Spin Cycle--Firsts!

So this weeks's Spin Cycle is firsts.  Any first you want to pick, first kiss, first date, first love, first day of school, first job, any first at all.  In looking back through the archives I found that I had done a post for this when it was a topic over a year ago.  I wrote about our first apartment.  I'm going to keep with the theme and tell you how we got our first house.
Nick graduated from college (the first time) in May of 1997.  The house we were renting had a lease that would run out in August.  We were not really keen on finding another place to rent.  We had a cat and a dog so options for apartments and houses were limited, even in our college town.  We talked it over and decided that trying to find a house of our own would be the best thing.
We headed off to the realtor's office and talked to them about the process.  We learned that we would qualify for a first time homeowners loan and should go get pre-approved so we would know how much house we could buy.  Once we had that done off we went to look at prospective house in our price range.
There are some scary houses out there.  In a town that has lots of rental potential, there are lots of small houses that had been rented.  We looked at one that had maybe 500 square feet on the main floor and basement, but it had been divided into three apartments.  There was another that had two separate furnaces--one in the main living space and one wall unit in the kitchen.  Another had a nicely finished dungeon basement solely for access to the octopus furnace.  Scary places.  But finally after about three weeks of looking we found the place that talked to us.  It was a three bedroom, one bath house with a "finished" basement, detached garage, on a corner lot.
We wanted this house--it was the best we had seen.  So we immediately put in an offer.  That was Sunday.  We waited and on Wednesday I got a call at home from our realtor.  I had to wait until Nick came home from work for lunch--he worked construction, no way to contact him on the job--cell phones were still not common then.  We headed to the realtor's office and found out that the sellers had counter offered, but that there was another couple who had responded before we did.  We couldn't have the house.  So we settled in to start looking again, when another agent came and asked to talk to our agent.  They stepped out of the office and when our agent came back she told us that a mistake had been made and the other couple had turned down the offer and if we wanted to accept the offer the house was ours.  We jumped on that one and started the inspections process.
Since we were using WCDA(Wyoming Community Development Authority) money for our loan, the inspections were a bit more rigorous about things that would incur high costs to us as new home owners.  The concrete sidewalk was pretty buckled and the house needed painting.  We made a deal with the owners so we could live in the house in return for fixing the concrete and painting the house ourselves.  They took it and with help from Nick's work(for concrete forming and such) and the realtor (for a discount on paint) we had the sidewalk fixed and the house painted in a month.
We are still living in that house.  It has had some remodeling, but we have an advantage there in that Nick is so very handy about that stuff.  Every now and then Nick gets antsy about wanting a bigger house, but then he remembers our small mortgage and he decides that our house isn't so bad.
Go see Jen at Sprite's Keeper for more first spins.