home sweet home

This officially happened yesterday: home-ownership, round 2!!

We closed at 4:00pm and unfortunately by the time we made it to the new house, across town in rush hour traffic, it was too dark for some good pics. So these will have to suffice for now.

The new place is a HUD home, thus another foreclosure. This means the house will be another huge DIY project and we can't wait to get started! Unfortunately this also means that there currently is no running water in the house, which among more serious consequences, made it hard to celebrate last night. We managed to get by with some banh mi and champagne though.

Now, a quick background on the process as I'll share more info when I can get some better "before" pics this weekend. This house was a fairly long-time in the making (at least it seemed so to us). We started looking back in May, originally for another duplex. There was one right off the bat we regret letting slip through our fingers, but we had no idea the rest of the summer was going to have such a sparse market for duplexes in our price range that met our criteria. As months went by we were able to save up more money and thus increase our search range slightly, but we still decided to open it up to single family houses- thinking we would most likely continue to live in our apartment and rent out the single family house if we ended up going that route. 

We bid on 6 houses over the summer- some SF, some duplexes. When we first walked through this house, in September, we loved it. However, we learned it was a HUD home, which besides other hoops to jump through, it means we legally have to live in it for one year after closing. We could not rent it out immediately. We had toyed with the idea of moving into a single family and renting out our apartment, but we had, until this house, agreed it wasn't the most ideal situation, though still somewhat desirable. After some thinking, number crunching, and discussing, we decided that for us, at this time, moving into this SF house and renting our apartment was the way to go. The house was a great deal, we'll have a better quality of life not sharing a house with our tenants, and we will still be making some extra money each month once we get that other apartment rented out. And who knows what would be on the market 1,3, or 6 months from now? At the rate things were going over the summer, nothing we could afford in the duplex department was going to show up. And waiting 6 or more months for the "perfect" property (that would still require months of renovation and projects) did not seem to fit in with our large-picture plans. So we pulled the pin, and here we are! Now stay tuned: more info and pictures to come next week.

Have a great weekend everyone! You all know where I'll be and what I'll be doing :)