getting ready to jump, I think

We've been looking at houses lately. Houses to BUY.

(I think I need to say that last sentence several more times to have it really sink in.)

We've been looking for several reasons: it's a great market for buyers, we have a new family member* on the way and no room for him, we're tired of paying rent instead of investing into a house, and my mom is starting nursing school in about a month, and we'd like to give her someplace to live while she does the starving student thing. We started looking around a few months ago, excited about such a great market, and promptly ran into several dead ends. Houses so run down that it wasn't worth the cheap price, houses so small that we might as well stay where we were, questionable neighborhoods, neighborhoods so far out that the commute time and gas expense alone made it out of the question. And when did living around here get so expensive? It was all very depressing, and we walked away for about a month, just to mull our options and recover our senses.

We started up again a few weeks ago, a little less starry-eyed but perhaps more determined than ever. One house in particular stuck out: nicely updated, in our price range, in an older-but-nice neighborhood surrounded by several very wealthy neighborhoods. It was small, but felt big, and mentally, we were calculating how to move things here and there to make the space seem bigger. We seemed positive. We looked at some other houses, including one that was at least twice as big as anything we'd seen but whose shag carpeting, cat urine smell, and 70's design left me... well... even though Jason was positively giddy about the size. Size ain't everything.

And then, our awesome realtor took us to see some houses in a neighborhood that I was sure fell out of our price range. It was lovely: all the space we needed, nice enough to live in happily now but just outdated enough cosmetically to give Jason something to sink his home-improvement claws into, great storage space. And totally within our price range. The owner is a nice little old lady anxious to move back home up north to be with her family.

It's not a done deal, but we're moving ahead with it. And it feels like such a huge leap of faith, and I'm a little afraid of getting my hopes up too high in case it doesn't work out for whatever reason (termite damage! crappy electrical! the seller changes her mind! a cult meets there every Wednesday! kids like to fling poo at the front door!). We're crunching the numbers anyway to see if we can do this, talking with our mortgage broker dude, getting ready to have an inspection done.

Whew.

I'll keep you posted.

*In the meantime, here are a few more names we threw out for Jumping Bean:
WILBUR
JONAS
OBADIAH
any combination of a first name with "Bob" as the second name: Joe Bob, Billy Bob, etc.
JASON - great name, but already taken to avoid any confusion for our kid