Buying our first house

In March of this year I applied for a home loan, along side my husband, mostly just for shits and giggle. To our astonishment, we were approved and on the phone with our lender within hours.

We were approved for an FHA loan. It's a loan from the Federal Housing Administration for first time home buyers and the cool thing is that you only need a 3.5% down payment, which for us is awesome.  We got us a pretty awesome real estate agent, and started the search right away.

At the end of March we found a home that we loved, in our price range and all of the things on our check list (at least 3 bedrooms, a garage, a pool, open living spaces) and put an offer in.  It was a short sale, so we knew it would take forever to get into it, but this worked in our favor. It means we would have more time to save money that we needed for down payment and any renovations/decorating we had to do before we moved in.  April, May, June, July came and went without us hearing much of anything. Other than we needed to sign this paperwork, we needed to sign that paperwork, and small update calls. At the beginning of this month we go notice that his home had a second mortgage on it, and that is was most likely going to go into foreclosure, so we had to walk away from it.

Since then we have been back on the trail of searching homes, this time no short sales, and no foreclosures. We saw six one Saturday, three of the six we liked, two of the six we loved. We made offers on both, both had already accepted other offers. We saw two more last Friday, they were both junk.  Mike is out looking today actually with our Realtor, and without me which is really scary. But he promised lots of pictures and notes. We have very similar taste. We know that our home has to be move in ready (little to no renovations) and aesthetically pleasing (good bones). Things can be changed/upgraded as we live there. If the kitchen is outdated, we don't care, as long as the stove works. Floors are crap? Doesn't matter right now. Mold, and foundation problems and the AC is bad and the roof is leaking? No go.

This has just been a long, sobering process for me. Mike has really kept the faith and knows something will be out there for us, but for me I feel like this has been the longest most stressful process of my life. We'll find a house, I know that but I just want to know when?!