The New 'Hood

I'm glad one of my New Year's resolutions wasn't to blog more. Failure!

One resolution that we accomplished within the first week of the year was finding a house! We told our stellar Realtor, Trevor, that we wanted to start physically looking at houses after the first of the year. (For the record, we had been looking online and doing price comparisons for nearly six months prior to this point so we had a pretty good idea what we were looking for and where). We got online and searched and found a neighborhood that was still in development in Mebane, NC. For those of you that live outside of North Carolina, the correct pronunciation of the city name is me (as the me from memory) + bin (as in trash). It has always ranked my list of the silliest names in North Carolina. And now we're going to live there.

One Saturday, Jericho and I and Realtor Trevor went down to the neighborhood and met with the agent on duty. Her name is Terri. She has two dogs. And she's really nice. We toured some model homes and some homes in progress. Jericho and I had previously looked at all of the floor plans that they had to offer and were pretty sold on one in particular. The Augusta. I took it as a personal sign since I was born in August. It had everything we needed and was the perfect layout. It looks like this (more or less):

We spent Saturday afternoon with Terri talking about options for the house, financing, costs, numbers, numbers, and more numbers. This was where I sat back and fantasized about my colors and decorations and wall paper patterns while Jericho and Trevor asked all the technical number-questions. Jericho had done months worth of research on mortgage rates and loans and, in combination with Trevor's fantastic support, they were asking all kinds of questions. Any time Jericho wants to take over the number train, fine by me. Just tell me where to sign. It's a blessing of having complete and never-wavering faith in my husband's ability to make responsible financial decisions. And since numbers and money cause me to have an anxiety attack, it really is the best option.

When we left on Saturday night, we had an estimate for what the house was going to cost. And it was a good number. The detail that was still up in the air was whether or not we'd qualify for the $8,000 tax credit. Sunday morning, we got an email saying we were in for the tax credit. Score!! The neighborhood office didn't open until 1:00 but we got there as soon as we could and didn't leave until nearly 8:00 that night. We spent the entire day hashing out offers and pricing and picking out cabinet colors and carpeting. In the end, we got everything we wanted. Bam!! We got a house in 4 days!! We have to chill a little on the celebration since we won't actually be in the house until June or July. Now we just wait and make lists. Lists of what we need to do before the house is built, what to buy before we get in the house, what we'll need after we get in the house, our IKEA shopping trip (which I'm totally stoked about), and everything we can possibly think of to do from now until June. Since Jericho is the main financial engineer with this, my main goal is to settle on my color scheme for the rooms, which is tough. So if anyone can offer any kind of interior decoration advice, I would truly appreciate it!

In the end, this is almost exactly what our house will look like (except we won't have trees in the backyard yet, just someone else's backyard):