The Pandemic has brought us all some unexpected times and life changes. We have a big life change to share… We bought a house during the Pandemic!
the Background
As you may or may not know, Taylor and I got married in October 2016. We have since lived with roommates for all but a couple months of our married life. Fortunately, we have enjoyed everyone we have lived with and have made so many great memories with our friends and family in our shared spaces.
Talk of buying our own home came up at least once a year between Taylor and I, but being located outside of the Seattle area the housing prices are just so expensive! For the past 4 years we have been renting and trying to save up for our first home.
Saving while renting is hard though! We have been renting houses because: the cost per square foot of space has been more effective, we have a dog (Mocha), and we’ve needed the extra space for a roommate. Over the last 4 years we quickly realized that we were paying more to rent a home each month than we would pay as a mortgage for our own home!
That was hard to embrace. We grew increasingly impatient each year when we signed another rental agreement.
One commonly asked question we faced after we got married was: “Don’t you want some space to yourselves?” Yes, of course we did. Living with roommates wasn’t so bad though- we always had company and it helped us save money.
Every month we put aside our roommate’s portion of the rent into savings so we could one day afford to purchase our first home.
The problem was, we had no idea how much money we would even need to buy a house!
We reached out to a friend who was an active real estate agent to get some information. Where do we start? Should we pay down debt or keep liquid capital? How long does it take to buy a home? All questions that our agent answered for us.
Simply put, it varies.
Our agent helped us evaluate our finances, what we could afford, and established a timeline to get us going. We needed to start looking for houses right away since we had 2 months left on our rental!
The House hunt
Taylor and I spent hours browsing the internet looking at home listings! After a few days of looking we found a house that we really liked. Our agent warned us not to get too attached from the photos and scheduled us a tour that weekend.
Home tours during the Pandemic were a little strange. First, you have to drive separately from your agent. The worst part was only 2 people were allowed to enter the house at a single time. This meant that Taylor and I could not tour the houses together. We would enter with the agent for individual tours for a maximum of 15 minutes. Shoe coverings and masks were required at all times too. Before entering the house we had to sanitize our hands, and throughout the tour mostly keep to ourselves.
Despite walking through the house separately we both came to the same conclusion… We loved it and decided immediately to put in an offer!
In order to be competitive our agent assisted us in placing an offer above asking. Not soon after did he get a call from the selling agent that the home had multiple offers above asking. If we were serious we would need to submit another higher offer. We did.
The house sold that weekend, but we were not the lucky buyers.
This was really hard news for us. We could see ourselves living in that house! The search continued as we scheduled a few more showings and expanded our search area.
This is where it gets funny
Taylor and I found 4 homes that we both liked enough to go see. Our agent arranged for all fours tours within one day. A fifth tour was added to the agenda by Taylor’s request simply because he liked the street name.
Tour #1 got cancelled because the buyers already accepted an offer. This was our least favorite out of our 4 picks so we weren’t that upset.
Tour #2 we cancelled because we did a drive-by and absolutely hated the area and the driveway.
Tour #3 was the worst! When our agent warned us about listing pictures versus reality it was because of homes like this. It smelled awful, felt way smaller that the photos made it appear, and had an unusual layout. NEXT!
Tour #4 was out at the edge of town and would double Taylor’s commute to work. All-in-all the house wasn’t terrible, but we didn’t see ourselves living there like we had with our first tour.
The weekend was starting to feel like a total bust. House number five was still on the list but I did not have high hopes for it.
Tour #5 was a little later in the afternoon and much farther out of town. This time my commute to work would be doubled. Taylor was extremely excited and started joking about the street name.
When we arrived to the showing it appeared that the tour before us was still in progress so we had to wait. Our agent wasn’t able to secure two 15 minute showings to walk us each through, so we had to split our 15 minutes to be compliant to COVID regulations. Taylor walked through first, then I followed. My first reaction when I stepped inside: “WOW!”
During my tour the next appointment arrived. This house seemed popular!
As soon as I exited the house Taylor and I agreed this was it, we wanted this house!
This house had some of the things we wanted, and some of the things we thought we didn’t want Yet it felt perfect for us. We made an offer above asking becuase we were very serious!
I didn’t even want to go see this house because of how far away it was and because of the street name. Taylor’s commute wasn’t affected by the location and really wanted us to go see it just because he thought it would be humerous. Little did we know we would love it!
I was honestly really nervous that we would be outbid on this house. Our first experience was really disappointing, and this house seemed to be more popular. To our surprise we were the only offer!
We bought our first house!
Everything after our offer was accepted went by so quickly and so slowly at the same time. The natural progression of home buying was not affected by the pandemic in most cases. We couldn’t be present for our home inspection, so our agent took care of this for us and offered to FaceTime. All financing was taken care of through online portals and file uploads which was so easy to do.
The previous owners took care of practicly everything we asked for from our inspection. Our house was move in ready after we signed the papers!
The Now
Owning our house is amazing! We have already dreamed up a few projects to work on together to make this space our own.
So far we have tackled re-doing the master bedroom walk-in closet. I shared this whole process on my Instagram! If you would like to see the before and after check out my “home updates” highlight.
More home projects to come, and lots of home decor too!
Thank you for following along!
