The Process Begins...

Yesterday we went and spoke to a realtor about selling our house and buying another one closer to Jorden's school. From what she told us, we may not have a hard as time as we thought when it comes unloading this one. Even though the housing market in general sucks right now when it comes to selling, the value in our neighborhood did go up. That combined with the home improvements we've already done, we should walk away with at LEAST a $10k profit. She also explained to us that houses in the price range of ours are selling really fast in Fayetteville. We do have somethings that we know we'll have to fix, like the kitchen floor will have to be retiled and most of the interior will have to be painted. (Word of advice: Don't ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER use flat paint. The slightest bump can leave a mark on the wall and it's not scrubbable so your only option is to paint over it.)

Now when it comes to buying, we went online last week and picked out a few houses to look at. When we first got to Fayetteville, we had to be out of our hotel in 5 days so we had NO TIME to pick out what we wanted. Now we can shop around. It's exciting! We thought we were going to have problems with our VA loan because we didn't think we could use it again but our realtor said that policy recently changed so we can still use it. Since we are using the VA loan we should stay away from foreclosed houses. The reason why is because if there's something wrong with the house, the bank (who owns the house) won't fix it and the VA won't approve the loan unless it is fixed. But our realtor is going to go through and print out a list of houses in our price range that we may want to take a look at. I can't wait!