Pleasing the Puggle

I guess we should start at the very beginning of our little house hunt story. As Allan said, after we got hitched we decided to buy our little puggle doggy, Riley, a home of her very own. But Riley had a pretty long wish list... like three or more bedrooms, at least two baths, a little charm and character, and a nice kitchen with lots of storage, a nice, safe neighborhood, a big back yard, some sort of outdoor living space, a pool... oh wait, that was my wish list! Anyway, with all of Riley's demands, we had our work cut out for us.


We started our search by doing some drive-by's. No, not the shoot 'em up type, the ones where you scoop out the nice neighborhoods and also the not-so-nice-never-would-live-there-ever neighborhoods. We definitely worked out a strategy for our drive-bys. We had to take turns getting the flyers out of the info tubes. BTW, how aggrevating is it when you get out of the car, walk to the sign, only to find out it is empty!!!! After several months of neighborhood-scooping, we decided on Winter Park, Maitland, or the downtown-ish area, which was where we were living at the time (across the street from a sex-offender, I might add. Allan decided to keep that one a secret from me until recently. Maybe we can share that story at a later date with a tutorial on how to find a sex-offender near you).

Ok, back on track now. In the meantime, we got pre-approved for a mortgage and decided on our budget. Well, Allan had decided on a budget and I decided on a budget, the two didn't exactly match. We were also frequenting the websites Allan mentioned in this post. Then we started actually going inside houses...... which is where we will pick up next time.

xoxo
Wendy

P.S. Allan wanted to write a WHOLE POST on getting pre-approved for a mortgage. Just think of how boring that would have been! We would have lost all two of our readers. You can thank me later for saving you from that yawn fest.