Let the Inspections Begin!

Now that our offer has been accepted, we are in the inspection stage. We don't want any big surprises. We have a very limited budget to work with and can't afford something major like replacing a well or septic system!

 Our son-in-law is the fixer upper specialist! He has his handy notebook for taking notes on what needs to be done, and how much it will cost to do. Our plan is to fix up the house so it is more livable, and then to sell it to our daughter and son-in-law after they sell the house they are in. 

Time to check out what's under the house. It's a very tight fit! He actually got stuck and had to come back out and take off some of the clothes under his outer clothes so he could get in.

Let's put new wiring on the list....

I'm glad I'm not the one crawling under the house! 

Our Adventure Begins!

So how did this adventure begin? Maybe it was a mid-life course adjustment, or the fact we wanted a place to go camping. Life was getting a little too predictable. We were in a rut. We also have a daughter and son-in-law that wanted to live in the country, so we started looking at property with them. We looked at some real doozies! Some were house rich and land poor. Some were land and house poor. We don't have a lot of money, so whatever we got had to involve a lot of fixing so we could afford it. One of the places we looked at was an ex-puppy mill with a dog breeder living next door. When the neighbors 50+ dogs started barking, we literally ran off the property! Then we looked at a place with an amazing house, but out of the 13 acres only the part with the house wasn't a swamp. And a bank would not touch it due to water issues.

And then we decided we had had enough of looking...and then this came up.

It was on the market for four days. We put in an offer and were competing with four or five other offers. All our offers were about the same, so they wanted us to give our next best last offer and tell how we were going to finance the purchase. We were the 3rd highest, but they liked our financing better. In case some of you are wondering where this is...east of Sedro Woolley in Washington state. 

The house has three bedrooms, is 1,200 square feet. It has been a rental for quite a few years, and EVERYTHING needs updating and fixing. The garage is huge, and actually looks more like a barn on the inside. 

These are some of the outbuildings. This use to be a working dairy farm. The farthest building was where they milked the cows. The white building is where they put the milk while they were waiting for it to be picked up. The original huge barn burned down, and the horse barn was torn apart and recycled. All that is left are concrete foundations and floors.

Now that our offer has been accepted, we will be going through everything and making sure there are no deal breakers that we just cannot afford to take care of (like the well and septic). We have a certain amount of time to do this. We will be getting inspectors out to look at things.