It’s official. We own a tiny chunk of Ohio. This chunk to be exact:

That’s a little less than 3/4′s of an acre and here’s what’s sitting on it:

Not too shabby.

So here’s the deal. About a year ago we noticed a house that we really liked was up for sale. We kept an eye on it, but it was just out of our comfort range as far as price goes and it was in an area we liked…mostly. The online listings never show indoor photos, just the outside (which was exactly what we liked) and they never held an open house or anything where we could get inside. We were never really serious about buying and didn’t have a realtor or get pre-approaved or anything like that, but we always kept an eye on that house because as time went on we talked more and more seriously about it. Finally May rolled around an a ‘Sold” sign went up. After doing some research we found out it went for a price much lower than listed and if we had actually pursued it rather than just looking on, we might have been able to get it. We never did see the inside and I prefer to think it sucked.

So in June I noticed a house just around the corner went up for sale…on the Cul De Sac. This one seemed like an even better fit. Better lot, nicer curb appeal, just a hair dated on the inside. The only catch was that it was WAY out of our price range. Still there was something that led me to keep an eye on it.

About a month later the sellers dropped their price a little. Interesting, but still out of our range.

Another month later and they dropped it again. Still out of our range, but the drops were encouraging.

Finally in August they had an Open House. We swung by and found quite a turnout. After spending too much time there (I’m sure the seller’s realtor thought we were up to something) we left knowing this house had everything we wanted except the right price. It was enough to make us get serious.

That week we hooked up with a lender and got pre-approved. It did indeed turn out that the house was still just out of our price range, but we were hopeful. We then hooked up with a realtor and in the first week of September made a date to look at some houses in the area. We made sure the house we liked was on the list even though we personally knew it was out of our price range.

After looking at six houses we knew more than ever this house was what we were looking for. It was on an awesome mature lot on a Cul De Sac. It wasn’t a pre-fab and it wasn’t stacked on top of a dozen other houses that looked just like it – which is pretty much all you can find in our neck of the woods unless you go with an older home and in this area that means late 60′s, early 70′s homes…and that’s just not our style.

In a nutshell, we were trying to pull some strings with an FHA loan and that was right about the time the government was making sweeping changes with how they worked. Essentiallly, we had a week to get the paperwork in if we wanted to finance that way, so with the time constraint, we decided to tell the sellers what the deal was an simply ask how low they could go (along with doing the same at two other properties that were ‘doable’).

I think deep down inside, we knew we weren’t going to jump on any of these offers unless the house we really liked came back pretty low. Turns out all three came back with prices that were either unreasonable (the ‘dobale’ houses) or still too high for us (the house we really liked on the Cul De Sac).

We kind of threw in the towel at that point. But we kept watching that house to see if they’d drop the price again. They held firm for the rest of September and at the end of the month the status went to ‘Sale Pending’ – I swear we almost cried. We started second guessing ourselves and wondering if we should have pushed to get it even though the price was really higher than we could afford.

I kept looking at new listings. Nothing good was going on the market and everything that was good was out of our price range. In the course of almost a year, we had seen two houses that we felt could work for us and they were around the corner from each other.

Then around mid-October a small miracle happened. The house on the Cul De Sac went back up for sale. We called our guy and had him find out what happened. Turns out the potential buyers backed out at the last minute.

The sellers ran another open house that weekend. My wife’s parents were in town and they wanted to see it since we had talked about it so much so she took them over. The seller remembered my wife (probably as the creepy lady who stuck around way too long at the first open house) and even mentioned that the sellers regretted that they didn’t have the time to negotiate further with our initial interest and they were ready to negotiate with a buyer.

After about a week of discussion, we decided it was time to strike. The owners weren’t dropping the listed price and it was still out of our pre-approved range, but with some negotiating and a bigger down payment, we could potentially make it work.

We scheduled an official showing at the beginning of November and after a final walkthrough decided to make an offer. There was a lot of contention (between me and my wife, us and our realtor, me and myself, etc) over what to offer. I really wanted to play off the pyscology of the whole thing. They weren’t dropping the price, but they’d been trying to sell for 5 months (pretty long in this area), they had one buyer fall though, they knew we were interested, their realtor mentioned they wished they’d played it differently with us the first time, it was coming up on the holiday season – a slow time for sales…

…lots that I thought I could use.

In a nutshell, my wife wanted to try to lowball them. I wanted to throw out a low offer, but one that wasn’t ridiculous that given the situation (the holidays, a spirit of negaotiation, the need to sale, etc.) the sellers would just accept as ‘close enough’. Our realtor thought we were both too low.

In the end we offered higher than my wife wanted to and a little lower than I wanted to, but close enough that I felt it was a win for me (smile). Our realtor was ok with it as he didn’t feel it looked like we were fishing, but told us to fully expect a counteroffer.

24 hours later were got the call.

The offer was accepted.

I could go into a long thing about how no one could believe they accepted (including the seller’s realtor) and how I feel like we played the situation exactly correctly, but it’d all sound like bullshit anyway. The point is they accepted.

We closed yesterday and the sellers should be out this weekend.

We ended up getting the house for about 13% less than it originally listed for and it appraised for almost about 10% more than we paid. Thinking like a numbers guy, the kicker is that while we still stretched our budget its farthest reaches, that the house, while only 13 years old, hasn’t had much updating on the inside. It feels like a house built in the mid-90′s. Without a doubt, bringing the house current to late 2000′s standards will bump that value even higher. It’ll take some time and that’s fine, I’m hoping we can spend a lot of time there.

It’s a house that fits us and our needs perfectly on a lot that fits our needs perfectly. It really is the perfect house for us.

I don’t have any of my own photos of the place yet so the two above that I lifted off of Microsoft Live and from the online listing will have to do.