It Opens At The Close

We did it! We bought a house. We now are the proud owners of a home built in 1965. It is 4 ½ bedrooms (yes, I said ½) 2450 square foot home. We closed on the home on Friday.

Now, if you’ve been reading my blog (hi mom!) you might be a little confused because it has been a loooong time since I last posted. That’s because the home we were trying to buy before fell through and we had to go through the trouble of finding another one. I decided to write my previous posts off as ‘practice’ and wait until I actually have a house to start fresh. So, consider this my ‘fresh start’ of my blog (hence the Harry Potter reference … but it fits).

I’ll give you a tour of the home next time, for now I’ll tell you the story of closing…

We were scheduled to close at 4:00 on Friday. I was obviously very very excited about this. I may have started skipping at work on accident and only noticed when my shoe flew off (true story).  So, there I am at work trying to concentrate on my actual tasks (and failing miserably) when we get an email from our loan person (I know, I use such technical terms!) telling us the sellers had already signed everything and reminding us that we cannot take possession of the house until the funding clears. Well, I immediately thought to myself “hmmm, we’re closing at 4:00 and lots of banks close pretty early… I feel like there is a chance this doesn’t go through today”… this thought really bummed me out. So we asked if we could move up close to 2:30 and they said yes. This was at about 1:50. LJ immediately left work and picked me up (we carpool) and then we went to the bank to get our cashier’s check that we needed to bring. Let’s just say it was a little obvious that I was excited about buying a new home. I don’t think many people take pictures of their spouses getting a cashier’s check at the bank….

After the teller processed the check we had to wait for the manager to come over. I think it took him about 2 minutes to get to us…. It felt like 2 hours. I was literally bouncing around with nerves and as soon as he came over and cleared us I grabbed the check and RAN out of the building. I got a weird look from someone coming in at the time… probably because only robbers run out of banks normally… LJ walked out like a normal person, resulting in me getting to the car way sooner and calling out “Come ON!!!” like a child. (: 

Then it was on to the title company. We got there ten minutes late, but it was all good. We signed a billion papers (I counted, I signed my name 40 times). I once again was the obvious excited new home buyer. Here are pictures of us signing stuff (I know... SO interesting!):

I was so excited the title company person asked “is that your bingo dance?” because I was literally bouncing in my seat while signing things… and then I starting putting my wrong social on papers… way to go Kris. But we got it all straightened out. Then it was time to sit and wait while they contacted the bank to fund the loan so we could take possession right away. She said it would take ten mins. Here is a picture of us excitedly waiting for the check to clear:

I decided not to take a picture of us after we waited ALMOST TWO HOURS IN A TINY ROOM WITH NOTHING TO DO BUT WORRY THAT SOMETHING WENT WRONG… yeah, not the most fun part of the day. But, eventually they came in and said we were all clear and the house was ours.

Then it was time to Celebrate! Some of our good friends, I’ll call them A. and S. (since they may not want their names online) went out to a Mexican Restaurant in our new neighborhood. If you live in Houston, check out Los Tios…yummmmmy.

After dinner they came by and let us drag them around the new house showing them everything. (: And A. was nice enough to take the ‘new home’ picture your realtor normally takes for you (we didn’t use one).

So that’s it! That’s how we ended up as homeowners! It’s funny because as much work as it was to buy a home… really this is just the start of the real work. But more about that next time….