Loan Owners Once Again

You know when you want something for so bad for so long that when it happens it doesn't even seem real? That's been the case with our desire to buy a house since we landed back in southern California 8 years ago. With the crazy market and home prices more than doubling in just a few years, we felt completely shut out of the market. We were lucky enough to be able to rent a decent house in a decent neighborhood (in a great school district) from our more-than-generous landlords, aka Mom and Dad. Still, the house wasn't ours, it didn't fit us, and we finally outgrew it.

Late last year we decided that it was time for us to start looking again. A lot of angst followed as the husband fell in love with every house we saw and I couldn't bring myself to pull Julia out of her beloved elementary school to move into any of them. Childhood scars take a long time to heal. I just couldn't picture our family in any of the ones we saw. Finally we found one, and it had been sitting under our noses since before we started looking. Once we realized that any house we could afford in the neighborhood we like would need at least $100,000 in remodeling, it became apparent that this one, right around the corner, in the neighborhood we maligned and hated for 8 years was the one. The remodeling has been done, the kitchen has been updated, the kids love the pool and the backyard (no more having to listen to "Mommy, why can't we have a pool, too?"), and it looks like everything is going smoothly for us to close escrow on it in a couple of weeks. We'll be in the same neighborhood, but at least we're moving a couple of streets away from the crazy people who surround us now. And I don't mean crazy in the let's-have-a-couple-of-drinks-and-have-a-roaring-good-fun sense. I mean crazy in the damn-the-cops-are-here-again-and-I-wonder-whose-house-they-are-
going-to-this-time sense.

So now we will owe more money than we can conceive of to the bank. My days of carefree recreational shopping are over. We will be spending hand over fist to make this house our home. And we don't care. Of course, stress abounds. I have no clue how I'll get our house packed and moved. A Dumpster will need to be dispatched. Babysitters will need to be hired (wouldn't it figure that our on-call babysitter, Grandma Goob, will be moving into her own mansion in a couple of weeks and will more than have her hands full). It will get done somehow.

Once we're in, you're all invited over. At some point, there will be a giant table for scrapping and I hope to see the pool full of kids and friends all summer. Beth & Kim, you're invited to help decorate and do projects. I'll provided the margaritas. We need lots of great decorating ideas and help picking out paint colors, etc. The rest of you, just pray we all survive the stress and the move. And if we all survive, see you soon in our new house!!!!