Well after a few counteroffers back n forth we got word yesterday that they took our latest one!! They are looking at a quick close – possibly July 1st and at latest July 14th so we are mucho excited!!
House Shopping fun or not…
Friday:
We started our shopping for houses with our real estate agent on Friday. We focused on Beaverton/Aloha/Hillsboro that day and in one word..disappointing. Needless to say we won’t be living in any of those areas. They seem to think that dividing someones lot up into 3 houses scrunched all together with a small driveway / alleyway to get to them is the way to build. There is nothing family like about that type of living. I didn’t like those areas in the first place but we wanted to give it a try because it’d be easier on Patrick’s commute.
Saturday:
Quick trip to Newberg to look at the area where we built our house that we gave up and see what else is for sale in the area. I found a few houses on MLS for that area and wanted to see where they were also. They are all in the same neighborhood the house was built in. Anyhow, the neighborhood we built the house in has our exact house built available for sale in a few lots – the LOWEST price to get back into it is $360,000. They had 2 other houses but not the floor plans we like up for sale in the $330-340 range. There was another builder that had some houses available for sale in the $320-340′s but we had no idea what their floor plans were as we just saw some pictures on the MLS listing. We decided we’d have to take Margaret (real estate agent) out there to check them out this week or something.
Sunday:
With Sam in tow (friend of ours) we decided to go off to Lafayette to look at houses but first we drove him through the neighborhood the house we had built was and he loved the area. While there we lucked out and the houses we saw on MLS were having open houses so we decided to check them out. They were pretty nice with some good options but I was disappointed with the kitchen / nook and lack of formal dining room. They have them price cut by $20k atm and Patrick and I love the neighborhood though so it really put them high on our list dispite the downfalls.
We then headed off to our real destination and drove out to Lafayette where we fell in love with some houses months ago. I had posted pics here at one point of them and anyhow they have a community pool / fitness/business center there also. The thing is, we looked at them in March and they had just started their first phase of building. They had a house we loved for sale, the Oswego – 2880 sf. 3 car garage, corner lot, beautiful house with tons of upgrades and sold for $331k.
Now fast forward to last week when my family was in town. We took them out there to show them the houses and the prices had gone up but they had a few decent plans available to view but not the one plan we liked the most. That brings us to yesterday. They had in a weeks time, upped the prices by $6-8k (depending on house) and the house we thought was ok was sold/contigency. We look at 2 other houses that are good amount of square feet and plans we thought could work. They both had good points but both had definite bad points.
Our last stop was driving around McMinnville to see if the houses I saw being built there were nice but after wandering around the different parts of town they are building in, stumbling into all sorts of new custom homes, we couldn’t find the builder I had looked at online so we gave up for the time being and drove home. I did find the builders location this morning and Sam offered to come run amuck out there tomorrow with me so I guess i’ll check them out then.
Wants in a house:
Min. 3bedroom + den/office or just a 4bedroom (bedroom for kiddo, guest room, our room and office for Patrick)
Formal Dining room – The nooks aren’t big enough for my china cabinet and dining room table (we bought them thanks to Patrick’s parents for our NV house) and we like to have family over like the Thanksgiving in NV where we had his family and my family for the big ol’ dinner. I was more then thankful to have the space then and can’t imagine entertaining w/o it.
Seperate Shower & Tub in Master
Stainless appliances – prefer gas also (we had the GE Profile Stainless ones in our NV house so we have a Stainless fridge already..would like to have it match & I think Stainless looks nice)
Prefer laundry room upstairs
Basically, I don’t want to go backwards from what we had in Nevada. We want a little bigger house then NV (that one is about 1700sf) because we have guppyman and want a backyard for him and our Neeva girl. I wanted to at least have the same options we had down there also.
Newberg is the closest for Patrick to drive but the floorplans are lacking imo but they had some nice upgraded touches in them. Lafayette is a bit further out, has great corner lots on the 2 houses we were eyeing and nice touches but still lacking in part of their floorplans. It’s like I want the bottom level of one house put with the top level of the other ROFL. The thing is – we had such an awesome floor plan on the house we had to back out on and with really great upgrades. Now we can’t get into a house like that really in our current price range due to all the pricing increases and interest rate increases. Lastly, there’s McMinnville, which I haven’t seen the houses yet but online as floorplans. The pricing there is exceptional from what I can tell online for the square feet and it’s a nice town / neighborhood etc. It just isn’t a short drive AT ALL for Patrick and if I were to go back to work, it could be quite the drive to wherever I end up.
Speaking of jobs – I found a job @ Nike that i’m applying to. Who knows if i’ll get a callback on it to interview. I have enough qualifications for the job and definitely love sports so we’ll see. The Nike Headquarters is in Beaverton and their campus is amazing. They have a daycare onsite, cafe’s, cafeteria, fitness center & employee store for all your Nike goods.
Well back to oggling over houses!
