For the longest time I have wanted to write more about our venture into home ownership. Yet, for some reason, I keep putting it off. I think my hesitation stems from not knowing how to present my thoughts and experiences into a perfect little package. There’s so much to say, but I can’t get it all out for some reason. So today I’m just going for it and I’ll start at the beginning with the search for a home in a down market full of short sales. Did I mention that we were nearly homeless leading up to our wedding?

Here we are in the days before the wedding: young, in love and with no set place to live after the wedding.

So, let’s go back to late 2007 to early 2008. Matt and I were engaged and had a decent chunk o’ change burning a hole in our savings accounts. As you may remember from previous posts, we knew for a long time that we were saving up for our first place. Back then, the market had hit rock bottom — or so we thought. Ha! Boy, were we wrong. — and it seemed to be the perfect time to buy something we would not otherwise have been able to afford. With the help of a trusty Realtor friend, we went searching for the many houses that were now in our price range. There was a lot of inventory and the majority of them were short sales.

We spent months looking at homes online and in person. Having watched HGTV for nearly a decade, I considered myself to be ahead of the game. Yes, we wanted a fixer-upper and yes, we knew what that entailed … for the most part. Again, we were wrong. We looked at dozens and dozens of houses trying to see past the good (staged homes) and the bad (wood paneling) to find our future home, and the plethora of ugly. There were a lot of homes that showed signs of a bad economy: people stripping everything out of the home, including cabinet fronts and door knobs; half-finished flips; really weird additions that weren’t to code (entering a back room by crouching through a closet for example); makeshift French drains and the resulting crooked foundation beams; and even basketball-sized holes in floors. And these weren’t cheap homes! The price you pay to live in California…

Ever hear of the Winchester Mystery House? Yeah, that's what we started calling a lot of homes we were seeing. Bizarre additions galore! (Image source: Howstuffworks.com)

After months of searching, we finally found something in our price range that we liked. It was a short sale in a nice neighborhood that needed a lot of work, but we were excited about it. So we put in an offer above asking, since we heard someone else was interested. Who knows why they call it a short sale, because it was a looooong process. So long, in fact, that it took a few months for them to get back to us and tell us — about a week before our wedding — that our offer had been lost by the banks, so they took another (lower) offer. At this point, we were trying to figure out if we would have to ask a relative to take us in during the interim. Not good.

We went to Craigs List and quickly found a small, furnished in-law unit for rent (month to month) and found a place to live on the Friday before our Sunday wedding. We got married, went on our honeymoon and to my brother’s wedding three weeks later and then returned to our in-law unit rental ready to start the home hunt again. We were refreshed and refocused.

Here's part of our living room in our first apartment. Note the green. It wasn't really that bad, but that's about all I could take pictures of it was so tiny.

Again, note the green in our first apartment's kitchen.

About a month later our Realtor asked if we would consider a condo instead of a single family home. We hadn’t, mostly because we didn’t think a condo or townhome was good enough for us. We had saved money for a long time and we felt a condo was like a bike with training wheels.

The more we looked at other places, we saw an overwhelming amount of work and money needed in the houses. The condo not only had less upkeep, but it had a pool, much more space and was move-in ready. Soon, we put in an offer, signed a ton of paperwork and finally received the keys to our first place.

Matt and I smiling with the key to our first home!

Did I mention that we initially planned to sell within two years? Oh, how the joke is on us. The wild ride definitely didn’t end with getting those keys. The next year brought many a curve ball. Perhaps that’s where we’ll dive into next time.