Not too long into the start of the house hunting we found a place that we thought would be worth putting an offer in on. It wasn’t ideal – it was a townhouse and it had next to no storage, but it was in good condition and an ok location with a nice view of the harbour. It wasn’t our dream house and had some drawbacks, so we felt like we would only take it if we could get a good deal. We sent an offer to the owner (it was a for-sale-by-owner listing) who countered, but we weren’t motivated to meet her. Still it was good practice for putting an offer together. We had a solicitor review it, which helped us feel comfortable to do the offers for other houses ourselves.
We spent some more weekends doing the house hunting sprint routines. All the easy to build on spots in Wellington have been built on, so there is always more people looking for homes than homes, Over the past couple of years, and unfortunately for us, peaking while we were looking, house prices have been going crazy. We had focused our searching on the western suburbs where we were more likely to find something affordable in a good school zone.
After a bit we found another house we liked. It was at the end of the road at the top of the hill, and needed some updating, but had most of the space we needed (though also needed more storage), and a nice view. We saw a lot of potential in the house and decided to go all in. We put in an offer at the top of our range, which we felt would be competitive, but ultimately feel about $15k short.
We eventually found another house we were interested in – as with most houses we looked at Kelly wanted to pull down a number of walls to open things up, but it was nice inside, and in a good location. One different thing about it was that it was a cross-lease which means that there were two houses on the parcel that basically lease the property from each other. The sellers didn’t supply a builders report so we paid for one, and lucky we did, because we found out that the roof needed quite a bit of work. not only that, but it was a tile roof and very heavy, so if we wanted to remove interior walls we’d need to remove the tiles and put on a different type of roof. We again put in an offer that we felt was good, though iffy as to whether it would be enough. But it was an offer we would be ok paying for the house, and if we didn’t get it, we didn’t get it. And we didn’t get it.
Time was now creeping towards Hop’s 5th birthday, which was important because we needed to be moved before that – we’ll explain why next time!
Kiwi Bound 