Eureaka we found shelter from the impending storm

Well I like TN a HELL of a lot better than the cursed midlands crap I currently live in. I finally realized how I describe this place - Flat and yellow. I never realized that I did that before until now.

Being a grown up is scary, just thought I'd let you know. I met with the Realtor, went over the 18 houses I had lined up to look at and broke them down to make the best plan to save time going logically from one subdivision to another. You can tell by seeing the property if something will be done in time or if the property is crap. Those you don't even get out of the car. Sad part, was that one set of like 7-9 houses were beautiful. I loved they way they looked, they were in a nice subdivision too. Bad part was that you turn around (they were all on one street) and look to the other side of the street to see those big electrical transformer towers - there were a whole fucking row of them, 15 or so. There's no resale value in property like that so there was no point in even getting out of the car. By the end of day one, I had looked at 28 houses when you add the additional 10 she thought I'd like. We went back to her office, and selected another 10 or so to look at the next day. So for day 2 (the day the hubby was in town too) we had about 15 houses to look at.

I went back to the hotel and freaked out on my brother. I was totally frustrated. Looking for houses sucked big time. Anything that was within our price range or at least close to BAH was crappy. Either the walls were small and couldn't fit a 10 foot entertainment centre, there was no where to put the dining room table or the property was nasty, slopey or looked like we'd lose our fence every 5 years due to erosion. I was not looking forward to explaining to the hubby that if we wanted a nice home that fit our wants then we would have to go up in price.

When I picked up him from the airport, I went over all the issues I ran into. I had made notes on all the houses we looked at already and went through all the notes. I took pictures of some things like the gully at the edge of his favourite property - which probably would have meant losing the fence once every 5 years due to flooding or erosion. As we ate dinner, he was coming around to the fact that we would be paying more for a decent home that we thought.

Day two turned out to be pretty good. I had my favourite house, but something was odd. The builder put in a fence already so I asked the hubby to look over the fence for me. Guess what we found - a pond, or possibly a sink hole. It was pretty far away from the house and foundation but still, bugs and the chance of the thing growing was a bad idea. As the hubby hopped off the fence, Nine Inch Nails starts blasting from the tree line. We all look at each other and try to figure out what it is. Its a Saturday so no construction workers should be working. We get in the car drive around to find an apartment complex, but its not coming from there. Finally we find this tiny dirt road that we drive down only to find Joe Dirt and his 3 friends drinking beer at 10:30 in the morning. That pretty much rules out that place. It was too bad too because the floor plan was beautiful. Ranch style with no stairs except for the bonus room over the garage. It would have been perfect, had it been two streets over.

We went to this subdivision where most of our friends have bought their homes. It was about 10-15K out of our range, but there were two houses we wanted to look at. It was a pipe dream for me really considering the house I wanted to look at he kept rolling his eyes telling me how frickin' expensive it was. The first house was nice but the fools painted, the rooms upstairs some crazy assed colours - lime green, burnt umber, a blue/grey slate, some kinda chocolate colour - why the hell you do that right before you try and sell your home is beyond me. They spent all this money replacing the kitchen floor with this really nice tile but then paint the house funky colours. Not to mention that one of the rooms that appears to be a teenage boy's room smelled funny. Yeah, yeah I know boys rooms can smell, but with the super preggo nose I noticed a musty, moldy smell. It didn't smell right at all.

The second home we walked in the door and the hubby tells me he wants it. The one he just spent the last two weeks telling me how expensive it was, he really wanted. We measured the dining room, wandered up the stairs, peaked at the man's uniform to figure out what his rank was and his branch (he's an aviator), turned on faucets, flushed toilets all that kind of good stuff. We then wandered the back yard, looked at the deck, noticed how close the trees were or weren't to the house and if the property was pretty much flat. We then went back one more time to pick a second home in case our bid wasn't accepted and picked one of them.

Back at her office, we started working on the bid. Man that contract is a pain in the arse to read. I read them, no matter how time crunched we are but when we our purchasing something that is about the next 3.5 years salary I am going to read what I am getting into. I asked her if she knew what the other people were bidding - she either didn't know or couldn't say. All she mentioned is that they have countered twice. So I wanted to offer $500 less than full price but the hubby and the Agent said go ahead and ask full price, ask for the carpets to be cleaned, and to have the seller fork out $3K in closing costs. We set up the paperwork and went to dinner.

About two hours later we got the call, we won the bid! Funny thing about it was that we beat them out over a frickin' shower door and an additional $1K in closing costs. We priced the shower doors and install fees at Lowes the next day before we left. The folks wanted to bicker so bad over $300. Seriously, the shower door and install would have been $300. We laughed and figured we'd use a curtain for the first month or so and then put in the door later.

So now we are working the finance angle, looking for the best lender we can find. Gosh I thought kids were scary but this is worse. With kids you can pick them up and move them where ever, but you can't pick up a 2000 square foot house.

So now if we can figure out why the dog has gone completely neurotic things would be perfect (I can't believe the dog would be this nuts over me being pregnant but that's what its looking like).