The Waiting Game

This is the worst part in the home buying process. The absolute worst. The part where you sit in your crummy little apartment, the one you've been dying to ditch almost before you moved into it, waiting for your phone to ring.

Even after years of watching HGTV, TLC, and Bravo (all homes to several real estate based shows) and living with my dad (former real estate agent and currently a home inspector extraordinaire), I still didn't realize what a process this was. Seriously. And it's not as though things have taken along time. We've been going back and forth with our agent and the seller pretty consistently for the last several days, with little or no wait time in between e-mails and phone conversations. There is just a lot of stuff that needs to happen, like:

• Finding the house (duh). 
• Putting in an offer. 
• Having your offered countered.
• Tentatively agreeing to said offer, but with a few conditions, like home inspections.
• Getting the inspections done, which can include, but aren't limited to:
• Septic inspection
• Electrical inspection
• Radon Testing (and other nasty stuff)
• General building inspection
• Property appraisal
• If you get all those inspections done separately, which we did, for a variety of reasons, then you have to wait for the results of all of those--thankfully all this only took about a week. (I imagine having a father who is so entrenched with real estate and home renovation and then going and buying a home is like have a father who is a doctor and then having major surgery--everything must be done absolutely perfectly and by the book.)
• Submit your Final Offer (I capitalize for effect here) and...wait.

Our Final Offer was submitted early (and I mean EARLY) this morning and sent off to the seller with our agent saying she expected to hear something from him soon. Well, that was roughly mid-morning. It's now almost three in the afternoon (granted, it feels way later than that, considering all the waiting around I've been doing today, but still, I had expected to hear something by now).

UPDATE: The seller has requested until the end of the day tomorrow to give his decision. This effing SUCKS. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself for a whole freaking day. Ugh. This is the worst, the very, very worst part of buying a house, being dangled over the pit of possibility. The thing I hate the most about being in this sort of situation is the fact that I'm rendered in capable of doing anything. I don't really want to think about the house, because if we don't end up getting it, I'm that much more disappointed (read: heartbroken). But there is nothing else I want to do!

All that's left is to be patient and to attempt to distract myself, though with what, I'm not entirely sure. This blog entry has been helpful, but I'm hoping that my next entry will be titled, "It's Ours!"