Hunt for our Home - Part 2

We have closed on both houses so I finally feel like I can share the rest of our story on how we found our house!


House #2

Still upset from the emotional rollercoaster of House #1, we continued to look at houses. We looked at a couple that week but decided we needed to wait until the weekend to look at more since both Mike and I had been leaving work to look at houses and deal with our own house stuff quite a bit lately.

That Saturday (two weeks after we accepted the offer on our house) we had scheduled time to look at about 9 houses with our realtor (we actually saw 8 houses after deciding to go to one because the neighborhood was too far south). We really wanted to find our house that day but I didn't know if we'd have the same luck and find a house that we both agreed on and be ready to make an offer as quick as we did last time.

The very first house we looked at we loved! It was the house to beat that day. The front of the house and back of the house are beautiful! It's in an older neighborhood so the trees are mature and picturesque. The inside of the house had a great layout and the kitchen was the most updated we had seen. The negatives to the house were that it did not have a second living area and there is only one way in and out of this neighborhood. The house is on a court off of a busy street and you have to turn left on this street with no light and no center turning lane to go anywhere else (including grocery store, work, etc.). Also, to walk Lil' Wasaff, I'd have to walk on the busy street (there is a side walk) to get to another street in order to walk through quieter neighborhoods. I plan to take lots of walks with the baby so I didn't like that I'd have to be on this busy street at all just to get to another walkable street.

However, each time we looked at a house we'd compare it and rank it with this one. The first house was in the lead until we saw the 7th house.

The 7th house was also on a court (or a Cove specifically). It was pretty from the outside but really stood out once we were inside. It has four bedrooms with a gameroom and an office (plenty of room to grown into!) Hardwood floors and a really great backyard. The back porch has a cover with ceiling fans - great for dining outside. A grassy area for Samson. And this house is in the neighborhood we really like (actually quite close to House #1). This house seriously became a contender.

We looked at one more house that day that had a great view but that's about all it had. And then we knew we had to make a decision between the 1st house we saw that day and the 7th. After making our list of pros and cons, we decided to go with 7th house, with the first being our back-up (just in case we needed one...). We made an offer that weekend which they accepted and then had the inspection scheduled for Thursday.

We had already seen a pre-inspection report on the house and it already looked MUCH better than House #1. When we met with the inspector he said the house looked pretty good except for one thing. He took us outside and showed us this:

Leaning chimney

Can you tell from the picture that the chimney is leaning??? So all is great with the house except for the fact that the chimeny could collapse into the house (master bedroom specifically) at any given moment! The inspector recommended getting an expert to come take a look. There are some folks at Mike's company that happen to do this sort of thing so we had his co-worker (a wonderful employee perk!) come out and take a look for us. He said that the chimney was built onto the house incorrectly and needed to be taken down and rebuilt. Side note to all of this, we had received an email from the owners the morning of the inspection telling us that recently while they were repairing the roof they were going to have to replace the siding on the chimney. Turns out when they took the siding down off of the chimeny they discovered the chimney was actually brick. I think they were excited to let us know about this fact but I don't think they realized at the time that they had actually uncovered a leaning incorrectly built chimney.

We now have more decisions to make - do we have a general contractor come out and look at the chimney to give us an estimate? Would the sellers even entertain the notion of paying for this? If not, would we still want the house? Or do we withdraw our offer on this house and just go with our back-up?