We found the house!

The positive news I was hoping for is here for me to share! The house that we first saw almost two weeks ago, that was at the top of our list before we even saw it in person based on online pictures alone which are sometime pretty deceiving, was our favorite out of all of the houses we looked at. It even beat out the home we liked in another town that we almost put an offer on. We went and looked at the house a second time two days later and put an offer on it the following day (this was two weeks ago). The let's make a deal part of buying this home was stressing me out big time. Putting in an offer and not hearing back from the seller for 36 hours is not fun, especially when the counter offer you finally receive is much higher than you were hoping for. We began to think we weren't going to be able to reach an agreement, but 5 days after our initial offer the sellers agreed to our final counter offer and we are on our way to buying our first home!
I have to tell you that I am in love with this house. My feelings may change after the home inspection on Wednesday, but let's hope not. The things we like best about the house...

-Great location/easy access to the highway/not too far outside of the city/close to LOTS of shopping/2 miles from Roxanne's favorite dog park

-It has 4 bedrooms. Originally we said we would be ok with 3, but once you see a house with 4 you really don't want a house with 3.

-Though we would like wood floors throughout the whole first floor, this house has wood in the entryway, kitchen and eating area which is nice, and really decent carpet throughout the formal dining, family and sun rooms. A lot of the carpet in other homes looked like it needed to be replaced sooner than later, but this carpet is actually fine looking.

-Nice sized kitchen with stainless steel appliances (besides the dishwasher)...down the road replace the laminate counters with granite and it would really look nice.

-No formal living room! Most homes we saw had one and it felt like a waste of space. This house has a family room and off of that is a sun room we would use more like a second family room with a couch and smaller tv.

-No major projects before we move in! Sooner than later the pink princess room will need a new coat of paint, but that will be easy enough.

-Huge, fenced in backyard with a nice deck, and there is even an apple and a pear tree back there!

-At the end of the street the house is on is access to a nice walking/biking path that will be perfect for Rob to run on.

The only two things Rob and I both weren't fans of was the curb appeal/exterior of the house and the development the house is in. The house is a two story, two car garage, very yellow home. Yellow is not and will never be one of my favorite colors, and while I know it is just paint it still took me a minute to get past that. Eventually far down the road we would probably paint it a different color. The white painted trim around the windows and the white painted garage doors need to be touched up as well. The part of the development that the house is in is ok, and the house is on a cul-de-sac which is nice, but other parts of the development are not as nice and frankly it looks like a bunch of people just need to man up and do some yard work or even just cut their lawns. But I realize no matter where you live you are going to have neighbors that just don't take care of their home like you wish they would. Even in one of the newer, cookie-cutter, homes close together developments we looked at, where the front yards all looked pretty nice and well groomed you have to deal with it. We looked at 2 homes in that development that were actually only 2 doors down from each other, meaning they shared the same neighbor in between. We walked out onto the back deck of the first home, looked to the right and said 'whoa-what is up with that neighbor's back deck/yard?' They had so much junk and who knows what back there that it really was unpleasant to look at. A few days later we looked at the house down the street, went out back and turned left and were like 'oh my gosh, it's that neighbor again, ugh.' So we decided given all the things we love about the house that we could compromise on a yellow house and a development that wasn't as pretty as we had hoped for. If the inspection goes ok then we are scheduled to close on the house on July 25th...fingers crossed!!