The new house is finally ours!

I know I’ve been neglecting you all and I am sorry. In my defense, I’ve been busier than a one-legged woman in an ass kicking contest and I have a good excuse…

We finally closed on our new house!

Buying a house in almost any circumstance isn’t fun, in my opinion. I like to shop. I like hunting for a good deal. But lets say I’m shopping for something. I browse around the store, find something I like and… ta da! There’s a price tag, which tells me how much I have to pay to make the chair mine. Then I can determine whether or not it’s in my budget, whether or not I really want it, etc. You shop for a house and it’s not that black and white. There’s a listing price and then there’s a bottom-dollar price the Realtor is trying to hold on to like a repressed secret. Then there’s our top-dollar price which we’re not disclosing either. The Realtor wants the highest price we’ll pay so he gets the most commission, we want to pay the lowest price we can so we get a good deal. So we do this little dance trying to find common ground. I haaaate it.

We did this dance and managed to get a good deal and the seller approved our offer. But it was a short sale so this was the first step. It wasn’t really up to the seller, it was up to her evil bank. From approving our original offer to keys in hand, the process took about four months. (Which is actually not that long in terms of short sales) Four months of my dear husband (DH) negotiating and dealing with lots of ridiculous paperwork and me obsessively Pinteresting and getting to the point where although I shouldn’t get my hopes up, I couldn’t picture living anywhere else. Even up to the day before closing and negotiating more ridiculous fees, my husband warned me, “We might have to walk away.”

But, I’m so grateful he was in charge of negotiations because we got a great deal, we didn’t pay all the bogus fees they wanted and we got the house! I’m pretty darn frugal and I’ll admit if I was taking the reins, I’d be like, “TAKE ALL MY MONEY AND GIVE ME THE KEYS!” 

We closed on our fourth wedding anniversary and when I walked in, there were flowers and a bottle of wine on the countertop of OUR new house. I can’t even tell you how great it felt, after four months of craziness, to have a toast with my husband and celebrate our new house and anniversary while our son danced around in circles chanting, “New house! New house!”

That was Thursday. DH took the next day off work and ripped out all the flooring and by Friday afternoon, our new house was officially a construction zone. So, I hope you all are interested in some DIY and home improvement projects because we have much to do… ourselves… on a budget.

I think we’re going to need more wine.