I cannot tell you the relief I'm feeling tonight (and the complete and total joy of knowing we are going to have a house). While things won't feel completely real until closing and even more so once we're officially out of our apartment and into the new house, I'm definitely chanting the, "It's ours. It's ours. It's ours," chant in the back of my mind. I've been fantasizing about this house since we saw first saw it and now I can really start planning in earnest (look out for a paint color post soon).
And, of course, amongst all my excitement and current brain-shift into full-on nesting mode (similar to what I experienced when I was pregnant), there is the new found anxiety of what it means to be a home-owner. We'll encounter expenses we did not as apartment-dwellers (I don't say this with any disdain, by the way--we've enjoyed our apartments, but have come to a point where it's just not working for our family), such as paying for oil/gas, a presumably larger electric bill, and home and yard maintenance. (I'm sure there are other things that I'm missing, but bare with me, it's just about 11:30 at night and I've been up since 6 AM.) I'm not so much worried about how we will handle these things, because I know we'll do it, but I do worry about the strain. I worry about money. I worry when I have it and I worry when I don't. I worry about how we're going to get it (i.e. how, when, where I'm going to get a job after graduation in May).
This may very well mean tightening our belts more than we're used to and forgoing a few purchases we were hoping to make. It also means I'm forcing myself and the Dear Old Husband (DOH--and yes, it is pronounced "Doh!", as in Homer Simpson's catch-phrase) into a crash course on personal finances. I imagine DOH and I will be spending the next couple of months curled up next to each other with a couple of books on personal finances and my laptop, pursing out our funds to the pertinent areas on a family budget.
But for tonight (what's left of it), I'm just going to enjoy the fact that we have (or will very shortly have) a home. A yard for our daughter to play in, a large open living space to spend time with friends and family in, no crazy neighbors crashing around above your head at 1:30 in the morning, and much closer to where we want to be (figuratively and geographically).
2 comments:
Yay!!! Congratulations!! So exciting! Tito and I are about to venture there ourselves as well. We've decided we're stuck here until he can get a job elsewhere with Boeing, and only Boeing. So we're tired of living in apartments, and I don't want to raise a second kid in an apartment. So hopefully in the fall we'll either be in something here, or maybe we will be on the East Coast!
Yay!! I agree it's crummy doing the kid thing in an aparment. There's no room, you don't really feel like it's yours, and there are the neighbors...I won't get into that, haha. Good luck on the house hunt!
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