The Home Buying Process

Taking a step back from the current ongoings of the house, I thought I should give you all some background on my road to home ownership. Jonathan and I started looking for houses at the beginning of December of 2009. Our criteria was a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home with a fenced in yard for the dog. Some of other features we were interested in were a garage, a front porch and a yard. Lucky Jonathan had a friend who was a Realtor who helped us out with the whole process. He gave us advice on several issues on what to look for in the house and what to avoid. In addition he helped us find the local bank to get our mortgage through and insurance company.
Most of the homes we saw in Quincy, which was our #1 town of choice, were very old and we soon found out that within our price range a lot of repairs would need to be done internally and externally. However we were ok with this as long as the price was right as we wanted to make the house our own. After seeing about 8-10 houses we found two that we were very interested in. One house, the second that we viewed, we fell in love with which I will call the Green House. It had many unique features such as two window seats and an open floor plan with a newly renovated kitchen. In addition it had an in ground pool. However, the heating system was very old, there were several cracks in the walls/ceilings due to sinking and some water stains. The other house was about 40k more than the green house but it was a block from the beach and would need no work with all rooms newly renovated and in good shape. However it was at a fork in the road and it had little to no yard. It was a tough decision for both of us but before we were able to put a bid in on either house, the beach house accepted another offer. We found out the news 2 days before Christmas and decided to take a few days off to think over our options. We decided to put in a bid on the green house which needed more work then the beach house but was less money and negotiated the price with the owner soon coming to an agreement.
We originally had thought that when going into this process we would have the negotiating power due to the poor economy and sluggish house market but we certainly felt the heat as we saw many offers being put on the houses we were interested in even during the holidays. Overall we didn't get the bargain we had thought we would but we both felt really good about the house. The owners of the green house agreed to a quick closing as they had already purchased another home but we were waiting on the bank to approve us for a loan. This was quite a stressful waiting process. We had some issues getting approved for PMI which is required for new home owners who are putting down less than 15%. At the end the bank decided to up our interest rate and go without the PMI which we were fine to as we were eager to complete the whole process. The actual closing was stressful and overwhelming with the amount of paperwork that we had to sign. But we were DONE and it felt great :)