Gorgeous and I had a heck of a weekend. A couple of weeks ago, I made contact with a new home Realtor and we scheduled a viewing on Saturday after lunch. On the way to meet her, we passed a sign on the road advertising new townhomes that were well within our price range. We looked at each other and said that if she didn’t show us those, we were going there afterward on our own.
As it turned out, that was the FIRST place she was taking us. We looked at one model and did a little, “meh,” and asked if we could see the other floorplan. They said it was under construction, but that the drywall was up and we could do a walkthrough.
The Mrs. was immediately in love with the floorplan and gave it an 11 out of 10 on the ole “like it” scale. I gave it an 8, but was forced to reconsider after she gave it such a high score. Her reasons were solid, and I began to feel more comfortable with it.
We visited some villas, and they were terrible compared to the townhome, so we told our agent that we wanted to stop looking elsewhere and investigate the financing for the townhome Sunday. We took another walkthrough of the one under construction (our to-be-unit) and left pretty sure about everything but the kitchen and dining area, since it was very hard to picture with only drywall.
We made it up to the development around 11:00 Sunday and met with the lender to begin a good faith estimate while we went to look at a finished unit next door to our building and spent well over an hour pouring over every square inch of the identical downstairs. We loved it. Did I mention that it’s on a retention pond with a few dozen acres of conservation area beyond it that will not be built on because of the zoning? No? Ok, well, it is.
When we returned to the office, the lending agent basically told us we rock and said that if we were comfortable with our monthly payment, he was ready to do a full-blown application, which we did. We even haggled another 8% of closing costs out of the builder when the lender made a boo-boo on the estimate and kept our closing costs the same.
When the building is done at the end of May, we’ll have a walkthrough to point out everything we want fixed and hope to close on June 2nd. I’ll be posting photos along the way. Enjoy these for now. Some of the photos alternate between our unfinished unit and a completed unit in the adjacent building on the same pond with the same view. Also of note, we’re upgrading to stainless steel appliances.
There has been a sign at work for months that makes me laugh, no matter how mature I try to be. My witty side, ala Alan Alda, keeps busting out and I crack a grin every time I pass it.
