T&G

We made our initial offer on May 6th and here we are, 40 days later, and we have an agreed-upon contract to buy the house. We walked away from the deal once and were inches from doing it a second time, but we slept on it and decided to agree to the last counter-offer.

We plan to stay in the house for 20 years until the kids go off to college. Our agent, who has heard buyers’ plans many times in his 21-year career, tells us that when people say 20 years, they mean 10, and when they say 10, they mean 5. We can’t know how we’ll feel in the future, of course, but we’ve been in our current house for almost 9 years and would be staying here if it weren’t for the kids. Barring catastrophes, 10 years seems easy. If we can make it that long, inertia should carry us for 10 more.

All told, it took us over 2 years to find a house we liked, interrupted by 7-months of work to design an entirely new house. It feels good to finally stop talking about it and start doing it! The rest should be smoother since our job is generally done now; other people do the rest of the work: appraisal for the lender, financing paperwork, etc.

We should close on July 15th. It’ll take another 9+ months to renovate it, so we won’t be living there until Spring 2011. I’m looking forward to start of the construction!