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.