The Deed is Done...

or

The Great and Dreadful Day has Arrived!

Last Monday, November 6, at 10:00 a.m., Bruce and I drove over to Farm and  Home Title Company and I watched Bruce sign paper after paper after paper...

...For our new house!!!!!

It's been a long time coming, and it's been pretty traumatic trying to get here. We looked at quite a few houses here in Vernal before we settled on this one.

And when we first saw this one, I wasn't inclined to like it or want it. For one thing, we were hoping for a large back yard, and this one has a pretty small back yard. (Although it is completely landscaped and has a sprinkler system, which is a huge bonus.) Then we walked in the front door and saw that the front entry is laid with goldie, silvery, gray-ish stone. I thought, "Ugly." I looked down the stairs to my left and saw this fireplace...

...which looks worse in person, and I thought, "Well, that stone will have to go, too."

My kids directed my attention upward to the cottage-cheese with silver-glitter ceilings. I don't like them much more than the kids do. It didn't bode well.

Then I walked into the front living room. I looked around.

It felt like home.

As Bruce and I looked through the rest of the house and talked about the possibilities I grew more and more interested, and more and more excited. This was our house!

So we put in a bid for it on September 13, and then we waited. The bid was accepted! We were already pre-approved for a loan, so we were in business. We hoped we could close on September 28, Bruce's birthday. But Shauna (our realtor) told us that wasn't possible; we could be OK with that. Then we thought we could close the second week of October. Nope. The following week. Nope. The week after that? No. Before Halloween? No.

The loan process was a Huge, Hairy, Harrowing Ordeal. We had turned in everything that they asked for, and we were waiting. And waiting. For over a week. Then we got an email from Shauna saying that the loan company needed fifteen items of paperwork or they would drop us, and we'd have to start over, and we'd lose the house. That was a bad day. (It turns out that someone had hand-written Bruce's email address, and someone else read it wrong, so he never got all the emails they sent him asking for all these things.) But we did manage to get them everything they wanted before closing time that same day.

Then it was something else, and something else, and something else. For a month. So it was pretty frustrating.  Also we had some substantial equity from the sale of our house in West Valley; we intended to put half of it as a down-payment on the house, and use the other half for some remodeling and renovations (like the kitchen appliances that have almost the same birthday as the house—1977.) In the end, to make our numbers look good enough to qualify for the loan we paid about 65% of our equity to student loans, and the rest went to down-payment and closing costs. No remodeling would be happening. Or not much, anyway. (The day we found out we'd have to pay off that much of our student loans all at once was a bad day too. But after a day or two of adjusting my thinking I decided it would be no bad thing to not have that monster breathing down our necks any more.)

And then, in the midst of all of this headache, our van began its death-rattle. Something inside the motor is broken, and will cost more than the van is worth to repair. So we found another van. A newer van. (1998 instead of 1997). A van we could afford to pay cash for.

It is pretty much the same van, only a darker blue.
And a cargo door on the side, instead of the hinged doors that I like. :-/

Although the process was very stressful, the people we worked with were great. Shauna Harding, our realtor, was willing to put up a fight for us when needed; if you want to buy a house in Vernal, go see her. And Cary, at Academy Mortgage, the frequent bearer of bad tidings (none of which were his fault), was very kind, very personable, and easy to work with. HUD, who was selling the house, on the other hand was... a government agency. The final insult from HUD was that they wouldn't give us the keys; they would take them and destroy them and we had to put new door-handles/locks on everything. Which we intended to do anyway; we just didn't expect to have to do it on the very same day we "got our house keys."

So, here are more pics of the house:

the kitchen—looking in from the dining area
To the left of the ancient ovens is, yes...

...a bathroom. In the kitchen! 
I am used to people coming into my house and saying,
"Ooohh! What's that smell?" I do not want anyone to come
into my kitchen and say, "Ewww! What's that smell?!"
This tiny bathroom has to go! Fortunately that is a remodel
that will cost almost nothing but time.

the dining area
The door on the left goes to the two-car garage,
the living room is straight in front of you, and
the kitchen is to your right.

the main bathroom (upstairs)
This bathroom is 15 feet long. The photo kind of fools you because that door on the right looks like the entry door; it is actually the door to a closet inside the bathroom. There's another big closet (in the bathroom) to your left, and the bathtub is beyond that (in front of the toilet). All of the bathrooms in this house are just a little weird (with the kitchen-bathroom taking top prize).

one of the upstairs bedrooms
This fantastic room has one wall covered with peel-and-stick cork tiles, checkerboarded with gold-veined, smoked mirrors. Underneath that is this fantastic wallpaper that has 60's-style line drawings of boys playing football, baseball, etc. I actually kind of love the wallpaper for its very vintage/retro look. But I don't love it enough to keep it. I have spent most of this week taking all that stuff (including the dresser, which is attached—probably a great selling-feature, back in the day) ...I spent a lot of this week taking this stuff off of that wall. Another inexpensive remodel.

our favorite room—the family room
This room is an addition on the back of the house. If you go back up to the dining-room picture and imagine turning around 180°,
then you will be looking into this room. It is really as big as it looks—21 by 26 feet.

On Monday, closing day, we got our very first piece of mail at our new address—a gift from Academy Mortgage: a tiny bamboo cutting-board, with North etched/burned into it. It's really cute, but I'll have to post the picture later. Too much house-cleaning and house-fix-upping to do.

When we get moved in—or mostly moved in—I'll post more pics.

For now, congratulate us! We have to make large payments to a bank for the next many, many years! Dreadful!

No,no, no...just kidding!
Congratulate us! We are homeowners! And it is GREAT!!