An Actual Life Update
Well, kudos to the few of you still paying attention to the stuff I post here, since I don't believe I've made much of a life update since the start of the year. Thing is... life's taken quite a jump forward in the last month.
It wasn't that long ago that I was just being weird about getting married and turning 30 last year. Aging and maturing and moving across the board in the game of Life. Well, it turns out I wasn't quite done yet.
kubrickfan and I bought a townhouse! And we're moving next weekend...
With that, and the sudden uptick in my Board and Committee and political commitments, I've been quite busy lately. Rather like "the old days," actually.
At any rate, I was most definitely not expecting to be a homeowner before we have even celebrated our one-year wedding anniversary. Oh sure, we had been to one of those home-buying seminars and talked to a realtor to set up a MLS search; but I was thinking end of 2005 at the earliest for serious intentions.
Well, life has a way of sneaking up on you sometimes. I wanted to begin driving around and checking out neighborhoods, and really begining to talk about where we want to live. And then as I began to identify listings that might fit our criteria, I thought it would be good to narrow those criteria by maybe visiting a couple and seeing what was in our price range. You know, like when you go shopping for any major purchase. You want to go around to a few stores, see what's available, ask questions, compare features...
Well, about a month ago, we did our first visit of a couple of places, and the last one we saw that night was -- in a word -- perfect. Cute neighborhood, right price, good layout. And, well, it was one of those opportunities where we decided we couldn't not make an offer even if we weren't as prepared as we had wanted to be.
I didn't mention it because I didn't think our offer would be accepted. We offered list price. It had only been on the market a couple of days. Didn't want to jinx things.
But this whole process has definitely been one of those instances in our lives where it just seems like it's meant to be because things work out so easily and in our favour.
I won't go into all the details. But it really has been almost divine. We've gone from offer to closing in a month. As far as we know, there were no other offers. We had little in negotiations. Home inspection went as expected. Putting the finances together went smoothly. We were able to roll closing costs into the price/mortgage. We forgot about a credit from our realtor towards closing, kubrickfan received a large tax refund, he was able to roll over some monies and cash out an IRA, and we even managed to get some of our earnest money back at closing.
This has allowed us some necessary fundage for moving and purchasing a few needs for the new place -- such as a new bet set. And now we're full of decorating ideas and more...
Anywayz, I was very leery of writing anything in here about it or make any efforts towards moving such as packing or changing any mailing addresses or anything until we actually signed the title papers and officially closed.
I just kept waiting for something to screw it up. It couldn't possibly go this smoothly, could it? But, so far so good. And I can write that we are officially homeowners now!
It wasn't that long ago that I was just being weird about getting married and turning 30 last year. Aging and maturing and moving across the board in the game of Life. Well, it turns out I wasn't quite done yet.
kubrickfan and I bought a townhouse! And we're moving next weekend...
With that, and the sudden uptick in my Board and Committee and political commitments, I've been quite busy lately. Rather like "the old days," actually.
At any rate, I was most definitely not expecting to be a homeowner before we have even celebrated our one-year wedding anniversary. Oh sure, we had been to one of those home-buying seminars and talked to a realtor to set up a MLS search; but I was thinking end of 2005 at the earliest for serious intentions.
Well, life has a way of sneaking up on you sometimes. I wanted to begin driving around and checking out neighborhoods, and really begining to talk about where we want to live. And then as I began to identify listings that might fit our criteria, I thought it would be good to narrow those criteria by maybe visiting a couple and seeing what was in our price range. You know, like when you go shopping for any major purchase. You want to go around to a few stores, see what's available, ask questions, compare features...
Well, about a month ago, we did our first visit of a couple of places, and the last one we saw that night was -- in a word -- perfect. Cute neighborhood, right price, good layout. And, well, it was one of those opportunities where we decided we couldn't not make an offer even if we weren't as prepared as we had wanted to be.
I didn't mention it because I didn't think our offer would be accepted. We offered list price. It had only been on the market a couple of days. Didn't want to jinx things.
But this whole process has definitely been one of those instances in our lives where it just seems like it's meant to be because things work out so easily and in our favour.
I won't go into all the details. But it really has been almost divine. We've gone from offer to closing in a month. As far as we know, there were no other offers. We had little in negotiations. Home inspection went as expected. Putting the finances together went smoothly. We were able to roll closing costs into the price/mortgage. We forgot about a credit from our realtor towards closing, kubrickfan received a large tax refund, he was able to roll over some monies and cash out an IRA, and we even managed to get some of our earnest money back at closing.
This has allowed us some necessary fundage for moving and purchasing a few needs for the new place -- such as a new bet set. And now we're full of decorating ideas and more...
Anywayz, I was very leery of writing anything in here about it or make any efforts towards moving such as packing or changing any mailing addresses or anything until we actually signed the title papers and officially closed.
I just kept waiting for something to screw it up. It couldn't possibly go this smoothly, could it? But, so far so good. And I can write that we are officially homeowners now!