SHAFTWAXER

So yeah, we bought a house today…

…HOLY FUCK WE BOUGHT A HOUSE…!?!

Dear sweet shit, looking for a house is… interesting.

When people were told that we were going to try and get married as well as buy a house in roughly the same time period, most people felt that we were insane for trying to take on so much at one time. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate unless you are dealing with a bridezilla or something like that. The wedding is not a problem. Pretty much everything is in place aside from a few musical choices and the final details on the cake. Otherwise, that’s about it. I’m sure that there will be something that comes along during the last week, but really, this process has been pretty smooth.

The house, that’s another story entirely.

There are many things that go into the process of finding your home, and it seems that it is the stuff that is not directly attached to the home that makes the biggest difference. When looking to buy your first home, in a way it makes you look forward towards the next 10 years or so of your life and make decisions about lots of things. How long are you planning on staying there? Are you planning on staying at your current job? Do you anticipate transferring? What are the schools like? Are you planning on having kids? When do you anticipate having your first child? How many children would you like to have? What’s the neighborhood like? What is the general trend of the neighborhood looking like over the next 10 years or so? And all of this is above and beyond the layout of the house, the features it has, and what features you absolutely must have and what can you live without.

Obviously, if you are planning on entering a lifelong relationship with somebody, these are all things that you should be talking about. We had talked about these things off and on over the years, but the housing process pretty much make you face each and every one of those RIGHT NOW. And not just what you would like to come of them all, it becomes you having to start to solidly start committing to those. In a strange way, your life together seems to start more intensely with the house than it does with the wedding.

That being said, the process has been going on for a while now. We had set a price limit for what we were willing to spend, and our initial searches were a bit below what we considered our maximum price to be. Fortunately searching for a home is much easier than it was in the past. Being able to do many of the searches from home on the internet makes life a lot more convenient. That being said, at this point we must have “looked” at over 200 homes. We have physically visited 8 or 9 of these in person. Since we already have a very solid idea of what we are looking for, we were able to usually tell within a minute or so once we got into a house if it was going to be taken off the list. With alarming regularity, this is exactly what was happening. It makes you a little crazy. Are your standards unrealistically high? Are you not at a point financially where you can get what you want? Are you doing something wrong?

It was getting difficult. Obviously neither of us had been through this process, so there was a lot of doubt and wondering.

FINALLY things started to look up earlier this week. We found one. It’s in a great neighborhood, the layout is intelligent, it has ample storage space for our crap, it allows us to grow should we decide to stay, and it has a lot of the little things that we were hoping for in a home. This weekend, we will be visiting 6 or 7 more homes. When it’s all said and done, we will make our final visits to the home we found earlier in the week as well as any “finalists” we come across this weekend. Hopefully, by the middle of next week, it will be time to make an offer.

Here’s hoping for the best.