Monday, September 7, 2009

How it all began.......

I have always wanted to start a blog, but never really felt like I had anything really interesting to blog about. Well, that is until now! Adam and I are officially now homeowners! It has been a long road (and will be an even longer one head), but it was all worth it in the end. To get you up to speed as to where we are now, I should probably start from the beginning. We started looking for houses in May in the downtown Issaquah area with our awesome agents, Jamie Butler and Tamaira Devany from Tec Real Estate. We love living within walking distance of Front St., so we started looking around the downtown Issaquah area.

As most of you know, Adam is a very skilled contractor and while I was leaning toward something that was a little newer, he convinced me otherwise, which was for the best (or I keep on telling myself that it will be for the best when we are all done!). As we began our search nothing that we looked at seemed to fit, either it was way too much work for us to even move in to, too small and even too big or it was a little too far from where we really wanted to be. We definitely wanted a house and not condo, so that ruled out a number of properties. Also, a lot of the houses are on mountains in Issaquah so the backyards can be at a slant or pretty steep, we really wanted a flat property. Half way through our search we found out that we really didn't like split-levels either. There is something about having to make an immediate decision to either go up or down upon walking into a house that we didn't really like. I know this all sounds too picky, but at the time I didn't think we were that bad, but I guess only our realtors can truly attest to that!

Right when I told Adam that I thought we were never going to find anything we liked, we stumbled upon 490 Mt. Kenya Dr. The house had been on the market for about a month and I had seen the listing many times, but I wasn't really interested in it based on the pictures in the listing. (My advice to anyone looking for houses, go see them in person!) As soon we pulled up Adam said he thought he was going to like it. Well, he was right, but not only did he like it, he ended up loving it! I, on the other hand needed a little more convincing. Once he told me all the potential it had, I was sold as well. I figured all the work we were going to put into the house was going to be well worth it.

We decided to put in an offer for the house the following Monday. The house was a short sale, so while we knew we were getting a good deal, we also knew it was going to take a while since we were working with the bank and not the owner. As luck would have it, another offer came in on the same day after the house had zero activity up until then. I don't want to bore you with the details of month and a half process, so long story short, we got the house and a great deal at that! We bought the house for 40k less than it sold in 2005 and the appraisal came in at 35k above the sale price! We closed the house on the 19th of August and could not have done it without our friends at Guild Mortgage, especially Tonya and Charles.

That brings us to where we are now. We have now had the keys for almost 3 weeks and have had very little time to do anything. With Adam starting to coach football and the end of summer activities, we haven't been able to spend the time on the house that we need to. I don't know why, but we seem to always move right around the beginning of football season, which is the worst timing. Luckily, we are in our rental until the end of September, which gives us some time. Our plan is to paint most of the interior, fix up the laundry room and resurface the roof before we move in. Not sure how much we will get done, but we are now on a mission. There is a lot more work we would like to do, like remodel the kitchen, but that is all going to take time that we don't have right now. I am hoping to remodel towards the beginning of next year after football is over.

While Adam wasn't initially super excited about people being able to watch everything we do in this blog, he is becoming more accepting of my great idea to blog about this adventure. I think it is going to be a true testament of our labor and hard work on our first home. We are incredibly excited and scared out of our minds at the same time. I still can't believe we own a house. In fact, I think it took us a few weeks to realize that we actually do own a home now! We can't wait to make progress on the many projects we have planned and watch how everything turns out right before our eyes. We have already experienced some hurdles, more to come on that, but we look forward to making this our own home.

We are sadly saying good-bye to the old "crack den" we rented behind Las Mas. For those of you that have been to our place you know what I mean!
















But excited to introduce our new home, 490 Mt Kenya Dr.! For those of you who are familiar to Issaquah, the house is on Squak Moutain about a mile up from Front St. You just follow Sunset past the salmon hatchery up Squak Mountain.
















Excuse the mattress in the front of the house! Just one of the joys of buying a short sale! We also have a weight bench in the backyard if anyone is interested!









This is the back of the house. The top picture is our deck looking into our living room and the bottom one is the sliding glass doors off the master bedroom. As you can tell, we have a ton of landscaping to do next spring!

4 comments:

  1. Wow you guys ...great idea...I can't wait to see the transformation.

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  2. BTW ... I am JO....xoxox Sarah

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  3. Congrats you two - looking forward to watching your progress. HGTV Fan Connie (and Mo too)

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  4. I'm just checking this out now. I can't wait to see it all unwind!! It's going to be amazing, I'm sure. It sure looks like you've got a lot of great trees in your yard too!

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