Adventures in house hunting: part two

Picking up where we left off in part one, things had to get a little worse before they could get better. Putting the offer in on the first house made me only up the search even more, but we had a problem on our hands - there was just no where even close to being desirable on the market, and even those dud places were being snapped up within a few days of being up for sale. We went to several home opens in one week and there were issues with all of them, from second bedrooms being no bigger than a closet in size to half-renovated units that would need a ton of work to get them up to scratch. But they all seemed to sell straight away.

We waited a couple more weeks, with me obsessively checking realestate.com.au every 10 minutes to see if anything new had been listed. Eventually I decided we would just have to go and see the bad properties because maybe we were being too picky and the things we wanted just weren't in our price range? Maybe the first property we found and loved was a fluke and there were no more out there like it? Perhaps those duds were the best we were going to get?

So we set out on a Saturday morning to view three potential places and all were just as bad as they looked online. By that point all my usual positivity had run out and I was talking about starting to look in far out properties or going back to a rental. I was ready to give up! But there was one last place on the agenda that was on the way home, which was the only reason we decided to head to the home open. It had been on the market for a couple of weeks (the equivalent of a lifetime in the current market) with no offers and the photos online were worse than all the others. 

The moment we walked through the door, I know I had been wrong in my assumptions about this place. The pictures made it look boxy and uncomfortable, but in reality there were high vaulted ceilings that gave a feeling of space plus a large window facing north, giving the natural light I so wanted. The floor plan flowed and made sense, once again adding to that spacious vibe. But it was when I walked out the back that I was sold - there were no photos of an outside area online, however, there was a large backyard far bigger than those we had seen in previous villas and I immediately started to dream about all the possibilities for this untapped area.

The downside was that the kitchen was practically unusable it was so bad, and the bathrooms also needed some updating. But we instead saw this as an opportunity to make the house our own. Rather than putting up with a new but ugly kitchen like so many of the other properties we had seen, we would have no qualms ripping out the seventies benches and appliances and replacing them with exactly what we wanted. And the great thing was that we could afford to make these changes straight away as the house was already bargain priced and with no other offers on the table, we had room to negotiate. Don't even get me started on the location either, because how can you go wrong being 10 minutes from the city and only five from three major coffee strips?

After we put the offer in I was the opposite of how I was at that point with the first place we saw. I was cool, calm and collected - perhaps I knew that we had this one in the bag? The agent came back the next morning and gave us a counter offer and we accepted it on the spot. It was well within our budget, in fact we expected to spend far more when we first started our search, and everything felt just right.

Fast track to a month later and we will have settled within two weeks. Everything was smooth-sailing finance wise, the only hard part has been waiting to get in so we can start on our renovations. I'm a big believer in "everything happens for a reason" and this was so true in our house hunting process. I'm much happier with the place we ended up buying compared to the first we put an offer on, and the money we saved is just an extra sweetener thrown in.