The Story So Far

We knew we'd be renting for the first part of our marriage. My husband was in the military, and we weren't sure where he'd find a civilian job after his ETS date. Life was a big question mark for 3 months after he came back from his last deployment and started out processing. 

After a lot of job interviews, and more than a bit of panicking, he found a job in Houston. We spent hours looking over apartment complexes in the area. 

Although we would have preferred a 6 month lease, just long enough to make sure his job was stable and go house hunting, we took a 12 month one because it was significantly less each month in rent. Plus, I figured it'd give us more time to get to know the area before we went house hunting.

We started looking into the VA loan in January 2013. Our lease was up in May. We were both rather crushed to learn my husband didn't have enough credit history to qualify while I did. After weighing our options, we signed a 6 month lease extension.

The lender made some recommendations to give him more credit history, which we followed to the letter and waited anxiously for several months. It was a stressful week when we reapplied, but we were finally approved for the VA loan in June! I may or may not have done a happy dance.

We're currently in the process of looking through home listings online and linking our realtor to them. That sadly has not been going well. Apparently a good portion of the homes on the market in our price range aren't eligible for the VA loan because of being HUD homes that are sold as is. 

I personally don't understand the big deal about having minor things to fix, like a tear in linoleum or a small unfinished area of tiling, especially if it cuts down the cost of the home. They're easy projects. I don't consider either of those to be a "safety concern." I mean I guess you could trip and fall, but I trip and fall over my cats all the time. They're definitely not "safety concerns."

Unless you're a bug.

Anyway, for our November 1 move in date, we were told we needed to start making offers in roughly 2 weeks. We haven't even found a house we can potentially make an offer on that we like. Eek!

I sadly get to miss most of the paperwork festivities because I'm going out of town for several weeks to visit family in about a week. I'll come back just in time to pack a whole lot of boxes.

After that, we'll move in and start the point of this blog -- making our first house into a home.