Our house, is a very, very, very empty house...

I spent about three hours at the house yesterday taking pictures of the place before we move in and start any painting. It was nice to have the time to really look at the place without worrying about realtors, owners, inspectors, or other people who might want to hurry you along. The results are above.

Closing Time

As things go, we have reached that point in the real estate transaction that marks the successful wedding of a willing a seller with a willing buyer: settlement, aka closing, aka here's the keys. Now it gets real. Now we become...homeowners.

Besides the small mountain of paper we have been putting together through various involved parties (insurance, mortgage, title, etc) there is the mounting anxiety of this day which marks a new chapter in our lives. After Tuesday we will own a house... and a mortgage, and insurance payments, and maintenance costs, and the general responsibility that comes with owning a house and being a part of a community. This anxiety aside we are looking forward to the coming challenge.

later...

Well I never got around to posting this last piece on closing and in the meantime we closed! So it's done. Just under two hours in the title insurance office signing papers and listening to the man explain what we were signing, and we were done! We left the office after handshakes and key passing, got some lunch and drove to the house. Eating our first "meal" (calzone, coffee, and Vitamin Water) standing up in the kitchen we talked for the first time, seriously, about what we want to do with the place. It was exciting. After eating we walked around the place, seeing it for the first time through the eyes of homeowners. Sweet indeed.

We won't actually move in until next week but I've been over to the house couple of times to drop off cleaning supplies and take a bunch of pictures before all of our stuff fills that space. These pictures will make up the bulk of the next posting... stay tuned.

Home Inspection: Check

Yesterday we spent FIVE HOURS going through every inch of the house with the home inspector!! It was great to be in the house and to look at all the systems and hear what the inspector had to say. He was extremely thorough and furnished us with a complete printed report when he was done is inspection. The things that he was finding were not surprises. The house is over 150 years and has have various updates over the years. The electrical system is a mix of a newly replaced service panel and new and old wiring. Most of the areas of the house that require three prong, larger load appliances (like the kitchen and laundry room) have already been updated with new wiring. The exterior chimney, which replaced the larger interior central chimney in the 1880's needs to be relined if we want to use the fireplaces (which we do) and for the general safety of the oil furnace. There were a few other minor things that one would expect to find in an older house (old plumbing, not enough outlets, etc) but nothing that needed immediate attention.

Some things that we discovered in the process of the inspection were the hidden attic stair, a small room with a cistern in the attic, and a huge collection of storm and screen windows above the garage.At this point we need to move ahead with the attorney to do the title/deed stuff and then we go from there!

Are we buying a house??!!

We are a late twenty-something couple who began house-hunting over a year ago. In the last several months the search got serious and in the last two weeks we found a house that we both knew was something special and one which we could see ourselves calling home. This blog is going to serve as our online journal for recording the roller coaster that we are expecting the next few weeks of contracting, negotiating, financing, closing, moving, settling in, and beginning to make the place our own. Over the coming months and into the summer we are going to post our adventures in home improvements and historical background that comes out of our research. (Did I mention the house is over 150 years old and in a historic district of nation's third oldest city? More on this later....)Where we are at now: On Wednesday the 21 at noon we are meeting with Jim Murphy, a house inspector from Middlebury to go through the house prior to finalizing the contract. It should take most of the afternoon to go through the nearly 2500 square feet of space. From this we will have an idea of what to expect to repair in the future (near or distant) and it will also provide a idea of whether we should be asking for some of the repairs to be done by the seller or whether we should ask a lower price. From here we move to finalizing the financials, having a appraisal done, and getting the legal stuff in order. Then we close and move in!

Who we are: Already I have gotten into this thing without proper introductions. We are a historic preservationist and a veterinary technician... in other words, I save buildings and she saves animals. As a result our lives are fully of old things and house pets. We have been in love and living together for about three years and are getting married in September. A house seemed a little more pressing as we realized the amount of money we were putting towards our landlord's mortgage could be paying own mortgage and we would have something to show for it. So we focused on a house and put the wedding on the back burner temporarily.

That's it for the first post. I will add more after the house inspection and provide some historic background on the house and the little city in which it resides. Stay tuned.