Things I Didn’t Expect About Buying Our First House

I didn’t really know anything at all about buying a house when we jumped into it. Sure I had a general idea about how things would go, but that’s pretty much it.

Things just get kinda crazy when you don’t know what to expect. For somebody who doesn’t deal well with change, this just made things more difficult for me.

Also, the fact that we were moving to a new city (a tiny little town really) made things a bit more complicated. Running out to the house wasn’t so simple, since it was an hour of driving round-trip.

The Loan

I’m not sure if it was just our lender being unorganized (or mean) or if things normally go this way. But he would ask us for 1 or 2 things via email every few days. Each time I asked him if there was anything else he would need so that I could send it now or start locating it, he said, “No, that’s all I need for now. I’ll let you know if we need anything else.”

Really? Do you know how annoying that was? The fact that we were using a USDA Guaranteed Loan was already going to make it take longer than a traditional loan, and the lender just kept dragging things out. You would think they would want to hurry up and get their money. So we had to keep extending our contract with the seller. Thankfully, the seller was really laid back and didn’t fuss about it.

Finally, when the lender was done twiddling his thumbs, the loan got sent off to the USDA for their approval. This can take up to 45 days sometimes depending on their turn times. So we had no idea if or when we would actually be getting our house. Which is another thing I don’t deal well with…uncertainty. It was all I could focus on, my mind was a blundering mess trying to concentrate on anything else.

Move-In-Ready My Ass

The house we saw when we put in an offer on it and the house we saw a couple of days before closing, were 2 different houses. It appears that once the seller accepted our offer, he abandoned the house and wiped it from his memory.

The cute little potted tree that I requested in the offer was still there when we bought the house, but it was long dead. He didn’t water it and the sun just sucked the life out of that poor little thing. :-(

The toilets were corroded inside with some strange substance that was most likely Wookie fur mixed with Orc flesh. It was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.

Ants, ants and more ants. They weren’t even paying rent, shame on them. We set off 6 heavy duty bug foggers the first night before leaving after we got the house. Then sprayed gallons of that bug barrier stuff the next day. Then we still had to set off even more bug foggers the next evening and spray again the following day. Yuck. I hate bugs.

Lots of little stuff all over the place was either not done, or was done completely wrong and my honey had to fix it. Thank goodness I married myself a very handy guy, I couldn’t imagine having to pay somebody to fix everything.

Painting SUCKS!

One of the things I wanted to do before moving our stuff into the house was to get the painting done. I’ve never really lived in a real house before and I love color. It made sense to do it first because there wouldn’t be any obstructions and we wouldn’t have to move or cover stuff.

Painting is hard work. HGTV makes it look so easy and quick, but it’s not. Painting takes so much time and work, it’s just not worth it until it’s all done and the paint is put away.

You have to tape stuff off, cover outlets and fixtures and keep the floor protected. Oh my, I was exhausted just from getting it ready to paint.

Of course I had to make things even more difficult…I wanted to paint the ceilings too. So we had to get those painted first. Also, I couldn’t stand the weird grayish beige trim and doors, no sir—so those needed to be painted too.

So much painting and then touching up because I didn’t want to do a second coat on the walls, even though all the touching up pretty much equaled a second coat. It took around 5 days for me to get only 2 rooms done.

The funny (but not at the time) thing is that if I wouldn’t have been too cheap to get the larger air compressor, I could have used our paint sprayer and done it all in a few hours. Plus I would have been able to get all the other painting (that I still haven’t done) done as well.

Did I mention that I ruined 90% of all my clothing? Yep, that’s right I’m a dumbass. I figured that since the paint washed off my skin, that it would also wash out of my clothes. That was just stupid. We were so busy every day and I just kept putting on clean clothes every morning that would just end up getting destroyed. I’m not really planning on replacing them for a while, so I’m walking around with paint stained clothes. On the bright-side at least I’ve got a ton of painting clothes now.

•••••••

This post is getting way too long, I’m going to have to do a part 2 since there’s still so much I haven’t shared.

What kind of things were not expecting when buying your house?

About Jen Perkins

Likes: saving money, being debt free (aside from our house), zombies, travel, getting money, blogging and dogs. Dislikes: debt, being broke, bunnies, wasting money, not having enough money to travel the world and paying interest. Facebook  ♥  Twitter  ♥  Google+  ♥  RSS

Comments

Things I Didn’t Expect About Buying Our First House — 12 Comments

  1. I actually don’t mind painting, but it’s because I’ve done it so many times that I am used to it, and I’ve also learned to set expectations. The truth is that there are three phases of painting: Prep, Painting, Putting Back Together, and each of the phases is roughly as difficult and time consuming as the others. Yeah, on HGTV they always show an empty room that’s all ready to go but that’s not the case most of the time, as you likely found out. Still, it sounds like you got to paint before you moved in, which is much better than having to paint around furniture!
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  2. I like how those TV shows make it look so easy. First thing you know they are wearing nice cardigans, opening up paint cans. 20 seconds later they put them down “All done, isn’t that beautiful!” and the walls are all painted. Of course they are nice and clean and didn’t sweat at all. Everyone is happy and gives each other a high five. I wish real painting worked that way! I too dread painting – feeling your pain!
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  3. It’s not just you!

    We are getting a traditional loan and let me tell you—I have never worked with such incompetent people in my life. In fact, I would have been fired from my job a long time ago. Our closing date was 11/7 and here we are, 11/25, with NO idea when our closing date is going to be. There have been nothing but problems the entire way and the lender has been doing the same things to us.

    I’m not looking forward to painting either…
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