Hopefully this will be the last.

That is, the last rent check I will pay to a landlord. (I have to add the disclaimer that Mark is actually paying this months rent, so technically the last rent I paid was in....April? This way we don't have to give the mortgage people an explanation as to where that random sum of money in my account came from when mark deposits money for the months bills. Nothing like having your checking account watched by big brother. Thankfully Mark works with our Mortgage guy so he's been taking care of this aspect.) Anyways, the point is, WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

No more rent!

No more rent! 

La La La, La La La!

Yes, we bought this house. This lovely 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath, 2200 sq ft house built in 1912. With a three season porch off the front, large dinning room, living room, and kitchen on the main level, original woodwork, brick fireplace (non working), half finished basement, fenced in side and back yard, and a 2 stall garage in the back.  

Yay!  We close in the middle of June and plan on moving the last weekend in June.  Yay!

I didn't really want to bore you guys with the suspense of house hunting, offer making, inspections, appraisals, etc like I did last time.  Although that would have given me something to blog about in the last few months instead of leaving you guys hanging.

Long story short, I've been tired of paying rent for a while now. Tired of not having a yard for Brooke to play in, tired of taking my laundry to a laundry mat (correction: tired of sending Mark to the laundry mat), and most of all tired of not being able to do what I want to my surroundings. 

A coworker happened to be looking online at houses for sale in Owatonna one day and I thought, hey, I can afford that. And with the deadline of the $8,000 tax credit looming Mark and I jumped into house hunting. I believe it was our second day out looking we found a house that I fell in love with, and after a few minutes of convincing, I had talked Mark into it. I really fell in love with this house. I even started mentally decorating it. So we made an offer. They countered. I continued to mentally decorate. We made another offer. They countered again (Here is where I put in a mini rant about how they kept countering higher than their original counter and at one point had their counter offer over the asking price). It essentially came down to the dang barn garage and the couple thousand dollars that it was going to cost us to repair the roof to satisfy FHA financing appraisals. We backed out. 

A couple of days later we did find our house. Coincidentally it's only two blocks over from the first house we put an offer down on, same house number even, and on the same street that we live on now. Initially it didn't have the same charm for me that the first house did. But it quickly grew on me when I looked past how they had it decorated and laid out to how I would decorate it and the thing we would do to it. 

We made an offer and they accepted. It was inspected and nothing major was found. Thankfully the inspector put Mark at ease with buying a 98 year old house. He said it was a very structurally sound house and he even knew the previous owners who had it for 30+ years.  The appraisal happened with only a slight hiccup when it came to the garage roof. He wanted to see the damage to the south side of the roof repaired.  Mark and I chose to just have the south side replaced and the sellers agreed to pay the cost. So now the south side of the garage roof doesn't match the rest, but we'll worry about that in a few years. It doesn't look tooo horrible. ;)

Now that just leaves us with packing up, closing, and then we'll start some painting projects before we completely move in at the end of the month!  

I'll post some "before" pictures when we close and even more "after" pictures when we complete our projects.

Ok, that ended up not exactly being a short version of the story.  Sorry. :)