Making Our House a Home: Part One.

Alright, settle in guys because this is going to be a long one… I’ve decided to go through the process of buying our house and later in part two I will show you how we are making it ours which you will discover soon has been really important to us.

I want to start first by pointing something out. Yes, I’ve started a blog and have been active on Instagram for a long, long time which means that I am more public than most people. But this does not mean I owe the world every detail of my life. I have a lot of private life that I may never share online even when looking back on things that are relevant, especially when it concerns part of another person’s life being made public. So please know and appreciate that I am choosing to share this with you because it is a major event in the life of anyone, so I want to help others sitting waiting to take the leap get a bit more of a look in. Drew has looked over this post and what is being published has been okayed by both of us. And while I am always happy to answer questions, this particular case means that I may not answer every question.

Getting this house has been quite a long process. We first started looking at houses back in December last year with a basic price range of $400,000 - $500,000 (at a stretch). This was what we guessed we should be able to get approved for by a bank, but at the time we really didn’t know how much we could be approved for. Neither of us are high income earners either so we wanted to keep it in a range where we wouldn’t be too overstretched financially after the sale. Drew is a much better saver than me but since late November last year we both have been saving as much as we could. I know that personally I was saving as desperately as possible to help level the field between us going into this.

We knew we wanted to stay around where we currently live, so we searched within our current postcode and some of the surrounding suburbs towards the train line. And going in we had our list of what we ideally wanted: a double car garage, ensuite and separate bathroom, two to three bedrooms, needs minimal renovations, a lower maintenance yard and no pool. We knew from the beginning at least one roommate would make our lives a lot easier so two bathrooms was quite important, so we could have our own space, and the double garage was because Drew has two cars and a scooter, so we needed a good amount of off street parking. We were also prepared to have Drew’s parents renting off us to live in two to three days a week for work in Brisbane as they were also looking to sell up and move to the coast.

And really this checklist was quite a hard one to tick in our price range. We found one house that was actually perfect early on but unfortunately it was perfect for other people too and sold at the open house the same week we discovered it on Realestate.com. Everything else we found either needed a lot of renovations, to fix up existing renovations, didn’t tick the bathroom or garage ideal, and occasionally, had a bloody pool. The pickings were pretty slim. Drew’s parents’ house had now been on the market for a couple of months and my parents had found a new place and were preparing to sell our old one so both of us were feeling the pressure a bit and this was when we received a proposal we couldn’t really turn down.

Drew’s parents had had their house on the market for nearly three months. It was in a fantastic location with an ensuite, bathroom, multi-car garage, relatively low maintenance garden, heaps of rooms and a pool. But it just wasn’t getting any offers for anywhere near its value. Buyers markets are great for buyers because you can beat down prices on homes that are overpriced, but it means for sellers that have priced their house to its bank value people try to beat it down hard core. But then something clicked to them and they decided to approach us with an offer to do a private sale.

They needed to be able to live in Brisbane a couple of days a week for work, so they would become our roommates and we would still have enough room to bring in another person or couple. And as a private sale we would save money on several key costs and they would in turn, receive more than going through a real estate agency. And honestly it was an amazing deal, so we took it.

The bank process started a whole new round of frustrations as the bank we went with fumbled their way through organising our mortgage making nearly every silly mistake they could. It took about five weeks from first applications to the approval to get everything finalised so that we could get into the legal part before settlement. I’m going to stay in the bank section for a moment to just note that it is so much easier to get approval with two incomes than you would think. We were originally worried that our price range of $400,000 - $500,000 would be hard to get off a bank but the bank ended up approving us for just over an extra $100,000 more than we expected. Looking back with this information I do think we would’ve made the whole process much easier finding out how much we could get from a bank or a broker earlier so that we felt more confident in our price range. That is probably one of my biggest tips for first home buyers because you are suddenly dealing with dollar values you have never actually had to work with before and it is very daunting.

We were also very lucky with this arrangement because it helped save us a lot of time in the actual moving process as all of Drew’s things were already here and we were always going to purchase a lot of the existing furniture off his parents as they downsized to their coastal apartment. All that needed to come over were my things – and for someone who’d only really been able to fit what they owned into a tiny room it was a lot of stuff! But this then started a new challenge, we needed to change up this house enough to make it feel like our home not like someone else’s we had just moved in to. But you have already read a lot of words, so I will go through this more in part two next week.

Thank you so much for sticking with me in this long post! Throughout this post I have left you with my five biggest tips for first home buyers from our experience and I hope that they can help you. Please feel free to message me any questions you may have about this process and I will do my best to answer them all.