Is it time to settle down and buy a house?

After living in the motor home for almost nine years, we've started feeling like it was important to spend more time with our children and grandchildren. Is it time to settle down and buy a house? We have enjoyed staying at our children's houses, and they have always made us feel very welcome. We have also stayed in the motor home at campgrounds near their homes for longer stays. But all the campgrounds around Kansas City are about a 45-minute drive from where our grandchildren live. That convinced us that if we bought property we wanted it to be closer to all this cuteness.

We started looking for property in the Kansas City area about a year ago. We envisioned an acreage a few miles out of town where we could put in a RV site with electric, water, and sewer hookups for the motor home. We could use those utilities in the future to build a house on that acreage. But we soon found that nice plots of land had already been snatched up by developers paying huge prices. We also learned that any plots within city limits had ordinances against parking an RV on them. 

So we moved on to Plan B. That would be to look for a nice house outside of city limits where we could park our motor home beside it. We drove the back roads encircling Lenexa and other towns in the area. We found out that a brand new battery manufacturing plant was being built nearby, and they were gearing up to employ thousands of people. The housing market was going crazy! We didn't find anything we liked that we could afford in the country.

We went to a few open houses and the parade of homes last spring. We got to know the area, as well as the housing market. We walked neighborhoods and met some really friendly people that made us feel welcome. When we found a house and a neighborhood that we really liked, we found that houses sell fast. Within hours of coming on the market, the sellers might have five offers over the asking price, and some of them were cash offers. This was going to be more competitive and harder than we thought!

We left for our summer travels, knowing that we couldn't do anything while we were on the road. But we got daily updates on houses coming onto the market through the zillow app. We really hoped that the perfect house didn't show up on those listings, because we were too far away to do anything about it. 

After months of following the area housing market, we came to a better understanding of what we really wanted. At our age, we thought it was important to have all of our living areas on one level. While stairs are no problem for us now, we planned to live in this house for the long haul. Our son has a large house that is great for big family gatherings, so we wanted a small house. That should be cheaper to buy and cheaper to heat and cool. Three bedrooms and two bathrooms would be plenty for us. Since we have almost no furniture, that would also mean less furniture to have to buy to fill it up. We made a list of all the things we would have to buy immediately: a refrigerator, washer and dryer, living room furniture, dining table and chairs, beds . . . Making all those purchases right away sounded very expensive and very intimidating. We also preferred that this house be less than ten miles away from our son's house, and hopefully on an easy-to-drive route. We preferred a  neighborhood with big trees, but we also wanted a house that was less than 25 years old. We have learned that almost all new housing in this area is multi-level, and most have a basement. We preferred an unfinished basement that would give us good storage and a place for our grandchildren to play.

Once we arrived in the Kansas City area to baby sit, we started looking in earnest. We started by looking at five houses that filled some of our wish list items, but ruled them all out upon further inspection. We found that autumn was a slower time for home purchases, and fewer people put their houses on the market in the fall. We were keeping track of all the new listings, but found nothing. . . until . . .

We saw a brand new zillow listing that was "for sale by owner." Even though we were baby-sitting, we took Eli with us to see the house for the first time. That's him, standing at the end of the driveway with the "for sale" sign in the front yard.

We situated him in the living room with some plastic dinosaurs to play with, and we took a few pictures of the inside of the house.

It checked a lot of our boxes. It was small--with three bedroom and two bathrooms. The kitchen and dining area and living room were all connected in an open floorplan. All the living areas were on one level.

Down the steps was a full unfinished walk-out basement. That was the exact combination we preferred.

For people (like us a year ago) that aren't familiar with the Kansas City-preferred housing style, this is what the back side of a house with a walk-out basement looks like. This city was built on rolling hills, and houses have sprouted up on the sides of those hills with sloping yards.

The house was built in 2009, so it checked the box for being within our preferred age. It's at the top of a nice cul-de-sac that doesn't get much traffic. The best part was that the front door was just 2.4 miles away from our son's house, down an easy-to-drive street. We were feeling pretty hopeful.

The house was owned by an older couple, who had purchased it new. They both passed away in the last 18 months, and their daughter decided to avoid realtor fees because she would rather sell it herself. She planned to have an estate sale to get rid of all the furnishings. But because we own almost nothing, we decided to make an offer "as is." The good news was that the family had left a lot of things that we would need to set up housekeeping in a sticks and bricks house again. The house would come with a refrigerator, washer, and dryer. It also had a dining room table and chairs, a love seat, recliners, some end tables, etc. That would make our list of things that had to be purchased right away a lot shorter. The bad news was that we wouldn't need a lot of the things that were left in this messy basement and garage. The kitchen and bed rooms also had lots of boxes and cabinets still filled with the couple's lifetime accumulations.

There were a few things that the family would still be taking--like those ladders that we really could use. But the rest of the stuff would take a lot of time and effort to sort through, and getting rid of the things we wouldn't keep would be a pain.

We had a building inspection, and found only a few things that needed to be fixed. The situation was complicated by the fact that we were baby-sitting. We had a schedule to keep that included school drop offs and pickups, and Eli's afternoon nap schedule. We were the busiest we had been since our own children were 5 and 2. What a time to be seriously looking at a house!?! We bathed the purchase decision in prayer and had some sleepless nights pondering our future and how this house might be a part of that. Is it time to settle down and buy a house?