Welcome back to you, and to me. It’s been way too long since I posted anything here. No excuse except a hosed brain from many, many things over many, many years.

I haven’t really been up to much. Trying to keep my head on straight, focus on good things, buying a house…

Yep, I’m buying a house. It’s been an actual dream of mine since I was a kid – to live in a place I could fix up any way I wanted, could ban anything resembling white/ecru/eggshell/beige from all walls, plant anything I want and never wonder if the next renter would tear it up, and no one except myself would be responsible for having to move. Again. No one selling a house out from under me. No one raising the rent to an impossible level. No landlords moving into dementia and demanding rent payments several times a month when you show them the canceled check and receipt. No one upstairs making noise that you can’t tell to sit still.

There’s been a few surprises along the way. First, that I was pre-approved for a loan. I thought my credit was too low. But, one evening, I decided to give it a whack & see what happened. After all, the only thing they could do is say no, right? But lo and behold, I got pre-approved. In about 20 minutes. Who’da thunk it?

So, I went back through all the houses I’ve bookmarked over the last five years, deleting the solds, sorting the decents, drooling over the wonderfuls, and figuring I’d end up in one of the fixers.

The first bit of reality was a foreclosed house with a bank that didn’t like VA loans. Good neighborhood, not too much that needed repair, nice size. Ah, well, eh?

What followed was more searching and driving to check out one house after another until one afternoon, we stopped at a house to have a walk-around, and happened to meet a realtor just finishing up a viewing. We chatted a minute, then followed him in to actually see the house. We ended by exchanging a card for an email address and shaking hands. Before anyone jumps up and says, “You didn’t have a realtor yet?” No, we didn’t. Having never been witness to an actual house-buying, I didn’t have much idea about the order all this was supposed to work in. But we got one that day. We started looking at houses from the inside, not just through windows and online photos.

So, along the way, offers were made, turned down, VA appraisal reqs were discovered, houses that wouldn’t meet those reqs said goodbye to, as were houses that didn’t meet my own requirements. It was sad. Until the price of one of the first houses we looked at dropped $2k. The realtor said he thought the owner would come down further, since the house had been listed for almost a year. Nothing wrong with it, lot & a half; it just hadn’t had any takers.

So, after the realtor talked several times with the owner and got them to drop another $11k and pay partial closing costs, we passed documents back and forth over the interwebs, got an actual loan approval, passed the VA appraisal & pest inspection with flying colors, we got a closing date. Less than two weeks from now. Yeesh!

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Hope y’all’re doing good too.