How to Buy A House Without Actually Having A Job

As I’m writing this it’s early May and the time since my last journal entry has been a blur, but I’ll try my best to remember what’s been going on.

How to Buy A House Without Actually Having A Job
March was a crazy month. It started out with me getting the news that Goodson, my primary client, was dissolving their in-house ad agency and moving all their TV and radio production to Arkansas. So, basically I had lost my job. But, being a freelance artist, that’s one of the risks so I began feverishly putting together my website and portfolio to try to sell myself to local ad agencies and production houses. That was a huge undertaking. This all ties in to Kayci because the timing couldn’t have been worse. I’m not complaining. I just wouldn’t have chosen for things to happen as they did. Losing your primary source of income isn’t something you’d chose to do with a baby due in three months. But regardless, my cheese had been moved, so I decided to make lemonade (to totally botch a couple of metaphors.)

Also, our lease on our house was up at the end of March, so we had a big decision to make. Do we stay in our house in the Heights and try to tough it out paying a whole lot of rent or try to find a modestly-priced house to buy that’s closer to Kristi’s school and our church (the two sources of most of our driving)? It didn’t take us long to decide that even though we didn’t to, it made sense to move.

I was supposed to go camping in Big Bend with my Uncle Phil over Spring Break, but as luck would have it, he couldn’t go do to a job opportunity. That actually worked out really well for us because it gave my and Kristi time while she was on Spring Break to begin looking at houses. We knew the general area where we would look- on the east side of town near Kristi’s school and our church (and also where Kayci’s babysitter will be.) We also knew that parts of the area we would be looking in were heavily flooded in June 2001, so we wanted a realtor from the neighborhood who would know exactly which areas had flooded and which hadn’t (as it turns out, that was a really good decision because a lot of the homes we looked at online listed no flood damage or no defects when we knew for certain that they were flooded- completely- in one case.)

God must have been watching out for us. We knew of a real estate agent at our church and we contacted her. However, she had recently quit real estate and let her license expire, but she referred us to another agent in the area whom she knew. We contacted the agent, Irene, and began going around looking at houses in the price range we wanted. We probably looked at fifteen or twenty houses in the course of a week. We drove right by several. Most of the ones we looked at were “fixer uppers” that would require quite a bit of work. But they were cheap, and that’s what we thought we needed. One house we saw needed to just be burned to the ground. It was just that bad.

By the Friday of spring break, we were beginning to get discouraged. We had seen some houses that would work, but none that really jumped out or that would feel like home. Now is when the God part that I mentioned earlier comes in. At this point we were looking at houses that earlier in the week we had not even wanted to see. There was one house on a street called Laguna that was kind of a dark avacado green color that was listed in our price range. Right next door was a cute little house that was for sale, but was SO much nicer than the avacado house that we figured it wasn’t even worth looking at because we figured it was well beyond our price range. 

But our agent insisted that we look at this house on Laguna. We said we weren’t interested, but she insisted. So we went to look at the house next to the avacado house. It was a cute little house. The front yard was very well manicured and it looked very well taken care of. We went inside and knew immediately that the house was in MUCH better condition than anything else we had seen. We took the tour of the house, getting more and more excited as we went. It had three bedrooms, a large living/dining room, a good size kitchen, a garage, a large room for me to use as a studio space and then… We went into the back yard. Stepping into the back yard, the first thing you notice is that there are no trees -- only green grass. Next, you notice that the yard slopes gently toward the house. Finally, you notice a tin-covered building, perfect for a pit smoker and some chairs. I could see having barbecues and crawfish boils and birthday parties in this back yard. And a swing set and a barefoot little girl running around in the grass.

We tried to contain our excitement until we got back into the car with the agent. We knew this house would go fast. But why hadn’t it gone already? It has been on the market for about a month. It turns out that reason it hadn’t sold was because the people who lived there were friends with another agent in the office where our realtor worked. They didn’t want to pay a full commission, so they worked out a deal to pay half commission, which meant that the house would only be shown out of that one office and wouldn’t show up on a web search. So only the agents in that office could show the house or even knew about it! We didn’t see it until later, but it was the hand of God working, looking out for us- I’m sure of it.

We made an offer that very afternoon. After a few counter offers, we finally agreed on a price. We were going to be homeowners- and have what I really wanted- a back yard for Kayci to play in.