Well, it’s been a busy time. Condo after condo. House after house. Yet no end in sight. While we’ve seen many wonderful houses and neat properties, none have quite panned out yet. Small spaces, high price tags, and untenable accommodations. The quality houses are either too expensive, or so far away that they would be difficult to work with. The quality condos, near where we would like to live are either too small, or too pricey. In fact, most every property we’ve viewed has bathrooms that are too small for me to use.
On top of that we’ve hit a financing wrinkle. The whole time we had assumed that if you were pre-approved for $300,000 and found a house for $200,000 that the bank might allow you some money, say $250,000 to make repairs and upgrade (notably for accessibility). However, we’ve found out that this is not the case, and the bank will only loan out 97% of the appropriated value of the property being purchased.
We have one final option in the deck … building. It turns out it’s more affordable than we originally thought, and the building company, Veridian Homes, has done accessible accomodations before. Furthermore, the cost of the accessibility changes can be included up front in the building cost, removing the financing problem. The only downside is that Madison is so saturated with homes and properties that the closest building sites are 40 to 50 minutes out by bus, and neither of us presently drives.
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