Please forward all correspondence to....

....our new house!

I just found out this morning (as I was standing at the vet with Emily strapped to my chest and 2 wet dogs peeing on the floor as they got their Lyme disease shots) that the sellers accepted our offer without changes! So as long as our land deal goes to settlement on September 15th as scheduled, and as long as nothing horrible turns up at the home inspection next week, and as long as a million other things fall into place, we just bought ourselves a house!

We've already had some major drama happening, but that's what keeps life interesting, right? Let me start at the beginning.

5 years ago, when Will and I were bright-eyed newlyweds, we went to the realtor who had sold my parents' house years before (let's call her Crazy Old Realtor), and told her we were looking for some land to sit on for a couple years and then build a house on. Long story short, we were NOT happy with how we were treated by Crazy Old Realtor, but she was the only person we had had experience with before.

Fast forward 5 years, and our priorities have changed. Rather than wait until we could build our perfect house on the perfect land, we were more interested in finally owning our own house; the place where we would end up raising our already begun family. So I contacted a family friend who recently became a realtor (hereafter referred to as Family Friend Realtor) just to get some info. Well, in hindsight you can see, right there was my mistake. You should never mix friends and business, and things only became more difficult when I found out that he works for the agency owned by Crazy Old realtor :-( We decided to give Family Friend Realtor a chance anyway, more out of guilt than anything else. We were working with him, not the agency anyway right?

I can't really complain. He has been less than perfect about some things, but our land is all but sold right now, so I can't say he didn't do his job. However we knew we wanted to go with someone else when we went to build our new house at Linton. Someone who had been through the new construction process before and who was an exclusive buyers agent so we wouldn't get pushed to the back burner in favor of people listing their homes, holding open houses etc.

We have been blissfully happy with our new buyers agent (New Buyers Agent), and we planned to tell Family Friend Realtor that we would not be requiring his services in finding a new home once our land had closed and the topic was broached. It seemed unnecessarily antagonistic to just come out and say "Oh by the way, we have another agent. I know you didn't ask or anything, but we wanted to go ahead and hurt your feelings so there it is."

Everything was fine, that is until yesterday when New Buyers Agent needed a copy of the contract on the land we're selling. I thought I had a copy of it...I SHOULD have had a copy of it, but like so many other things at Crazy Old Realtor's agency, it seemed to have slipped through the cracks. I tried to get it, but Family Friend Realtor was out of the office all day and most of the next morning. I thought there'd be a copy of it in the office...there SHOULD have been a copy of it in the office, but, well, you get the picture. Their secretary treated me as a burden, and it ended up that New Buyers Agent had to call Family Friend Realtor for some info and that's how he found out about the existence of New Buyers Agent.

So he's being less than helpful, and I also got a hurt and angry email from him yesterday (i.e. day from hell) which I had to take a valuable 30 min. to sit down and answer. Thank God his commission depends on our land deal going through, so even though he's angry our best interests are aligned and we have someone to watch out for us on the other side. Closing will be fun though. You never expect real estate transactions to be easy, but somehow I still always manage to be surprised how not-easy they turn out to be.

But all that aside, we are quite pleased with how things have gone. Nothing like happening upon a house that's the best you've seen and has desperate sellers to boot. Now I just have to get my mom used to the idea that her granddaughter will now be living 26 minutes away instead of 19. You'd think we were moving to Iceland.

And rest assured in the midst of all this strife and as much as I complain, Will and I are still very excited and happy that next month we will be moving to Reykjavik...oops, I mean Frederick.