Home is where...

Home ownership.  It seems like an easy thing.  In you head it's an easy thing: you get together some money for a down payment, you pick out the home of your dreams, and you buy it using money a bank loans you.  In reality the process is much more of an emotional roller coaster than we like to believe.  

We originally went looking at houses without much direction.  We knew the areas of town we would ideally like to be in, but not much else.  The houses we saw at first were wonderful houses, we could easily see ourselves living in any of them.  As we continued our search, we saw what was available in our price range and what we wanted our home to be for years to come.  We sat down and evaluated the pros and cons of each house and decided what were our top few houses.  Did we find the house of our dreams?  Not at this time.  We were stuck with two different houses at the top of our lists...so we went back to the drawing board.

At this point, I was convinced that we were making a huge mistake not jumping on one of the two properties, but I was willing to look one more time.  We went out again looking at different houses in the same area and we found it.  The house was everything I wanted and everything Haley wanted.  We weren't sure if we'd get it or not, but we knew it was the one we wanted.  It's still not officially "ours" yet, we still have a few weeks before closing and "anything can happen", but it feels like ours.

Looking back on the process, there were a number of times we were both convinced we needed to settle on a house and a number of times we both were convinced that we weren't going to get the house, but it all worked out for us (so far).  I just wasn't prepared from the outset for the ups and downs of home buying.