Life moves fast when your wife falls in love with a house.
Over the weekend, Carrie researched and whittled down a list of a 100+ houses into a favorites list of 15. Monday, she whittled it down further and picked 7 houses she wanted to visit on Tuesday.
Six were busts. One was "the one."
Wednesday, Carrie made arrangements to visit "the one" again with me in tow. I showed up at 5:25 PM after tutoring. Thirty five minutes later we left talking about what our offer would be. That night, our agent came over at 8:15 PM and we spent the next hour filling out paperwork. Our agent left, and we ended up on the phone with USAA talking loans. Bed time came just short of 11 PM.
Today, Carrie woke up feeling sick. It's crunch time at work for me, so staying home to help wasn't an option (5 IEPs in three days). I go to work, and I receive an email from home. The appraiser is en route. I can only imagine the panic my wife went into! That afternoon, Carrie calls to tell me about the counter-offer. I get home from work around 5:40 PM and Carrie and I hop on the phone with USAA for another hour plus. 7:20 PM, our agent is back and we're initialing a modifying contract. It should be faxed off and USAA should be ordering the appraisal.
Carrie and I are going to own a house! It's smaller square footage than what we have now, but it has a yard, driveway, street parking, and no shared walls. Quaint, homey, and modest are the best words to describe it.
It took a week to put the townhouse up for sale, a week to sell it, and it took less than a week to find a home and put a contract on it. The time in between was waiting for inspections to clear and fixing random odds and ends. Our inspection of our home-to-be is scheduled for next week, but hopefully that'll be the last bit of work as we settle in to the long lead-up to closing in June.
Throughout the process, we've worked like dogs. Carrie was never happy with how clean the house was, and Shane going to bed just meant it was time to clean or do chores most nights. It feels good to know it wasn't for naught.
We also had a lot of support from our families. Carrie's parents have held on to the cats since we put the house up. My mom volunteered to hold on to Shane for a couple of extra hours of child care on Wednesday so I could view the house. I want to travel and live somewhere far away one of these days, but it's hard to imagine not having my family nearby.
From this point on, we're going to be praying that nothing comes out to throw the contracts out of whack. The HOA still has to look this house over, and tomorrow we should hear what the appraiser reports.
I'm saving my excitement until more of our ducks in a row. Carrie's ecstatic enough for the two of us!
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