Step 1: Finding a House

Ben and I have been looking off and on for the right house for over a year. The market is perfect for buying our first house but it is a scary prospect. There was always something wrong... manufactured, no garage, small yard, wrong school district, will cost too much... I think you get the picture. Anyway, we finally found one we both loved about a month ago and started making plans for purchase. It is a forclosure and so we used the opportunity to inspect the house thoughrly prior to even making our first offer (My dad is an electrician and owns a building inspection company so he looked it over with us). We even took measurments to get good estimates on the cost of bringing the house to our standards. After calculating what it would cost to rehab the home we decided on an offer. Unfortunatly there were 2 other offers placed on the home and the seller gave us a few days to place our "best" offer. This sucked and we offered more than we had really wanted to pay knowing the house was worth it and that it was the one we wanted. We WON!! whew! Next came requesting radon, well and septic inspections since we couldn't do these prior to offer.