Next Round of Houses!

This weekend was our next round of houses.  We saw eight houses in all on Sunday.  Our first showing was at 9:30 in the morning and then two more right after that.  Then we grabbed a light lunch and on to five open houses.  Lets just say it was a long weekend again.  But we are definitely seeing things that we like, and plenty of things we don't.  We have decided since we are not in a huge hurry to move that we can wait for that perfect house and not settle on something that might not be exactly what we are looking for. 

The first house we saw was a short sale.  It definitely was the nicest of the first three we saw.  It was a bi-level home, which we like.  If we are going to have multiple floors we would like a bi-level.  It had great curb appeal, you drove up and thought 'this is a nice house.'

It was over 1700 square feet, which sounds pretty nice for our first home.  And it had a finished family room in the basement.

It was a short sale, so that meant the bank owns it and well we would be shelling out more money in fees and would be buying it as is, which can be scary at times, but we said if it was worth it, we would do it.

It had these great double doors that looked so nice from both the outside and inside of the house.  How cool would it be to welcome people to your home by opening two double doors.  Pretty cool.

These beautiful doors opened up to the entry way and you either went up or down from there.  Down to the half bath and family room.  Up to the large open dining area and huge over sized patio door.   

As you can see it had outdated railings, but those are easy enough to fix.  and it had older carpet on the stairs.  I would probably rip up the carpet in the whole house and replace it with nice wood or laminate flooring.  That would just open up the house so much.  Just make it brighter and more cheery to look at.

And speaking of carpet, here's a good example why I would want it all ripped out.  It was white carpet, who puts white carpet in a house?  You are just asking for trouble.  The carpet was all stained, you could see where each peace of furniture was and where they walked.  It was dingy and combined with this wall color, made the whole room look dingy.

Plus side of this room, those lovely large floor to ceiling windows.  They were newer windows and brought in so much light.  They also allowed you to see the lovely marsh right across the street.  This house had a great view.     

The kitchen and dining area was all updated.  It had all built ins, the bad news, some one had ripped out all the built ins and left large gaping holes in the kitchen.

The only thing left was the built in stove top and the sink.  But the cabinets were pretty and I loved the ones with glass panels.  My new dishes would looks so nice in these.

But the down side, we would have to buy all new appliances and they would have to fit into areas that were already cut out of the cabinets.  That was a little of a downside for me.  

The kitchen and dining room looked out into the large wooded back yard.  It was a very pretty back yard.

The back yard was beautiful.  It was all wooded and very secluded.  You might not even notice that you had neighbors.  You could barely see the house behind your house and you could only see the house on the right side of the lawn.  It was great.  And the house already had invisible fence, so that was nice.

Thee was a nice cement patio off the back that would very easily hold a hot tub and a nice patio table and a grill.  We could do some nice planters around it to.

And there was plenty of space for my large garden to go in.  Which I have to have room for my garden, I don't want to do a potted garden anymore.

This house also had a fireplace in the family room, but I don't know how often we would use it.  The floor plan also seemed a little cramped for being over 1700 square feet.  It also would be very difficult to add on if we wanted to in the future.  And we also couldn't find a decent place to put my glass studio.  I can't live in a house with out my glass stuff, that wouldn't be cool at all.

The house was really nice and the school district is one of the best in the Madison area.  There was just a lot of updates that would be needed.  But this house still made the list of ones we are still interested in.   

The other two houses in the same neighborhood were okay, but nothing that impressive.  I actually didn't even take pictures of the second house we saw because I was so disgusted by the half ass job they did on remodeling.  So tomorrow I'll show you some of the other houses we looked at.  We decided we really liked one of them, so we're going to look at comparable homes next weekend and make a decision on weather we should keep looking or make an offer.  Oh exciting!!!