delinquent

I haven't truly posted since my return from Hawaii...eek! A while back I read this post from Kelly and she said the following which sums up my excuse for being delinquent.

"Sometimes there are things that you can't quite blog about yet, for whatever reason. Yet, it's an all consuming thing in your life, and you can't really think of anything else to blog about. And it just sort of becomes a vicious cycle."

So this has been me for the last month or so. And now, the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. You see, we are house-hunting. Not necessarily a problem, unless your good friend and landlord also happens to be your bishop's wife and they care whether or not you stay in the ward. When we moved in here, it was with no contract and was wide open as far as how long we stay, provided we give them a little notice when we leave. So, I wasn't worried that they would care about us moving out of their house. No. The problem is that there are not a lot of houses for us to buy in this ward. Jon has only been EQ President since November, so we feel a little guilty if we happen to buy in a different ward. But we don't feel like we should buy our real estate based on ward boundaries, either. And, we have looked at houses in every ward here. I haven't wanted to say anything until we actually had a contract in place, but yesterday at church I was talking with my friend and she brought the whole topic up out of the blue. She said she had just figured out that we were looking, although enough people around town knew about it (our mortgage office is full of people in the other wards) that the beans could have easily been spilled by someone else. In any case, they know, and now I can blog freely.

We have looked at a minimum of 30 houses, I kind of stopped counting. It's a challenge to balance Jon's must haves with mine, and find something that works for both of us. At first this whole process was fun, but it quickly became stressful. After seeing pretty much everything on the market that meets our criteria, with only a select few even making the "maybe" list, you get kind of discouraged. I guess that is one of the burdens of living in a small town, there are only so many neighborhoods out there that we are comfortable living in. It's not like we can go 10 miles north and just have a longer commute. That puts us in Olathe, and I think not. I honestly want to fast forward a few months and just have all the decisions made for me. Can anyone make that happen?

We actually have an offer in on this house. It is For Sale By Owner, although he is willing to allow a buyer's agent. The seller is a bit of a control freak, though. He wants to get full appraised value without having to make any concessions, which I think is totally unreasonable in this market, especially considering that the house has been on the market for about 10 months. While we have made a reasonable offer, and we like the house, we feel like we are the only ones willing to negotiate in this deal and a part of each of us is actually hoping that it doesn't work out.

We should know our fate by tomorrow afternoon.