First Time Home Buyers

We did it! We bought a house! Okay technically it’s a townhouse, but compared to our old townhouse we were just renting, this is a House! The old place was more like a vertical apartment, which was good, but this townhouse house is much better! It has so much more room and allows for growth.

You see, we first started talking about upgrading to a bigger place last summer when Zach’s sister got her dog, a corgi, which is Zach’s dream dog. She plans to breed them, and we plan to get one of her puppies, problem is our apartment complex doesn’t allow pets. Our lease was up in October but we decided to renew for six months so we could move into a new place in the spring verses hurrying to find something in the fall or waiting another year. We made it our New Year’s Resolution to buy a house before our lease expired in April.

The process we knew would be a lot because of a Home Buyers Seminar we attended about a year prior hosted by Anna Sengsouvanna at Cyprus Credit Union. When we felt ready for this next step we contacted Anna and began the process by first applying to be approved for a mortgage loan. That was first week of January. After being pre-approved she referred a couple realtors and that is how we met Zac Williams of Ideal Utah Homes.

Zac was fantastic to work with! We highly recommend him. He is very good at what he does, and communicates clearly with his clients and is up front about everything. He prepared us for the rollercoaster the whole home buying process can be and was there each step of the way. It was so nice to have a realtor we could trust!

About the middle of January we began going to house showings, which was pretty fun. It was fun seeing different options and taking note of what we liked and what we didn’t like. The funniest moment is when we were at a newly built complex that didn’t have blinds or any sort of covering for the windows. The townhomes were close together and we could totally see into other’s homes. I told husband Zach he won’t be able to walk around naked, but realtor Zac thought at first, for a brief moment, I was talking to him! He said so and said his first though was he didn’t know we had gotten that close to make those sort of jokes. Hahaha. So funny. We had some good times.

Well, the home buying process is fast! When you find something you like, you gotta jump on it. A few of our favorites were getting snatched up quick! In my mind I was going through our options, and there was one that just keep jumping to the front of my mind of somewhere I could really see us living, and so we put an offer on it. (Spoiler Alert: It’s the one we ended up getting.)

I admit it was little intense waiting and then negotiating, coming to an agreement, with the sellers and their agent. One thing we were informed that first night was that the sellers were not completely ready to move. They were waiting for their new home to be built so they needed an extra month. It was proposed we do a Rent Back (also known as a Lease Back) which is that they sellers would rent from us after we closed for a month. That plan actually worked well for us as our current lease was up in April. So that is what we did.

February we worked on getting our Home Inspection and Appraisal task completed. The Home Inspection was done by a referral from Zac, Luckie Bogenschutz of Top Notch Home Inspections. He did a great job thoroughly inspecting the place, pointing out the littlest things. Everything passed and we were good to go. The Appraisal was bit more complicated. It ended up coming in low. Both realtors, ours and the seller’s, decided to challenge the appraisal by presenting their CMAs (Comparable Market Analysis) they ran previously. The appraiser (who we never met, so I don’t know his name) decided to stick to his original amount and we had to re-negotiate. It was nerve racking. We had the potential of losing the place before it was even ours. That part wasn’t fun, the waiting and worrying. Thankfully it all worked out.

We closed and signed on Tuesday February 25, 2020 at Meridian Title Company.

I remember telling Anna that February felt like a really long month and I had a feeling March was going to feel even longer. I had no idea how true that would be. Not only were we waiting for the Rent Back process to be finished, the global pandemic COVID-19 entered the United States and caused all kinds of mayhem. March was a crazy month to say the least. 

At the end of March we received our keys and we moved into our new place last Saturday April 4^th, 2020. Overall it went really well. Zach and I are blessed with an amazing family. We had all our brothers come help. My favorite memory of the day is when I was with my three brothers we were took a small break to play with a Frisbee, passing it back and forth. Chris made the comment it was the perfect social distancing activity. Haha. 

It’s been a week now in our new place and we are loving it. I love having a kitchen table to eat dinner at, a beautiful view of the mountains from the balcony, and much more. In summary I love and am grateful to have a place to call ours, to call HOME.