We're officially homeowners

Well, we did it. We bought our first house, and it wasn't nearly as painful as I expected. I'm pretty sure that we signed more documents when we made the initial offer than we did today. There are some scary numbers in those documents. The one that showed the amount we will actually pay over the life of the loan is astounding. Oh well.

We had the final walkthrough around 9:15 and everything was fine. We tested all of the faucets, toilets, and few other things. Everything seems to be in working order. The house in general needs a little work, but we'll get to that later. After the walkthrough, we were off to the realtor's office. The gentleman running the show was impressive. He had piles of papers and was bouncing back and forth from us to the previous owner. I expected the mood to be a little more tense, but it was really laid back. All in all, the process took 31 minutes. Not bad.

Now comes time for all the work. First up on the list is painting. Audra and I went to Home Depot yesterday and spent a ton of money on paint. Let me tell you, Audra had the kid behind the paint counter working for his money. All told, we got 11 gallons of paint, 2 gallons of primer, and a big bucket of ceiling paint. I know that we're probably going to need more, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The checkout guy was the hero of the day. Audra mentioned that she didn't want him to tell us the total and just swipe the credit card. Apparently he took pity on that statement and gave us 10% off the entire order. Rock on, sir.

So now starts the process of spackling and priming. It's going to suck. The walls are plaster, so there are a ton of little cracks all over the place. I'm going to do my best to get them all, but I can make no promises. Even before starting that work, Audra is picking out more paint. We decided to paint the living room after going back to the house after settlement. She recently got a new area rug and it trying to coordinate wall colors. She put all of the swatches on the rug and told me to pick one. I still maintain that all of the swatches were in fact identical. She claims that they weren't, but I think the picture to the right proves otherwise.

Well now that we're homeowners, I guess it's time to start laying out the projects. They are, in no particular order (and no particular timeframe):

• Prep walls, prime and paint
• Carpet and paint basement, fix basement ceiling
• Replace kitchen countertop and floor
• Fence in backyard
• Buy lawnmower and fatty-bobatty grill

So the plan right now is to start prepping the walls for paint, put pipe insulation on a couple water pipes that are above the garage door, and possibly change out the doorknobs and deadbolts. Our realtor gave us a $50 gift certificate to Lowes, which I thought was really nice. They probably have stacks of those things somewhere that they give to all of their buyers. That should pay for half of the locks, so it's still a nice surprise.

I'm starting to do that stuff tomorrow, and hopefully the house will have heat. The oil tank is really close to empty, so I hope I can get one or two more days of heat out of it. We're getting a delivery sometime this week, but that's not going to help me tomorrow. The spackle I have works best in temperatures above 50 degrees, and I might be pushing it.

Oddly enough, my sister is also settling on a house today. Here's to a life of debt.