Our First Home....

So....Where to begin...Sigh. I recently came back from a job offshore and me and my wife decided to look for a house. Nothing really serious on my part but mainly looking for her. At the moment, we are living in a 40' 5th wheel RV/Toyhauler with our 5 year old son. It’s big for an RV but small for a home, New 2009 model just bought last Sept months after I got out of the Navy. She’s in it more than I am due to the fact I work offshore. So she is ready to get out. So I get home and we start looking at houses on various sites and find a realtor that way to get us into homes we’d like to look at. So for a good 3 weeks straight, we actually managed to look in over 50 houses. We had our options fine tuned as to what we wanted at first and as we began to look more and more, we found more and more we liked. We went from looking at 1500sf homes to 2700sf homes in our price range of 200k for a VA loan. And then it happened...we just happened to bump up our sf maximum and found a home that was almost 4000 sf. WOW are you serious? My wife didn’t even want to go look at it! But I finally talked her into it just to look at what 4000sf really was. We had never even been in a house that big before. So we added it to our list of houses for the day to go look at and it ended up being the last house on our list for the day. We were both nervous about looking at it because it was soo big. We were excited about a few 3000sf houses we had seen that day. And this was another 1000sf. Well, it is huge, it is a model home, it is in a new housing development, and the people building the homes foreclosed. They are no more. We want it. OMG this house is awesome! AND it’s in our price range. So we put in an offer the next morning just happens to be a Wednesday and the realtor says we can expect to hear back in 2-5 business days and she will try and find comps for us and get is any information she can. So Thursday rolls around and she has one comp...3700sf sold for 225k. Then tells us the house is a foreclosure and is being sold as is and has actually been on the market off and on for almost a year. People buy it...try and rent it. Then put it back up for sale. Me and my wife are confused by this and look up the prior listing. WOW the pictures are horrible. A couple picas of drapes and a set of stairs...and one from outside. No wonder no one went to look at it. They were probably trying to rent it for way to much as well. So we put in an offer at 10k less than they asked for but still more than they had asked for 4 months ago by 1k. We heard back from them on Wednesday morning saying there was another offer and it was now up to our best and final offer. So we offered 100$ more than they asked and 1400 for closing costs. They accepted!! YAY! So we start scheduling inspections. The night before I get my inspections...LAST night to be exact. I get a call from our Loan officer, VA will not do out loan. The house is too big. Based off our debt to income ratio they assume the house will cost a certain amount of money for utilities and it puts us over. The loan officer had based the information on our approval on a 2700sf house maximum and she was amazed we found 4k for the price we did. So now we have to find another lender. Our loan officer wants to do a FHA loan now. It’s not a horrible thing but very surprising that it actually came down to how big the house was. We are going to continue to try and get the house still.

So based on our debt to income ratio we were approved for 200k at 5.5% with VA

Suddenly the size of the house in an issue and we cannot get the loan.

Sigh. So were off to talk to the loan officer today and hopefully get something worked out.

We are really hoping this works out for us. I believe this house is a really good deal and so does the realtor. We managed to find a few more homes built by the company that foreclosed and the 4000sf models they built are going for more than 375k. This was one of their model homes with all the bells and whistles, Granite, sprinkler system, new appliances, high end stone facing instead of brick, the works...

So does anyone have any advice for this situation? This is our first actual home we are buying.