As each day draws closer and closer to us actually owning the home, everytime we leave to go somewhere, Jen urges me to drive by the house so she can look at it once again.

"Are you joking???" I question her. "They'll think we're insane if they keep seeing us drive by everyday." Excited as we may be about the house, I don't want to give them the impression that were psycho house stalkers. Then Jen sheepishly admits that she drove by a couple times last week while I was gone on my trip. All I can do is roll my eyes at her.

Then while talking to my mother-in-law on the phone today, she asked me that very question - whether we had started to drive by it everyday. I guess they did the same thing when they bought their house and their friends did it too. Perhaps that practice of being drive-by lookers isn't as strange as I made it out to be. Still, I don't want to give the neighbors any bad impressions. Not *yet* in any case.

When we were over at the house to sign the contract, we actually met the neighbors across the street. It's a family who has a son about 13 or 14 yrs old. The husband seemed pretty laid back and was quite funny. He had a sort of humor I can appreciate. They also informed us that there are several other nice boys Ariel's age that live on the street, and ever since they found out the house was for sale, they've been spying on all the potential buyers to see what neighbors they would end up with. I guess they were happy to find out that another girl was moving into the neighborhood. Great. I guess I'll have to get out that baseball bat sooner than I planned. I wasn't planning on doing that for another couple of years at least. *smacks the baseball bat into his palm*

So during the inspection, aside from shooting photos from every whichway, I finally got to see more of the house in detail. While Jen has been over there several times, that was pretty much only my second time doing a complete walkthrough of the house. And the first time I had opened the cabinets/drawers, turned on the faucets, that sort of thing. The inspector (who was very highly recommended by friends/coworkers independently of one another) showed up with his son and proceeded to do a very thorough inspection of the house. Not only did they do the usual testing of doors, blinds, that sort of thing, they tested the water pressure, oven temperature, air conditioner efficiency, electrical outlets - things I would never have thought about. Overall, he said the house was built very well, and there are only a few improvements he would suggest that would go far in making the house better. But he didn't find anything *major* that needed to be done as far as repairs to the house. Yay!

We even got to see the attic storage this time which was nice - with that and the hunchspace, there will definitely be lots of room for storage. Our closing isn't scheduled until the end of August so we still have some time before we have to do the actual move. We're still in the process right now of working out the financing, and even after we get the application submitted, we won't lock in a rate just yet. We'll either wait until 60-days or 30-days before close before we lock in a rate. But now that we've done all the "hard work", we're ready to move in!

Jen & I were just commenting that this will be the first house we've lived in where we'll have tons of room and not have any furniture that doesn't belong to us. We're really excited about that. And seeing how we knew we were going to have to move again, we've been saving all our boxes for that very reason. After this move, kiss all those boxes goodbye - yippee!

I suppose this is the Final Frontier for us. We've done the wedding/marriage thing. We've done the childbirth/baby thing. We've done the first job/cross-country move thing. We've done the buy-a-car thing. And now we've done the first-time homebuyer thing. Do we get some sort of award now?

The funny thing is that everyone in *my* family will be moving into a new house this year. My parents will be moving into their new modern-style Victorian at the end of the summer. My sister and her husband will be moving into the house my parents are currently living in. And we'll be moving into our new house as well. But I look forward to finally digging my roots in deep and ending this vicious cycle of moving approximately once every 1-2 years.

Now that the idea of this house will be ours, we've started to think about what items we'll need and want. I didn't even think about a ping pong table until Co-worker Buddy brought that up. Damn. What a fine idea! Which also prompted the thought that now I'll be able to hang up my deluxe electronic dartboard in the garage as well! You can see where my priorities lie. We'll probably make do with whatever furniture we have right now, but we'll slowly phase things out so they match the house's decor. While my dreams have been recreating in our garage or grilling on the deck, Jen's dreams have involved entertaining people on our deck & having kids playing in the huge backyard or reading a book while relaxing in our jetted tub.

In all truthfulness, I'm just glad we found a house that is perfect for our little family and meets all our criteria, and the fact that it doesn't look like I have any business travel coming up for a while.