I realize it has been an incredibly long time since I updated this thing, so I may not have any readers left. But, for those loyal few who have stuck with me, I have exciting news! We got a house!!! Finally! All the long months of house hunting are about to pay off! We actually went under contract about 2 weeks ago, but for some reason I never could motivate myself to get on here and tell everyone. Maybe subconciously I was waiting around in case something happened and it didn't go through or something. Who knows. But, at this point, we are closing in less than 48 hours, so hopefully I'm safe.

Our house hunt became quite frustrating after my last post. We lost the bidding war on the house we offered on in November, and after that we started really getting burned out. We figured we had pretty much seen all there was to see in Mansfield, so we started thinking about other locations to look. Charles was considering applying for a job in another school district, so we decided to go on a house hunting hiatus for a while until we figured that all out. I think that was good for us. Right after New Years, we decided to pick things back up. Charles decided not to pursue the job he was thinking about because it was a little further away than we really would like to be. But, we decided to expand our search area to include Burleson. I don't really remember how we came to decide to look there, but it seemed like a nice, smaller town that was still close enough for both our jobs and, most importantly, it was something different to look at. We spend one incredibly long Saturday looking at several houses in Burleson, and one in Mansfield that popped up on the market over the holidays. And, wouldn't you know, we didn't like a single one we saw in Burleson, but fell in love with the one in Mansfield.

So, we made an offer. Unfortunately, so did someone else. And apparently it was a better one, because they pretty much didn't even give us the time of day. That disappointment just about did it for me. I was so ready to be done, and I know Charles was too. But, the next weekend we found a house with the exact same floorplan as the one we loved, just one street over in the same neighborhood. We made an offer, and after a day or two of negotiations, we had a contract. That's when I learned that the really craziness of buying a house starts after you find the house. I had no clue the amount of paperwork required to prove oneself worthy of a mortgage. I basically faxed our life to these people! And since part of our contract stated that we would close on January 30, we only had 2 1/2 weeks to get everything done. Apparently that is a pretty tight schedule in the mortgage business. But, we got our end of the deal taken care of, the seller is putting a new roof on the house tomorrow to take care of his end of the deal, and by Friday night, Charles and I will hopefully be in possession of the keys to our first place! I'm so excited!

The real fun starts after we get the house for real. Since our lease at our apartment goes through the middle of March, we are going to take our time moving in and get some stuff done to the house while it's still empty. We have an appointment with a flooring company on Wednesday to get an estimate on new laminate flooring, which I am super excited about. We are also hoping to put in a sprinkler system and do some painting. I can't wait to see it all come together! I'll try to post some pictures soon!