A new frontier

It's a buyer's market. We don't have a home of our own. Stephen's job is doing well and is steadily receiving raises and has good stability. What does this add up to?

Well, truthfully it adds up to my head exploding, but that's all part of the game.

Yes, we have started the official process of getting our first house. It's scary. It's exciting. It's nerve-racking. It's frustrating.

But I can't complain all too much. For the enormous life changing event that this is, it's gone very smoothly so far. Almost as if someone up there is saying "finally! It's about time!"

It started Monday morning. Stephen and I had an appointment with a mortgage broker. We came out with a pre-approval for a loan with a great rate and excellent terms and a referral for a real estate agent. I called Jamie (the realtor, who we LOVE), and by the end of the day she had already emailed me our first list of homes to look at. Wow! We drove by some houses Wednesday night and had our first walk throughs today.

Wow! What a whirlwind! Now you can see why I said that my head is exploding.

Now, I have to point out that we're not really intentionally rushing into this. We've been talking about this for months now and have been scouting out homes on our own for weeks. So we had an idea what was out there and generally what to expect. What I couldn't have prepared for though was how well this has been going and how fast.

So what have we found? A lot of very different houses. Out of the 5 that we saw today, 2 were nos. One was a remodel that was never finished, so that would be way too much work for us to take on. And the other was a decent enough house, but it was on an incredibly busy road. Not cool. The 3 others:

House #1: Unbelievable location - totally ideal for us. 3 blocks away from Jen & Phil, across the street from a huge park and a great elementary schools, close to tons of shopping. Oh, and walking distance to a Starbucks. Yay! We actually weren't able to get inside the house to look at it because the key box was jammed. But we took a walk around and were able to see into most of the house. We'll see what we think once we can get inside.

House #2: Good things: good location, proximity wise. Good amount of space, great layout, fabulous kitchen, gorgeous yard, updated electricity and heating. Oh, and did I mention that I'm in love with the house? Seriously, it's amazing. Bad things: parking is funky. It's on a semi-busy street, and you're not allowed to park on the street. There is room for parking 2 cars next to the house, but you have to drive up a sloped driveway and then drive backwards back down it into the street or turn around in a fairly tight spot. But 2 cars - that's it. What happens when people come to visit us? What? No house warming party? No birthday parties? Ugh. It's also a short sale, but we're waiting to find out where we stand with that. We'll see.

House #3: In the Stadium district of North Tacoma. Ideal location in the way of I've always wanted to live there. It needs some serious work, but it's pretty much stuff that we can do. It has so much potential, it's great. The amount of work scares me a little and it means that we'll probably be living there for a while before some of the work gets done. But Stephen was all excited about it - we'll see.

One thing in common between the houses - "we'll see". And we still have many more houses to see. So, more to come.