The timeline of the house-hunting trip

Last week, my wife and I had a whirlwind of a house-hunting trip. There's lots to talk about, from neighborhoods and restaurants to commutes to inspections. But for now, here's a quick timeline:

Day 1: Arrive at the airport in the afternoon, check in at hotel, have
lunch and go out with our real estate agent to tour neighborhoods. We
see a few houses, but don't like any of them. We go out to dinner and
fall in love with house #1 from the outside.

Day 2: We see house #1 on the inside and realize it's a huge fixer upper
and fall out of love. Painful. We see a couple more houses
and fall in love with house #2. We have a nice dinner at a neighborhood restaurant.

Day 3: We try out the commute from house #2 to the eastside. We
look at house #2 again from the inside. Nothing wrong yet. Decide to
go ahead and make an offer. Agent suggests we have the house
pre-inspected so we can wave the inspection contingency and make our offer more
appealing.

Day 4: Get the house inspected. Wow, house inspectors are cool.
They know everything about houses. House #2 is in great shape overall, but
needs a new roof immediately. We decide that's ok.

Day 5: We make the offer. Fly home to the California. Wait
nervously by the phone. The sellers accept the offer. We beat out another
offer of the same price because we were able to waive the inspection contingency.

Day 6: We start to fret about mortgages...

My favorite part of the process was (other than finding a great house) the inspection. Right now, I can't imagine that I'd want to commit the time and effort to making an offer on an older house without getting it inspected first. First of all, it wasn't too expensive (about two hundred dollars; it's cheaper than a normal inspection because you don't pay for the final report unless you get the house), and for our money we were able to learn a lot in general about houses in Seattle, the various problems they tend to have, common pest issues in the Northwest, neighborhood geography, older homes, etc. In the end, not only did it strengthen our hand because we could waive a major contingency, but we were much more comfortable making the offer because we knew more about what we were buying. As an added bonus, holding the inspection the day before the sellers were going to listen to offers scared off at least one potential competing offer, increasing the odds of our offer getting accepted.