Hey everyone!

It’s been awhile since I posted last but it has been a crazy last few months but I have some fairly major news to share. As of 9pm Wednesday, Oct 4th, I have officially purchased a house. It has been a crazy and complicated road getting here but as of last night we removed our conditions on the offer making it official. I wanted to wait to share this news with people until everything was said and done (well almost everything).

As I said, the road here was fairly crazy: from taking out a debt consolidation loan from the bank, to fighting with different credit companies to close accounts (I’m looking at you Desjardin—you guys are a real pain to close an account with, but that’s a story for another time), to fighting with the bank to jump through an ever-increasing number of seemingly arbitrary hoops; we finally were ready to pick a realtor and look at houses. After speaking to a number of realtor’s, Berith and I decided to go with Joe and started to look at properties for sale in and around the $400,000 range.

Joe has the patience of a saint, let me tell you. Berith and I went into looking for houses with no idea where we wanted to look, what we wanted to look for and what we should expect. We knew that we wanted a 3 bed, 2.5 bath detached house with garage and either partly finished or fully finished basement. I wanted something that had a fairly open concept main floor that was built no earlier then 2002; while Berith wanted something that had good access to transit. I was fairly certain we wanted to stay in the south. After a couple of whirlwind tours, we saw a few we liked—and a few we really hated. It became evident, after looking at a few homes with major issues (that Berith pushed hard on due to how close to transit they were), that I didn’t want anything that required any major renovations. Paint—sure, flooring—I guess but I didn’t want to replace a roof or windows, fix a cracked or sunken driveway, or replace appliances within the first year (I have a collie to move out here after all). I wanted something that we could move into now and build/renovate later.

We saw one we liked pretty early in but it went before we could even make an offer. I will admit, we looked at so many houses I can barely remember which one was which. Eventually we found one in Bridlewood we really liked. It wasn’t as open as I had hoped but it did offer a nice yard with two-car oversized garage, big bedrooms and a partly finished basement. It has a few of the features I really wanted (central vac, garburator, garage heater) that weren’t deal breakers. The owners originally listed it at $419,000 but after two months on the market, lowered it to $399,900. Berith and I looked it twice and decided we wanted to make an offer.

Joe did his due diligence and came back to us with a price analysis—on the low-end, $375,000 and on the high end $390,000. When he spoke to the selling realtor, they told him they had other people interested in making an offer. We decided to come in with a strong offer of $385,000 with a possession date of Oct 25th, in an attempt to beat the snow, and they had to update the RPR (real property report) as it was grossly out of date. The next day, the seller had countered our offer: $399,800 if we take possession on Oct 31st or $399,700 if we take possession on Nov 30th, and they were not willing to update the RPR. Joe told me he laughed in the other realtor’s face when they countered but after a brief discussion, we decided to put our best offer forward: $390,000, possession on Nov 24th (at the latest) and RPR is non-negotiable.

Later that day they issued another counter-offer. They agreed to the move in date, they agreed to the RPR but their final price was $397,900. I was unwilling to come up any further as we were already at the top of the fair market value, we decided to walk away. A few days past and we started to look for new places, finding another one we liked that was just above our price range, but we decided to see if we could lowball an offer and sent Joe off to do a price analysis on the property. The next day he called me and told me that first house we put in an offer reached out to him. In the 6 days since our offer, they had 2 more offers fall through on price and were willing to come down and split the difference. They offered all the same conditions but this time $395,000. Berith, Neox and I discussed it and decided to go for it (with interest rates on the rise, I decided I’d pay more than $5000 extra in interest if my rate guarantee expired). We put in an offer at $395,000 with all the same terms later that morning.

A few hours later, Joe calls me up and told me they are countering the offer again, they had two changes they wanted to make. Initially in the offer, we included the alarm system in the included goods but apparently the seller was unsure if the alarm was owned or rented, they wanted us to strike out the alarm and said they would include in in good faith should it not be rented. The second change they wanted is they wanted to move up our condition removal date from Oct 4th to Sep 29th, giving us only 3 days to remove the conditions. We agreed to the first change but held fast on the second, explaining to the seller it takes at least a week to approve financing and book a home inspection. Finally, they accepted and the deal was done.

So, all that is left is getting my lawyer involved, signing the final paperwork (mortgage, land-transfer), checking their RPR and packing before we wait to move in.