Everything happens for a reason. Believe it.

You know how I said that I hoped that we would find an end to our home search that night?

We totally did.

To recap: We had looked at a total of 21 homes (about average), Rob was getting frustrated, and was accusing me of becoming more picky (which, I don't know if that's possible. I'm pretty fucking picky).

We were slated to look at seven homes after work that night. It was a perfect day- the nicest day so far this year, and the temperature lingered around 80-85 degrees.

We get to the first house and look around. Nope. We know that the house is a "no" quickly. I guess we're pretty fast at looking at homes- we know what we want.

This house had no charm whatsoever. But I liked the street it was on... but onto the next house.

We get there, and have to make sure the owner's two cats don't bolt out the door when our Realtor opened the door. 

We get in... and breathe.

This is a nice house, we thought.

It had just about everything we want.

We looked around at everything. We knew.

This was it.

There were five more houses to see, but we didn't need to see them.

This was it.

So instead of going into the "everything's on fire" frenzy like last time, we decided to be rational. If this was the right house for us, everything will work out. Smoothly. Well, not smoothly, but everything will just fall into place.

Like our wedding--I only planned it in 53 days, and everything simply fell into place. Plus, had I had the typical one year of wedding planning, I would have been a jailbird Bride with blood on my hands....both our families are crazy. 

Anyway, we call our awesome lender gal, who talks us through some financials, and she said she would send us a Good Faith Estimate from the bank with this purchase price.

The house is listed $5000 more than our supposed maximum price. I was a little worried, considering we only have enough cash for our 3% down. We would need the seller to pay all of our closing costs. 

We also asked our Realtor to send us some comps within the neighborhood to see if the house is priced correctly.

And then we go to bed. I had good, homebuying dreams (most of my dreams lately have been really fucked up, so it was refreshing to have good dreams).

The next day was crazy. I was busy at work, Rob was busy at work, and we still had things to obtain before making an offer. 

We got the Good Faith Estimate from our lender gal, and my jaw drops.

This is actually feasible.

I can't believe it.

This may actually work.

Instead of putting 3% down and having the seller pay our closing costs, our lender gal is using a program that works with the FHA loan called AmeriDream- it's where the seller can actually contribute money to help out the buyer get the house. Our lender gal basically called it "legal money laundering."

Fine with us. That way we can actually pay our own closing costs, but the seller would pay our 3% down. Weird, I know. But we may actually not need all of the money we have saved. That would be awesome.

I left work early to pick up Rob and headed to our Realtor's office to sign the offer.

We ended up offering $3000 more than the listing price (according to the comps, this house was very well-priced), so that way the seller will still make a decent sale of the place (the last thing we wanted to do was to completely low-ball the offer, piss off the seller entirely and lose the house).

We sign the paperwork, head home (Friday was up to 100 degrees!), and play with Marley.

At 8:30 that night, our Realtor called.

THEY ACCEPTED! Wooooo!

But they had two addendums:

1- to get them a pre-approval letter within three business days (duh. The only reason we didn't get them one when making the offer was because we switched lender contacts, and our gal wasn't sure if she needed to run our credit again (I hope not), so she had to check with the underwriters).

2-That we will pay our own closing costs, reserves, etc.

Done and done.

Our lender gal actually got the pre-approval letter to our Realtor yesterday. She is so awesome.

So now we have to schedule an inspection, and go through closing. Our closing date is June 20, which happens to be the first day of Summer.

How appropriate.

So now we're basking in the joy of the deal, and going through our shit at the townhouse. We're getting rid of a ton of shit and having a yard sale at Rob's parents' house.

I already went to Freddys and picked out paint samples.

Now THIS is how all of this should feel. I think the whole botched condo deal was a good thing because we knew how it should NOT be, how it should NOT feel.

This is so right.