Part 2

If you haven't yet, read this.

Right.  So I literally backed down the street, rolled down the window, and yelled, "NICE HOUSE!" at the Realtor and the prospective buyer who were coming out.

"Want to see it?" the Realtor replied.

"Hell yeah!"  I said, but then she asked me if I was working with someone, and I said I was, and she said that she wouldn't want to step on someone's toes and I'd better go get my Realtor.

It just so happens that Lauren, the Realtor we've been working with for about 2 years, lives on the back of the same block we were on, so I drove around the block.  She was in her front yard watching her kids, talking on the phone.  I waited until she finished her call, then said, "We have to go see a house right now." 

"My baby's asleep inside..." Lauren said.  She's so professional, she only looked at me like I was crazy a little bit.

"My sister Megan was a first grade teacher and she has a one year old and I trust her with my life, can she watch your kids?"

I mean, obviously it was an emergency.

So Lauren left her three small children in my sister's capable hands, and we walked over to the house.  I called BJ on the way and had him meet us there.  "When?" he asked.  "RIGHT NOW."  I said.

As soon as I walked in, I knew it was my house.  I was ready to put in an offer right then and there.  We have had so many houses bought out from under us, and some that we've wanted to look at that were sold before we could get there.  I knew we had to act fast.  BJ was less convinced, so we made arrangements to look at it a second time the next morning with our dads.

The next morning we arrived, and we were told that there were 8 showings that day with several second showings...  So we wrote an offer in the kitchen.  The seller accepted.  Now I'm writing to you from our BRAND NEW HOUSE!

It is so beautiful.  The master bedroom is bigger than the entire upstairs was at our old house.  It has everything we needed (a bedroom on the first floor with its own bath - that will be BJ's office, unless a parent needs to come stay with us someday), a basement so I don't have to take Xanax during storms anymore, a HUGE sunny backyard, a wine drinking porch, an amazing kitchen, a two car garage, a front porch that's so welcoming and inviting...  The list of things I love just goes on and on.  The street it's on bears my grandfather's middle name.  It's like it was meant to be.

We managed to get an amazing mortgage rate, too, and now they're starting to go up again, which was something we feared would happen when they bottomed out about a month ago.  If we bought today the rate would be about 1% higher. 

The seller was so amazing - she fixed everything we asked her to fix.  She could have held out for a higher offer and gotten us into a bidding war with someone else, but instead she accepted our offer and that was that.  I brought her a plant when we did our final walkthrough, and thanked her for being amazing and for letting us buy this gorgeous house.

The closing was so much fun - we laughed and joked the entire time.  The banker even came because, as she said, "I knew this would be a great closing!"

Ok, break time is over, I have 10,000 pictures in my car that need to be unpacked.  I'm sorry I've been busy but I had to upheave my entire life and bring it over here.  I haven't even begun to tell you about the process of keeping our old home as a rental and all the fun Craigslist people I've met as a result.  That'll be Part 3.  It's well worth the wait!

My Triumphant Return to Blogging

"Where," you might be saying to yourself, "the hell has Amy BEEN for the past month and four days?!  Her niece turned one and she disappeared!"

I will tell you, my friends.  I will tell you chronologically and in a series of posts with ample pictures and hyperbole.

It all started about 50 days ago.  How do I know?  I'll get to that.  But about 50 days ago my sister Megan and her baby Kate came down for a visit.  We went places.  We did things.  Then both the kids (Jack and Kate) fell asleep in the car.  "Rolling nap!" we said, and drove directionlessly around town.  Normally we do rolling naps on the phone, so it was a nice treat to be able to roll in person.

Megan just bought a house last year, and she knew that we'd been looking, so I said, "Let's drive by some of the houses we've looked at."  She was game, so I steered the family truckster into one of my favorite neighborhoods in town.  We drove past the one that was too narrow, and the one that was too beige, and we were on our way the one that I almost bought while BJ was out of town when......  <brakes>

HOLD THE PHONE - LOOK AT THAT HOUSE!

...and now it's time for me to go get Jack so you'll have to check back later to find out what I said to the Realtor who was coming out as we were backing up.