Our house hunting process

We had always planned on staying in our starter home for just a few years, but once we realized we'd be staying in the Twin Cities area (originally, we thought Mike would go into academia, likely with a move out of state) we figured we'd wait 1-2 years to upgrade our house. The whole process to get into our new house moved both faster than we expected and slower than I'd have liked at times.

Starting the process
From our financial planning, we figured we'd have the down payment for a house at the top of our budget by July/August 2020. I'd been casually browsing Redfin regularly for fun ever since we bought our last house and one day last July a house on Como Lake caught my eye. There was an open house and, as it was just a couple miles away, we checked it out. Turned out it was a flip and definitely not for us, but it led to months of going to open houses nearly every weekend. As many as we could fit in each weekend before Mike got sick of them for a bit (he's definitely not as into houses as I am).

As we visited open houses, I tracked each one in a spreadsheet to mark the features, what we liked and then how quickly it went off the market and what it eventually sold for so I could get a feel for what was hot and pricing.

At this point, it was still all pretty casual. Just one house was one we would've considered and we weren't too sad to pass it up as it only had a single car garage. The Fall Parade of Homes had a lot of inspiration and reinforced Mike's love of newer homes and my desire to not have a completely open concept house.

Defining our criteria
Our last house search was fairly straightforward - we had to get out of our rental by a certain date with a very set budget and only one car at the time meant a very defined area to search. With this search, our options were much more open in many ways. That was great! But, it could easily lead to spinning in circles.

Based on all the houses we saw during our casual search and lots of conversation, we narrowed our main criteria down to these must haves:

• Location: reasonable commute (20-30 minutes average) and "good schools" (that has a different meaning to everyone, of course, particularly as we don't yet have kids). For us, this narrowed it down to parts of Minneapolis close to I-94 and the river, Mac-Groveland, Highland Park and St Anthony Park in St Paul and a few NE suburbs including Roseville and Shoreview. I couldn't see myself moving to the 'burbs yet and preferred staying in MSP proper for walkability (sidewalks and things nearby) and ease of access, whereas Mike loved the schools, price points and space in the suburbs but wasn't so keen on the lack of public transit. 
• Large, nice kitchen. Ideally with a double oven for hosting holidays and a window over the sink overlooking the backyard. I saw a sink like that in a flip and just loved it. We were fine doing renovations in most other areas, no so much the kitchen. 
• Oversized lot. Our old house had an oversized lot and we got used it, plus Mike has an affinity for grassy space. I wanted a decent patio area. 
• 3-4 bedrooms. 3 actual bedrooms and then an office space. Master bedroom with en-suite and large closet. 
• 2 car garage. I got a car when I changed jobs to one with no easy public transit access. 
• Dining space large enough to host holidays. We frequently host and our previous house required rearranging the entire living room/dining room to do so. 
• Room for a theater space in the basement.

Our nice to haves included:

• Walkable to a grocery store, park, etc. 
• Fireplace.
• Character. I loved a lot of older homes with built-ins and pretty windows. Mike didn't have a preference for that, and at 6'2" he'd often hit his head going into the basement in older homes. 
• Front entry closet with easy access. In our old home, it was blocked when the front door was open, not great for guests. 

With this criteria, we ended up seeing over 30 houses before landing on ours. Many had a lovely first floor but then the 2nd floor or basement wouldn't work out, or if it was recently updated I'd typically want to change a few things and it felt silly to do that with recent updates or it wouldn't work with the budget.

Getting a realtor
From July through October, we were casually looking at houses that seemed interesting - both in and slightly above our price range - to get a feel for the market. Then in mid October there was a house that Mike loved online. It had a .3 acres, a huge yard for the city, had the character I liked and was right on the river. Needed some work, but the price wasn't bad. It never had an open house so we never got to see it. So, we got a realtor in case a situation like that came up again.

For our first realtor meeting, we saw two houses - a gorgeous one that just wasn't for us at the top of our budget and a total fixer upper that we thought was the lower end but turned out to be even more $ than what we ended up with. We also said it could be a long process, keeping in mind that we likely couldn't do the top of our budget for a few months at least. Turns out, of course, it wasn't.

The house we almost put an offer on
Since by the time we met with our realtor we'd already seen a lot on our own, we ended up seeing just five houses with her. I had started getting a bit antsy seeing all these much nicer houses and we were struggling between Mike's desire for a lake house in the suburbs and mine to stay in the cities.

Then we saw this house. In St Anthony Park, one of my favorite neighborhoods, huge yard, a converted duplex with a beautiful kitchen, living room and patio. It was lovely and I so wanted to put an offer on it. We actually told our agent to put an offer in and then minutes later backed out. As soon as we started talking about writing a letter and the price for the offer, we knew we couldn't do it. Getting the basement we wanted for the theater room would've required digging it out further, which we couldn't get an estimate on in the short time frame we had and we also suspected that we couldn't offer enough to get it anyways. It ended up going for $50k over asking, and at its price point that didn't work for us at all.

Getting our house
Not offering on that house with the huge yard was difficult, and a bit emotional for me. St Anthony Park homes go fast and there's few of them, and I was convinced we just weren't going to find anything we both loved. I wanted to pause searching for a bit and figured we should just wait until we could get something closer to the top of our budget.

But, the first St Anthony Park house led to another one in the same neighborhood. Discussing that one had led to us agreeing that we could do a 10-12 year home rather than trying to find a "forever home," and the next week Mike sent me the below house that would become ours. He initially sent it to prove to me there were other homes in the neighborhood coming on the market, and we could tell it'd need some work to be perfect for us. But the price was great, and the work looked doable from the photos so we scheduled a showing.

I loved it right away. There were some projects - besides what we could tell from the photos, the floors needed to be refinished - but that all seemed reasonable. Mike didn't even hit his head in the basement and the ceilings overall were very tall, which he loved. He still wasn't convinced, though, always thinking we should wait for the spring market. I ran some estimates on the work to be done, we went back to its open house and with that we made an offer and got it! The numbers convinced Mike and now he keeps saying "this is such a great house!"