Our road to buying a house, part 2

So the decision to buy a house was made, now we had to find out if this dream was a realistic possibility. So we met up with a mortgage broker to talk about how much of a house we could reasonably afford.

At this point in time, we realized that we wanted to by a home with rental possibilities. A stepping stone of sorts into the real estate world.

The broker gave us all the financial info we needed to move forward. Now all we had to do was find the house of our dreams.

The first house we found and looked at was a place on the Quinnipiac river in New Haven. A bunch of our friends were moving to New Haven, so that seemed like the place to be.

Right when we were ready to put a deposit on the place, it went off the market. (Which ended up being a good thing because the murder rate in New Haven has been rising and the housing costs have been falling. This particular house had close to a 20% drop in value. Whew! That could have been a horrible investment.)

Then we looked at a house in Stratford with good income possibilities that we weren't in love with, but we were starting to get desperate to find a place of our own. The problem was, when we went to put in an offer, they said they weren't accepting offers at that time even though it was on the market.

So glad we missed that bullet, turns out that neighborhood was not too good afterall. We saw another house a street away and it was full of smoke and there was a baby left on a bed in one of the rooms crying. I told the parents their baby was crying and was completely tramatized by the whole ordeal.

Finally, Kevin and I were looking on Craigslist and we came across this gorgeous farmhouse colonial in Danbury that was listed on the market that day, in our price range, it had a rental, and seemed to have everything we were looking for in a home. We instantly called John Anthony and he set up a time for us to go see the home the next day.

Then we called our parents to see if they would come see the home with us. They have experience buying a house and we wanted to have them be a part of this important decision we were making in our lives. They were more than happy to help.

So, we met our parents and John Anthony at the house (soon to be our home) in the middle of winter, with 3 feet of fresh, unshoveled snow, to see this gorgeous place...

A dirty place. With no running water or heat. But with beautiful "bones" and history.

Check out Part 3 for the response from our family!