House hunt

Now that we have contacted a realtor, our house hunt is kicked off into high gear. I still don’t have a really good idea of where the neighborhoods are cheap-but-ok or cheap-and-slummy, but I think our guy has a good idea. We saw like 6 townhouses yesterday and will probably see 5 more on Monday.

We are looking for a townhouse that is about the same square footage as our condo (1100 or a bit more), and has inside laundry, a ground floor entry and no upstairs neighbors, 2 br, 1.5-2.5 baths, and want to pay around 450k. We looked at a couple nice ones out Alum Rock, and out Berryessa, both east of 680, which are the two current front-runners (actually three because there were two identical mirror-image units out Berryessa). Tomorrow, we will probably look at some townhouses around 85 between 17 and 87. I don’t know which is worse, commuting up/down 85 or commuting on 237/680, probably about a wash.

The scary thing is we are looking to about double our house payment. So we probably won’t be going out to dinner much, but at least we will have a nice kitchen and can start cooking for ourselves.

I am sitting here eating Lucky Charms and drinking coffee with Irish Cream flavoring. I wonder if Lucky the Leprechaun ever hits the heather cream a bit when the kids aren’t around hassling him for cereal.

Oh well. Must do some paperwork and get caught up on quicken; I want to run the numbers and find out if we can really afford this move.

gregc

0 thoughts on “House hunt

  1. 9thmoon

    So frightening.
    My first house (granted this was nine years ago) was exactly the townhouse you describe, and it was 19 miles from Seattle, and I paid $79,900.00 for it. As it happens, my sister lives in that house, now, and even so, recently had it appraised at ~$145k, iirc.

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