Under contract

We are officially under contract.

We are having our home inspection on Wednesday.

We close on 9/15/08, our anniversary.

As long as nothing goes wrong with our financing between now and then, we should be out of the house we rent and into the new home by October 1.

It's a pretty cool house. Bigger and cleaner than we expected to get in our price range, with a bigger lot. It's in an established neighborhood close to my mother-in-law. And, actually, that's great. I love my mother-in-law, and she watches Bean after school when Hubs or I can't make it out of work early enough to pick her up.

It had renters before, but it has brand new carpet, paint, tiled kitchen and bathroom. The backyard is an eyesore, but it has a clothesline! I'm very excited about the clothesline.

Wait until I post pictures of the godawful green awning that covers the back deck, though. It's spectacular. In a white trash kind of way. I'll probably wait to post pictures until we close. I don't want to get any more emotionally attached to this place until we figure out if it will really be ours.

Already sick of looking

So. I've been house hunting for 24 hours now, and I'm already developing a nervous twitch. I guess I shouldn't say that I've been hunting for 24 hours. I've been looking at homes online for years, increasing my search in the last few months, and in the last couple of weeks, it's all I'm doing with my free time.

Hubs, Bean, and I all went looking at houses yesterday with our realtor. It was about what I expected. Saw a lot of mediocre houses that in one way or another, just weren't right for us. A couple smelled like smoke, one had a completely worthless kitchen with two cabinets and a butcher block top rolling dishwasher (trust me, there was no saving this kitchen on our budget). One was listed as a two-bedroom/one-bath, but really, it was more like one bedroom on the main floor and a big open loft area on the upstairs half floor with no door, no hope for a closet, and carpet that looked like death.

We were fortunate, however, that only one house smelled like urine. Human urine. What's sad is that we'll drive by houses, Hubs will say, "What do you think of that one?", and I will respond with, "It looks like it smells like pee. Human pee." This one did. Oh, the hilarity.

Tonight, we're looking again. From 6pm to 9pm. Only, I'll drive home, eat quickly, drive the 25 minutes back to the area where I work with the fam in tow, look at one house I'm 98% sure is waaaaay too small and too expensive, look at another house in the general area, then drive back down to where we live to look at houses down there.

Let me say that I'm not thrilled with where we live. But if what we saw yesterday in our more desired part of town is any indication of what we can afford, we'll sacrifice. There are some cookie-cutter communities close to where we live, and I hate cookie-cutter communities. But I also know that lots and lots of people love them. Their gleaming whiteness, their newness, their neat little square lots. So I'd be willing to fake it for a few years until we could afford what we REALLY want. And, frankly, if I'm going to live in a soulless neighborhood, there are some damn fine soulless neighborhoods in our general area that are also in our general budget.

But I'm already tired. I'm already tired of looking at houses, thinking about houses, thinking about money, fretting about the monthly mortgage, going back and forth between what I think we can afford and what I'd LOVE to just say "yes!" to. I'm tired of being in the car and driving and sitting on my ass. I'm tired of MLS numbers and FHA and talking about double-paned storm windows.

If I make it through this and haven't ended up as the main focus of a story on the Oxygen show "Snapped", I'll post pictures.