You heard it here second!

Yeah, I know.  We pretty much just decided we were going “home.”

But the post was scheduled a little while in advance.  Maybe a week or so.

And we had been looking at houses for over a year in CT and NY because we knew we wanted to head to the ‘burbs, but just thought it was going to be around NYC.

We also monitored the MA real estate market for years.  My wife knew that was “home” and where she wanted to be.  So she watched.

I'm not exactly sure why I watched it… Part of me thinks it was because I knew I was wrong about being out in NYC.  Another part of me thinks it was to torture myself with houses that actually worked for our budget…

Looking for houses around NYC was pretty rough.

Basically it started out with a big checklist of things we wanted:

A commute of less than 45 minutes each way.

Colonial style home.

4 bedrooms.

At least 2 bathrooms.

A garage.

A nice yard.

Good schools.

Side street, dead end if possible.

One by one, items were dropped from the list.  45 minutes became an hour and 45 minutes (That's on top of 10-12 hour work days.).  4 bedrooms became 3.  At least 2 bathrooms became at least 1.5.  A garage and nice yard became “just enough grass to park a car on.”  Side street, dead end if possible, became “as long as the house is not sinking we'll take it.”

The only thing we kept was “good schools.”

It still wasn't happening.  Everything we saw had a major flaw.  At some point I'm pretty sure one of us actually said – out loud – “so it's got a little mold… what house doesn't have issues?”

We couldn't commit.  For me I think it was mostly that I couldn't imagine adding another 2 hours to my day….

But we saw so many homes, we learned what we liked and disliked.  And we had everything lined up for a quick close just in case lightning struck and we needed to move quickly!

Well… lightning did strike.  It struck me.  

So when I told her I was ready to go home, my wife understandably moved fast before the little terrible husband hovering over my shoulder talked me out of it.

And I was OK with it for the same reason.  That guy can be convincing….

In MA it was pretty simple.

We toured a few houses.

Made an offer.

Met in the middle.

Yada, yada, yada, we closed yesterday.  That's right.  We closed yesterday.

Now comes the fun part:  making the house our home.

The yard work began right after closing.  Literally.

See… the house is a little tired.

An 85-year-old woman lived there and couldn't keep up with the yard work and some other things around the house.

So there are vines all over the yard and around the house and the interior could use a little freshening up.

My job is to get rid of the vines.  Those things are in there pretty good….

We may need to rent a goat.  I'm getting torn up out there!  I'm aching!

But the look in my wife's eyes as we worked together on making the house our home was priceless.

It's the first time in a long time that I felt like a real husband.

Pretty cool.

Incidentally, when you can wear the same clothes doing yard work as you did to the closing of the house, did you over dress for the yard work or under dress for the closing?

My guess is a little of each.  🙂

Back to the vines!