Early Bird Catches the...Furniture?

Eight o'clock, Sunday morning, new house. That's where we're going to be. While I know DOH is not going to be thrilled at the prospect, that's what needs to be done if we want to take measurements of the rooms and take account of what furniture we might be interested in buying off the seller (we haven't completely closed on the house yet--everything still needs to go through; we're looking at another week or so).

At the crack of dawn, we'll make our way down from the western mountains to our new house (I always feel like we're returning to civilization when we drive down to visit our families). We'll go through each and every room, take some pictures, make some measurements (which may lead to furniture shopping later in the day--yay!), and decide if we want some stuff.

There was a lovely old hutch (I don't know if that's the official word for the piece of furniture, but that's sort of what it made me think of) in the kitchen that I know if I don't take it, my mom will want it. There was also a bed in the basement level bedroom that, if it's a queen (I can't remember) we'll probably take. There's also a sofa and a coffee table in the living room that we were interested in. And the bathroom had some lovely storage cabinets that I'd really love to hang on to.

Hanging on to all this stuff will make our lives a little easier, considering we're going from broken down college student furniture to real people furniture. Good-bye futons and milk crates! (Seriously.) We can't afford to buy a lot of furniture ourselves, so we're relying on getting some of this stuff at a slightly discounted rate, plus my parents have offered to buy us a sleeper sofa for the basement room, which will become DOH's "man cave" (side tangent - in my literary theory course last semester a guy did a 20 page psycho-analysis paper on the concept of the "man cave"--it was really interesting!). There is some furniture in storage that we got from my grandmother's house after she passed away, but it's unlikely much of it, if any, will make into our new house. I suppose my family will end up selling a lot of it.

Anyway, even if we decide we want none of the furniture in the house, I'm really looking forward to just being back there. I love that house (our house) and I'm looking forward to being in it and knowing it's going to be the place where our family will be living. I also can't wait to snap some pictures to share!

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!"