Kim and I have been tossing about the idea of buying a house. We finally made the decision last week Sunday to move forward, and today, 1 week later, we have made an offer on a house and the seller has accepted it.

It has been a hectic few days. We spent a good portion of Friday and yesterday driving around Broward trying to find a suitable house for the amount of money we wanted to spend. The nice, well mantained houses we saw were too smal and the larger houses that were the right size were in a deplorable state as they were rental properties where the tenants didn’t take care of the house at all. Both would have needed $20-$30K in remodelling.

We finally found a 4BR townhouse in Miramar that we liked. It is just north of the Broward-Dade county line. It is a new construction home that was just built in a new development area.

The purchase of the house isn’t a done deal as yet as there are still a few obstacles we need to overcome. Because of the crazy S. Fla housing market, we actually had to offer $5K above the seller’s asking price, but we may run into appraisal problems. We will have a better idea where we stand over the next 4-5 days.

If everything does go according to plan, we will close on the house on April 15th. Our fingers are crossed…

UPDATE (Mar 31 2005): The house house appraised at $330,000 which is below the asking price so we’ll need to put the $5,000. We decided to go for it so we’ll definitely be buying the house. I will post pictures later today

UPDATE (Apr 5 2005): Kim and I decided to cancel the purchase of this house. We are still looking, but this time we want to ensure that we have at least a small backyard for Celeste and Brendan to play in.