We Finally Bought a Place!

Last night M and I were anxiously awaiting to hear the phone ring. We were expecting to hear back from the sellers to see if they would accept our latest counter offer. The phone sat there on the table, quietly, not ringing.

For the last couple of days, we had all kinds of thoughts swirling through our heads: is this the right place? Can we afford it and still go out to the movies every now and then? Oh my god this is a lot of money.

That kind of stuff.

Now we sat there, almost two years into our house-buying search, waiting for the stupid phone to ring.

But nothing happened.

So I picked it up and checked my email…again. A lot of the back and forth with our broker had been via email, and I decided to check it just for kicks.

New email from our broker…subject line: “YEAH”

And in this day and age of constant electronic communication, when we found our place online and passed it off to our broker, when we relied so heavily on the Internet to learn about the history of the place and the area around it—how appropriate was it that we heard about it via email instead of with the phone call we expected?

Very appropriate I would say.

We are still reeling from this whole process and now comes the hard part: parting with our money and signing a whole bunch of paperwork. This week we’ll have an inspection, we’re meeting with an attorney, and we’re starting to write checks for all the smorgasbord of fees that come with a mortgage.

And we are extremely nervous, excited, and anxious.

It doesn’t matter how much or how long you prepare—buying your first place is scary.

But we will get the first-time home buyer credit, rates are at historic lows, prices have been coming down since we began looking, we got a very good deal, and this place has everything we wanted.

Everything.

We had some rocky times with our broker (including a place we almost bought), but as we were on the verge of closing on this place he and I had a frank talk about the whole process. And he told us we did very well in waiting despite his advice to just buy a place already. We waited and waited and waited.

We saw around 80 places total in a wide spectrum of price ranges and the whole time we knew we’d have to compromise on something. The perfect place simple doesn’t exist. We were wondering if we’d ever find a place we could afford that we both walked in and knew right away was the place.

And it’s true: no place is perfect. But this place is by far the nicest and most complete package. We are pumped we found it.

I’ll obviously be writing a ton about this in the future, but right now I’m still trying to process it all so forgive me if I’m a little incoherent.

Woooo!

Image by Steve Snodgrass