Beginning the house hunting process

[shipo]

shipo - WOW Congratulations and good luck with the house hunt! If you do make a trip - Englewood CO and nearby areas are really nice; Littleton and Centennial especially - just my personal, unjaded opinion. If you do go, make sure you hydrate a lot beforehand. I had headaches and felt sleepy for months until my body adjusted to the mile high altitude: learned to make drinking water often, a habit.

Thanks! We're house hunting in Gaithersburg, MD where our daughter and her fiancé relocated to last summer, so at this point it is starting to look like I'll never make it to our Englewood office, especially because Google has reached out to me a couple times since December to get me to apply for a job with them.

[Zombie13]

Thanks! We're house hunting in Gaithersburg, MD where our daughter and her fiancé relocated to last summer, so at this point it is starting to look like I'll never make it to our Englewood office, especially because Google has reached out to me a couple times since December to get me to apply for a job with them.

Excellent! And good luck with the Google interviews!

[shipo]

Started the prequalification process today...

Here's an interesting spin on getting a mortgage compared to my last update; we just found out a close family member passed the Mortgage Loan Officer exam last year and is now working with a mortgage company, so we're giving him the first swing of the bat at getting us a mortgage.

Today we filled out the necessary information online to begin the prequalification process and came away with a few observations:

• Our last mortgage application was over 20 years ago; my how things have changed. I know, shocking; right?
• Note to self, having assets spread around across well over a dozen different accounts is a pain in the hind parts when applying for a mortgage; it may be time to consolidate a little.
• I fortunately anticipated virtually all of the information we needed for the application, so the process was more or less cut and paste; even still it took the better part of a half hour.
• It has been over a decade since we sold our last house, but even still, it felt kind of funny answering "No" to the "Are you a first time home buyer?" question. That said, things have changed so much I do feel like a newb when it comes to the home buying process.
• I quickly looked at what potential benefits we can glean from being a "First Time Homebuyer" in Montgomery County, Maryland; I'll need to focus on that this weekend because the brief look-see presented me with more information than I had time to wrap my brain around.

I'll keep y'all posted on the progress.

[shipo]

Update...

After six months of (initially) passive and then active searching for a new home, yesterday not one, but two new listings popped up, both of which tick off enough boxes for us to put in an offer. I had my MLO pull the trigger today for the prequalification and within a few hours we were preapproved and ready to go. I honestly expect to need to get into a bidding war for the one we like the most; fortunately we're preapproved for quite a bit more than what would be a very high agreed upon price.

If all goes well we'll close on the condo early May, have contractors in there to repaint the entire place and to rip out the carpeting and VPL (Vinyl Plank Flooring) which I detest, and lay down wood flooring throughout the main living areas. With any luck, we could be moved in by the end of May.

[justbroke]

Congratulations shipo. Did you say you were moving to the Maryland area?

[shipo]

Into the Kentlands community of Gaithersburg.

[justbroke]

Very cool. I spent a long time in and around Columbia (Howard County). I didn't live there, but I worked in the area for over 10 years. I have never been that far west into Maryland.

[shipo]

Very cool. I spent a long time in and around Columbia (Howard County). I didn't live there, but I worked in the area for over 10 years. I have never been that far west into Maryland.

LOL, "that far west into Maryland", Kentland is only 21 miles northwest of the center of Washington DC.

[justbroke]

Like I said... I didn't get out much. LOL. I think I stayed in the Inner Harbor once. I went into DC once via Union Station. I'm not too adventurous.

[shipo]

My wife and I were both Gypsys before we met; we'd lived in a combined nine states and fourteen metro areas by that time, and in the 30 years since then we've only lived in three states and four metro areas.

[shipo]

Oh geez, it has been quite the roller-coaster ride around here over the last few hours; I made an offer late this afternoon which featured automatic escalations of $5,000 over the next highest bid, with a cap at $75,000 over ask; the winning bid was going to be announced at 7:00 this evening. At seven our real estate agent called us and said there were so many offers they had to push the final decision back two hours. At 8:45 she called and said, "Well, you were the second highest bidder, however, you were out-bid by a whopping $65,000." I said, "Not going there, let them have it." She agreed.

A little after nine she called again and said, "You're nimble enough to close in three weeks, the high bidder wants to close in July; the seller has agreed to sell it to you if you bump up your offer another $10,000 and provide $40,000 in earnest money tomorrow. It hurt a bit, but I agreed; two hours later and lots of e-mail traffic back and forth, the contract is signed and our closing date is 10-May.

Funny thing, because of the rules on what constitutes a "First Time Home Buyer", it looks like I'm about to become one for the fourth time in my life.

[shipo]

Today begins our 7-day countdown to closing...

Being nimble enough to close 18-days from from a signed contract is proving to be a double edged sword; on the positive side that very nimbleness was what won the deal for us, but wow, all of the stuff what needs doin' has been quite the distraction from everyday life. As of today the (almost) final closing disclosure for the mortgage came through about an hour ago, I have the internet and water services scheduled to start, however, the electric and natural gas are both proving to be a bit thorny as the electric company claims our condo is in a different building with a different address, and the gas company which allegedly services our building claims they have no idea any such building exists. I mean, seriously?

[justbroke]

Fun times. When I bought this house in 2020 I had a 10-day overlap for services between my two places. As luck would have it, the stupid internet provider did show up on Saturday and added service to the new address, but turned off service at the old address. I was still living at the old address. The entire purpose of the overlap was to take my time. This was during COVID lockdown (April 2020). I was lucky to have movers. In any event, we rented a UHaul van and moved as much "needed" things to the new house piece by piece (12 miles each way).

The "main" move was still 10 days later. I laid into the internet provider. Guess what they did? When the service was supposed to turn off at the other place, a guy shows up at the new place to install service. I told him it was already done. He said okay so I went back in the new house and my internet was no longer working! I ran outside and caught him in his van. I asked what's going on and he said nothing. Luckily he was real nice and already assigned 4 hours to my install and he looked it up and it was yet another install order which messed up all the IP addresses. But it was all situated within 1 hour.

I hate moving.

[shipo]

We have more like a two month overlap; the internet will be enabled in the new place next Friday, we won't shut it down here until late June or early July. Unfortunately for us, the new place is almost exactly 500 miles away and requires driving through or around Boston, Hartford, New Haven, New York City, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington DC. I've made the trip eight times in the last year, the shortest was a few minutes under 8-hours, the longest was just over 13-hours. I figure at least two of the southbound trips will be pulling a 6x12 U-Haul trailer with certain items we don't want the movers touching for various reasons.

Last weekend we started clearing out things we know we will no longer need and moving other things to storage for later this year; my new vehicle tows well.

[justbroke]

Reminds me of when I first moved from New England to Florida. Movers drove a 25-ft city truck (liftgate) and we drove an full-sized SUV via the auto train from Lorton, VA to Sanford, FL. The SUV had my "important" things in inside.