Adventures in Zenderland: Home buying adventure

Hello Friends!

Wow...has it been an eventful couple of months since my last update!!!

February 5th was my last post and I gotta say it...that seems like eons ago!

Since then we have completed our house hunting, went on a 5 day vacation to Clearwater Beach, FL, closed on our house, moved, been to a couple of concerts, had a few family visitors in town...I'll just start from the beginning.

I truly do have every intention of updating this blog more frequently than once every couple of months...but the theme for me so far in 2010 is that time just FLIES by before I have a chance to catch everyone up.

House hunting continued throughout our weekends in February. We found "the one" on February 20th and that day turned into probably the most stressful day of our life thus far. The house had gone on the market on Feb 18th, it was very well taken care of by the previous owners, and it was staged beautifully by the selling agent. We knew it was going to go fast. Our realtor came across the listing the morning of the 20th basically by accident and she knew we had to see it. We weren't three steps in the front door and we were both already in love. The selling agent told our agent that she had three other offers going in that day and that if we wanted to make an offer, we needed to do it that day. A couple bottles of wine, a lot of stressful phone calls, and a couple of minor freak outs later...we had made a pretty aggressive offer and were told that the sellers would be accepting Sunday afternoon!! We couldn't have been happier. Turned out...it was well worth the few painful hours we had gone through that day.

Pretty much immediately after that, we started packing and getting all of our ducks in a row to move...again. I think its safe to say that moving is mine and Andrew's least favorite pastime. But, knowing that this move was going to land us in OUR home kept us motivated and within the first weekend, our apartment was 80% packed up.

Our closing date was set for March 31st which worked out perfectly because we had time to squeeze in a vacation to Florida and a Wilco concert.

We closed on Wednesday March 31st and we moved in Saturday April 3rd. Thanks to a few great friends and family members out here, the move went off pretty much without a hitch and we were "in" after just a few hours.

Since then, we've made a couple of purchases...the most significant and most important ones in our minds being the deck furniture and grill. :-) With summer quickly approaching, we plan on spending as much time enjoying our deck as possible. Ah...it's so nice to say "our deck". :-) The moral of this story is that we are thrilled to be first time home owners. And we are hopeful for lots and lots of visitors!! Please accept this as your invitation!