It's All Coming Together

Buying a house is a lot of work!  No one tells you that finding the house, putting together an offer, and coming to an agreement with the sellers is the easy part.  After all that is said and done you have a million things to do.  Like fill out an innumerable number of forms for a mortgage company.  Those forms include odd questions and require your signature and/or initials far too many times.   And not only do you have to fill out forms, there are dozens of documents that must be sent in like bank account statements, student loan documents, pay check stubs, retirement account statements, school transcripts.  I'm pretty sure our loan officer has over 100 pages of documents in our file at this time.  We also had to set up and be present at a home inspection.  Ours went very well, but there were a few things that needed fixing.  We spent 45 minutes on the phone one evening going over the inspection report with our realtor and deciding what we wanted to ask the sellers to fix.  Luckily they were very fair and fixed almost every item on the list.

Then you have to lock in a mortgage rate.  You probably haven't been paying much attention to them, unless you're in finance or you are buying a house right now, but they are all over the place!  After dozens of phone calls with our loan originator we finally locked in a rate that we are happy with.  And don't forget, we are in an apartment right now, which means we had to turn in our 60-day notice.

Aside from all the paperwork there are tons of other things to do.  We are planning to replace some of the downstairs flooring with wood floors.  We've been talking to a couple floor installing companies and have narrowed it down to two.  Before we can go any further they need to measure the rooms and show us the wood samples.  But the sellers are still living in the house and are less than flexible with their time.  

Also, this house is much bigger than our current and previous apartments, therefore requires a lot more furniture.  We spent all day Sunday driving around in the snow and slush looking at several different furniture stores for the perfect living room set.  We've also been looking around for a kitchen table.  Last night we went out again and checked out a few stores.  By the end of the evening we narrowed down the options for sofas and purchased our kitchen table set!  (Well only the stools, the table was out of stock, but should be there next Monday for us to pick up.)  First piece of furniture for the new house - it was exciting!!  Here's a picture (we got 4 stools):

Our kitchen table - I love the idea of a couple baskets beneath

Now we need  to pick out paint colors for a few rooms, find a moving company, start packing and find more furniture pieces (desk for the office, TV, media console, coffee table and a patio set).  We close in 20 days!  Yikes!  We can't wait to have the keys to our home!!