i know the video is sideways. i was taking photos and decided to just switch to video mode on my camera and totally forgot i should re-orient the camera. i am a moron, but i was excited at the time and it does honestly look better in a vertical format. OBEY MY WHIMS!

so steven was bringing home the HOMES magazines and i would look through them in a wistful way a homeless person would look at a discarded french restaurant menu. all dreamy and wondering what it would be like. i came across some pages of homes that had stamped across them FORECLOSURE and would instantly feel bad about whomever it was who might of lost their home due to a series of unfortunate events. then i would look at the prices and twitch. i started browsing realtor sites for the area and sighing heavily. 

eventually i noticed how the cheaper houses were kind of run down or way more rural than we currently were living. we didn’t mind either. a little hard work and lots of quiet sounded quite nice to me. eventually i came to a page in a magazine that literally shocked me  to the point i had to get up, go to the computer and look on the realtor site to see if it’s true and the site was far from well designed. i click link after link, no longer knowing who’s site i’m actually on anymore because there is contrasting email addresses. i read up on the house and get excited and send an email to one of the provided links. i wait till steven comes home and i show him what i’ve found. he strokes his chin scruff and says that maybe i should email and ask about it. i just look up at him with a big grin on my face “i already did!”

i get so anxious the next day i call up the office number on the site and they tell me the address. christopher and i go and look around the outside while steven is at work. it’s not in the best of shape, but it’s not a total dump. it just looks like a lot of hope to  me, where people see problems, i see excitement over fixing them and making it look a million times better. i always feel guilty changing things that already look really nice, so i had nothing but hope and excitement. 

we stop by and tell steven what we saw and what we thought. he told me to arrange for a viewing. i get nervous, so i go and do some research on buying a house and what to expect and what to do (i’m usually research a whore. i love to research stuff, but i HATE writing papers. one major reason i’m not all that worried about ever going back to college). i call up one of my friends from high school that is a realtor, but due to the economy and the housing situation, she had to give it up and go into banking. i ask her to be my buyer’s agent,  that way i have somebody i can trust representing me, and somebody i know will get some cash out of me getting a house. 

if you don’t know the difference between a buyer’s agent and a seller’s agent, let me try to make it simple: a buyer’s agent works FOR YOU and has YOUR interests at heart. a seller’s agent works for the HOME OWNER and has THEIR interest at heart. obviously a buyer’s agent will do more than just show you one house, they will actually help you look for other houses that meet your criteria, get permission from the seller’s agent and show you the homes, get all the info you want, and gives helpful advice on getting loans. it’s a pretty sweet deal. i don’t understand why more people know about them than seller’s agents. the sad part is they don’t get the whole commission if the house sells, they get part of it, the other part goes to the seller’s agent. well, sometimes that is. for more info, start by looking [here] and then be on your merry way to research.

so i talked to my friend and she says she will not be able to show us the house because it is during her regular work hours and what to not say since it would be the seller agent showing us the place and anything you say AT ALL can be told to the seller by law. we kept our mouths clamped but when we showed up, to our surprise it was another buyer’s agent. very cute girl with the kind of perkiness that doesn’t annoy the crap out of me. she showed us around and asked how i got her email address. again, that site was so confuzzled. it said to contact the selling agent, but had a link to this buyer’s agent and… so confusing. this nice girl’s name is Polly Leadbetter, but we have dubbed her The Agent to be all slick and spylike. she runs Lake James Real Estate. before even meeting us she printed out tons of other listings in this price range just to be nice. and it was nice. but i wanted THAT house. 

steven and i talked it over and i talked to my friend cassie and she actually encouraged us to use polly as our buyer’s agent since she was swamped at her day job and home life (little league mom and a football mom. and a regular mom. whew! that’s a lot of momming!). steven said he wanted a few days of thinking about it before he acted. because of the price, i found some mortgage calculators to get a rough idea on what we would have to pay as a mortgage on a first time home buyer’s loan at some banks.

steven did want the house. he, like i, saw and knew it needed a lot of fixing up. also like i, he also saw all the potential of making it into his OWN his in a price he could possibly afford. but it is such a big commitment and so much money involved. 

this is where we began freaking out.