After we returned from vacation, we began looking for a new house. We have been feeling increasingly cramped in our current house. We've lived here for 9 years and it is time to move to someplace better.
The last time we looked for a house, the internet was only just getting started. While we were able to view some house listings online, for the most part looking for a house required you to go look at lots of houses in person. Today, it is far different.
We looked a literally hundreds of houses online. While some realtors are still in the dark ages and have only minimal information online (such as one or two pictures, a paragraph description, some square footage numbers), many of the houses we looked at had a great deal of information online. Many realtors now put up lots of pictures and even complete floor plans on their site. We looked primarily at those houses where the most information was available online, particularly the floor plans.
There were a couple of realtors that require you to give all of details of your first born before they allow you to look at the listings on their site - these houses were eliminated.
In many cases we were able to just eliminate houses on the basis of their floor plans, so we never had to waste time even going to them and looking at them.
Once we had a group of promising houses from our online search, we then went driving around the neighborhoods we targeted, looking for what houses were available and what the general area was like. We had a pretty good idea of what parts of town we preferred to be in. Some areas of town are very nice but are awfully close to the malls - there's just a ton of traffic there. Then it turned out that some of the houses that looked good online had serious location problems - such as one fine house that turned out to have a major street (Koke Mill Road) right behind its backyard. Of course you can see that on a map online, but until you actually drive there you don't know what the geography is actually like.
Throughout the search, we kept coming back to one house that had a great floor plan. We then went to actually see the house and it was fantastic. Every other house we looked at online or went to see physically had some sort of major aspect that didn't make it suitable for us.
Last week we put in an offer on that one house and it was accepted.
Now we are starting the process of packing. We don't have a moving date yet (there are still details that have to happen, such as an inspection on the new house).
Obviously I'll blog more about the new house as we get closer to moving, but for now I'll just mention that it is located close to (but not directly on) Lake Springfield (the actual shoreline is a park in this area). We are increasing our square footage by nearly 50%. But primarily it is a better house rather than a bigger house.
It has a huge sunroom on the south side with two stories of windows. Even better, the house was built with 2x6 construction, making the exterior walls very thick. This means that all of the windows have very big windowsills. Cats will actually be able to sit in every window (our current house has no windowsills - we had to built cat ledges).
In addition to the house hunting and buying, I am getting a new version of Pretty Good Solitaire ready for release soon. All of this meant that I was unable to go to the SIC this year.
Congratulations on the new house. You've got some very good points for house shoppers, and realtors here.
Posted by: Marie | July 15, 2006 at 08:35 PM