20 Things About Our New House

We had the inspection of our new house yesterday and I am cautiously optimistic that this sale might actually go through (really I won't believe it until we are actually handed the keys but one can hope!).  Here's some things about our house:

1. We are paying $125,000 for it.  This is a little more than double what we first expected to pay for a house here back when everyone was raving about the great $50,000 houses you could buy in Las Vegas at the height of the market downturn (they forgot to mention that trying to outbid cash investors on these super cheap houses is nearly impossible!). 
2. We put $1,500 down on the house (and hope to get some of that money applied to the principle since the seller is paying all of our closing costs).
3. We got the inspection done yesterday.  The cost was supposed to be $340 but the company said they would do it for $300 and then when the inspector arrived at the house and we told him he had done an inspection on a condo we were supposed to buy almost a year ago he said he would do the inspection for $250!  He also raved about what great condition the house is in so that's a good thing.
4. We have a great view of the Strip and our master balcony overlooks a nice park full of palm trees.
5. The house is bigger than we wanted to buy--it is three bedrooms and three baths as opposed to the two bedroom, two bath home we were looking to buy here.
6. On the plus side, we will have plenty of room for guests (and we seem to have had a bunch of these lately!).
7. It's a house and not a condo which I think is a very good thing.  Houses also tend to hold their value better than condos plus you don't end up with noisy upstairs neighbors like we currently have (we just turn the TV up to drown out their noise).
8. It isn't in a gated community.  I pretty much detest gated communities so was really happy that this home isn't in one.
9. It is part of an HOA.  Fortunately the monthly HOA fees are low but I really can't understand why every house in Vegas has to be in an HOA instead of having the city and county doing the job of maintaining the streets and landscaping.  Weird.
10. The yard is big with fruit trees and roses and flowers and the perfect space for a garden spot!
11. The back yard is also big enough for a clothesline which I am going to have hubby put up as soon as we move in.  It costs an arm and a leg here to dry clothes in the dryer so for the first time in my life I am going to try to dry all of our clothes outdoors just like my grandmother used to do.
12. The house is in excellent, move-in ready condition with all new paint and new flooring (this wasn't the case with many of the houses we looked at previously which would have taken over $5,000 worth of improvements before we would even want to move into them).  Needless to say, hubby is a very happy camper.
13. The neighborhood is excellent.  We drove around the neighborhood a bit and it really is a great location.
14. We have already started buying stuff for the house.  None of the bedrooms have ceiling fans in them (a necessity in this hot climate) so today we found nice enough ceiling fans at Walmart for $21.98 each so we bought three.
15. Because the house is bank owned they won't do anything to the house to help it pass the appraisal or inspection so when we noticed that all of the smoke detectors were missing, we bought five new ones, had our realtor let us into the house before the inspector got there yesterday, and quickly installed them (we didn't want to miss out on this great house because of $50 worth of smoke detectors... obviously if the sale falls through we are going back to uninstall them!).
16. The house has a bunch of things we aren't familiar with--gas appliances, a water softener system, a yard irrigation system, etc.  I am sure we will figure out how these things work eventually.
17. We still plan to keep our expenses as low as possible.  I believe our TV antennas will work so we won't need to get cable.  There won't be any internet so I will be getting online at the library most likely instead of paying for cable internet at the house.  We will do everything we can to keep our electric, gas, and water bills as low as possible, etc.  Eventually we will look into solar power for the house (but I understand this has a big up front cost to get started).
18. We have talked about "flipping" the house.  If prices on houses go up here like they are expected to, the hubby and I talked about selling the house as soon as it builds up $100,000 in equity.  We would then take this money and buy a smaller place.  Obviously this is a crap shoot because who knows which direction house values will go here.
19. We will furnish and decorate the house...slowly.  It would be nice to have $10,000 to go spend to furnish and decorate the house as soon as we move in but since that isn't going to happen we will just furnish and decorate it as the money comes in (which means we may be sitting on the floor for a while until we have the cash to buy a sofa).  We are also going to keep the cost of doing this to a minimum (as we learned when we had our massive garage sales when we sold our last house, the things we buy to decorate the house with--art work, trinkets, etc--are worth literally pennies on the dollar when you go to resell the items at a garage sale).
20. We will try not to shop too much at home decor places.  We were at Pier One Imports a few days ago and were lusting over all of the cuuuuttee things they had to make the house look so beautiful.  We will try to restrain ourselves (mostly by not shopping very much and hitting up the Goodwill for things we need for the house first).

So for now we are waiting for the process to move through all of the steps needed until the house closes but overall we are super happy with the house and will be super excited when we get the go-ahead to move in!