Buying a house and making it a home used to mean you had to spend your nights and weekends doing DIY work, spending your earnings or using a credit card to pay for it all. Everyone calls it sweat equity. While DIY work can be rewarding and save you on labor costs, most of us are too busy to deal with it. 

As a home buyer sometimes you’ll find a house that’s missing a key component that every other house in the neighborhood has in this case a garage, but it doesn’t have to make you overlook this house in fact it can actually help you take this house and turn it into a home with a renovation mortgage.

Questions are the fuel to our communications here at AmeriFirst. We love them. It allows to help hopeful home buyers better understand the process. One person's question is very likely the same question for many others. In other words, you're never alone in your questions about the home buying process.   This question came from a reader, so we thought we'd share the answer.

A home buyer called me the other day to ask a great question about buying a foreclosed home and taking care of some of the work on it. Have you seen these vacant houses? Some of them need a lot of love. This house in particular had a driveway issue that was affecting the foundation of the house. Of course I immediately thought of the Full FHA 203k. This home improvement loan must be used when the work involves the structure of the house. The caller asked if the 203k would pay for a new driveway. Since I didn't have the answer at the top of my mind, I leaned on our expert.

It happens a lot. We'll see a contact form from a potential borrower that tells us "ACME Bank gave me mortgage pre-approval. But the house I want needs work and they don't do renovation loans." Don't worry, your home buying process isn't completely off the rails. We can help.