Since we've moved down to the Minneapolis area, we have been looking at houses. We are currently renting a house that we could buy if we wanted to and might. If the offer is right, we will buy the place we are in but I highly doubt it will be. We are currently living in a four bedroom, 1 bathroom tri-level house on 5 acres. It has a heated, commercial shop on the property and beautiful landscaping. This is my husband's dream house because the property is perfect. However, the house is just not what I want. It's a little too small and not the layout that I would prefer, has only 1 bathroom and needs a lot of updating. The guy we are renting from plans on re-entering it into the market if we don't buy it and move out but first he's going to let us have first chance at it. He is eager to sell it because he currently lives in Texas and with the house being in Minnesota, it's hard to upkeep it. The last offer we rec'd was he'd get it appraised, take $15k off the appraisal, give us $10k cash to do what we want with and he'd throw in everything that he left in the shop including some children's toys, a trampoline with enclosure, a garden tiller and a Polaris ATV. Nice, if it was what we (meaning I wanted). We'll see what happens but since it's on 5 acres and knowing what it was listed for in the past, I think it's going to be way more than we want to spend.
Anyway, we have now looked at over 40 houses. Yep, 40. This is crazy to me since the very first house we bought in Lapeer, Michigan was the first house we looked at. The second house we bought in Badger, Minnesota, we pretty much bought over the internet. I thought with the foreclosure crisis going on right now it would be so easy to find a house we want in our price range but I am sadly mistaken. Trevor wants land and I want to be in a neighborhood or subdivision. We have finally figured out exactly what we are looking for after looking at all of these houses so that's a good thing, it's just finally finding it before we get ditched by our realitor. Face it, he has to be losing money on us if we don't find something shortly.
We have learned that we are looking for a 4 bedroom (or 3 big bedrooms with potential for a 4th), 2 bathroom home on at least 1 acre in a neighborhood. We also need to have a room for toys and we absolutely do not want a split level house. It can be multi leveled but not the bi-level split which Minnesota builders seem to be so fond of building. I don't get it, what is so appealing about that style house? No offense if that's what you have, I just don't understand it. In most of them you walk into the front door and you go up or you go down. Plus, there is no room for more than two people to be in that front entry space and then you can't find one big enough to have all of the bedrooms or at least three of them on the same level.
While looking at houses, I have found it amazing how some realitors will downright lie to get you into the house. There was one that was an older custom built home that had potential from the outside and it listed that it had "the most gorgeous kitchen ever" so I was excited. I walked into the front door and that's all I needed - yeah it had the most gorgeous kitchen ever, back in 1977 maybe. OMG it was awful. The rest of the house was worse, you wonder what people are thinking when they design the layout of their house and how some layouts could possibly work for a family.
I don't think we are being unreasonable here, this is the house that we plan on being in for a long time (god I hope, I am so tired of moving and so are the kids) so we want to get what we want for a decent price.
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