First offer on a house FAIL!

I haven't blogged in a while. Partly because we've been pretty busy looking for a house and with work and partly because I haven't had much to say, or at least anything that would be interesting to the two followers I have! :) (Thanks for following ladies!)

On Sunday, The Husband and I went to the first of 5 houses we had scheduled to look at that afternoon...and we fell in love! We walked around, talked about ideas and then went outside and found the most awesome, most beautiful backyard we'd seen at any of the houses. We both knew this felt like home. We went to look at the other houses, or as our realtor put it "Let's go look at the other dumps" - HA! None of lived up to the first house and we kept comparing them all to the first one. We asked if we could go back to look one more time. Afterward, we went home with the intentions of putting in an offer in the morning.

After speaking to our mortgage guy, he told us he'd need the most current paystub from each of us. Since we are living in a temporary home at the moment, I leave all my paystubs at work...in a city that is about a 35-40 minute drive with morning traffice. First FAIL! We had to drive to my city of employment and all the way back, just to grab my paystub. You can be sure those babies will be coming home with me from now on.

After meeting with the mortgage guy, we booked it to our realtor's where we found out there was another offer coming in as well. We decided on our best possible offer, wrote a schmaltzy letter about us and how much we'd been looking forward to buying our first home together since meeting and how we'd fallen in love with their home and how beautifully they'd cared for it and sent them both off by fax. That was at 1:50pm. Almost exactly 2 hours and 40 minutes later, my husband got THE CALL. Turns out the other offer was a FULL CASH offer and they decided to accept it. However, the agent made sure to tell us that the sellers "really appreciated the letter and would've taken our offer if the other one hadn't been cash." Yeah, thanks. I feel SO much better now.

We are so disappointed and upset. Everything we find that we really like either already has an offer on it or it's out of our price range. The ones we are finding are outdated and not exactly the location we want. I am getting so stressed that we'll never find something we love and will want to live for years to come.

Back to the drawing board.

What about you guys? How have your house hunts gone? Any advice?