We're Adults. When Did That Happen and How Do We Make It Stop?
I got to visit my shiny today. And by "shiny" I mean my wedding ring. We dropped in to talk to the jeweler about getting it sized, and picking a stone for the setting and such. It made me all happy and giddy just looking at it. It's so beautiful and unique. I've never seen one like it. It should be paid for and ready to wear by the 31st.
We've also been spending a lot of time looking at places to live.
I knew it wouldn't be easy, but I didn't know it was going to be this difficult. We started out looking at one of those places that says "homes from the 120s, $500 moves you in". Well that may be true... if you're a single couple and don't need any extra rooms for kids and such, but we're not. We're going to have two teenage boys that preferably need to be separated into two rooms and we need an office. And I do mean need. We have like seven computers between the four of us. So that's at least 3 bedrooms and an office/study, or 4 bedrooms. Which isn't cheap.
Then we ran into problems with the mortgage. One place told us we couldn't get a loan together because of his credit, but with my salary we could maybe afford a box under a bridge in a decent neighbourhood.
So we started looking at homes that weren't new. Still couldn't find anything in our price range that wasn't a total dump. And I do mean dump.
Now we started thinking about "multi section homes". Hey, it may not sound impressive. It may make you think "trailer", but if you've never seen the inside of the ones we've been looking at, you'd be shocked. They're HUGE, and they're so nice. The master bathrooms are gigantic. They all have garden tubs and separate showers. Walk-in closets. Big, big kitchens and living rooms. Way more space than we could afford in a "real" house. Just most of them don't really have an appealing exterior. My father said "they'll spoil you for a real house". Some of them are really very impressive.
And I can't emphasize enough how much space they have. They're basically perfect for us. It's in our price range. We can get the number of rooms we need in a square footage that's amazing. It's actually kind of exciting.
So then the problem we run into there is property. We don't have any. So we have to find property we can put it on. But that's not easy either because it has to be zoned a certain way to be able to put a manufactured house on it.
We were wanting Rutherford county so Jerry could be closer to his kids when they're with their mother. That's basically out of the equation now. We can't afford the price of land in Rutherford county, and it's basically impossible to get land in the right zoning. We think we may have found some land that we really like in Madison, which isn't too bad distance-wise from the kids, and definitely better for me for driving to work, but we haven't found out if it's zoned right yet. Driving through the neighbourhood we think it's possible it may be. Some of the houses around it looked like they might be manufactured housing. There was definitely one brand new manufactured house a couple of blocks up from the land we looked at.
Keep your fingers crossed for us please. I've been getting kind of discouraged. It has seemed so far that nothing we have tried is working for us. The obstacles we're going to run into here is the land being zoned right, and the price of buying the land, getting the house set up and put down, and the price of the house combined and getting the financing for all of it with a reasonable monthly payment.
Even though it's seemed a bit discouraging however, I feel like we've gone about it the right way. We've explored all the options we can think of. We even looked at rent to owns/lease purchased, and if we can't get this land and such that we want, that'll probably be our last resort. We've gone through all the talk about financing, budgeting, spending. We know where our money goes, what we have to spend, what we don't have to spend but aren't unreasonable spending (like cell phones, netflix, video games, stuff like that), what we'll be able to put in a savings account. We've really talked it up one side and down the other.
Well, thanks for reading my 3 AM ramblings.
posted by AllieKat 8/05/2007 02:58:00 AM .:. 2 comments
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