda and I have lived at the same place here in Louisville. While it's been nice living here, over these past few years, the management has changed 3 times and the quality of living here has gone downhill. We decided that after we were married that we would begin the process of purchasing a house of our own. After all, I make a pretty decent living in IT these days and in a years time Amanda will be finishing up with school in another year and begin bringing in a decent income of her own. It only makes sense to begin putting our money into something that we can get back should we ever decide to sell the home. Living here at the apartment, we're just throwing money away.

Let's put it this way: Amanda and I have been living here for 3 and a half years. That's 42 months. Our rent is roughly 600 per month. That's a total of $25,200 dollars that we have given someone else when we could've been putting that to a home of our own.

That's a LOT of money.

So, I've been looking around and have come up with what we think would be a reasonable amount of money to borrow so that we can purchase a house. Several weeks back, we went driving around different neighborhoods in the east end of Louisville to see exactly what certain amounts of cash would buy. We had an idea of what kind of house we want: 3 bedrooms, 2 or 2.5 baths, kitchen, dining area, etc. We found all kinds of homes in the surrounding area that fit this outline, and it allowed us to get an idea of what we should be looking to borrow to get exactly what we want.

After getting an idea of what we needed to borrow, I started doing some research on buying/building a brand new home instead of purchasing a home that has been around for many years and may need some fixing up. This eventually lead me to the Dominion Homes Web site where they have many different housing options available. The best part is that these houses are brand new, including all appliances and such, so that maintenance wouldn't be a problem immediately going in. We would be able to spend the first few years living at the home without putting a lot of money into it, which is a pretty big thing to me. After all, if we're going to be spending this much money, I would like to have something to show for it from the beginning.

Another important thing going into this is making sure that we purchase a home that fits our space requirements. The apartment that we're in now is pretty damn large. Over the past few years, we've aquired many new pieces of furnature, pictures, movies, computers, etc ... so that moving into something smaller just wouldn't be feasable for us. Because of this, I've been looking for something a bit larger than what we currently have. We're hoping for a place that will have at minumum 1300 square feet, but really want around 1500 to 1600if at all possible. With what I've found, there are quite a few options available to us at this point that will give us exactly what we're looking for.

Some other things that we're looking for are:

The other night, Amanda and I decided to take the next big step and begin the process for a pre-approval. Should everything go OK, we should be starting the process for buying a new home here in the near future.

Wish us luck.

~out...

Posted by ed at June 29, 2006 09:34 PM

Comments

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?