First time ever that I went out early in the morning and shopped.  Beth and I went to Menards to buy a few things for the house.  It was insane.  I will likely not do that again.  The shopping wasn’t so bad, but the wait to checkout was nuts.  And there was no parking.

And Black Friday was expensive!  Granted, we didn’t spend a lot early in the morning, but we did go other places and do some shopping in the evening.  We bought some furniture, paint, etc.  So between that and buying the house it has been the most expensive week in our lives by far.  And the sad part, the week isn’t even over yet.  I think we’ll add on to the expenses today.  We’re going to be buying flooring for the house I’m pretty sure.  That’ll make it look really nice.

The house is coming along nicely.  Within an hour or so we’ll be back over there painting and then ripping out carpet.  I think we should get that all done today. Then it’ll be off to Lowes to buy some flooring and appliances.  We’ll probably get the Lowes Card, because of the good financing deals.  It’ll be an expensive day.  The grand total remains to be seen.  Oh well.

Thanks to my sister and Barry (and my parents) for helping out so much this weekend.  The house is looking better!  Barry and dad spent several hours outside raking leaves, mowing the grass, trimming trees, etc. and now the yard looks great.

And we met some of the neighbors.  They all seem really nice.  The one right across the street is nice, and he’s been there since the house was built (1977).   The neighbor right next door, whom we haven’t met yet, has been there the same amount of time.

So we’re loving the house, and getting it all cleaned up and everything.  It’s going to be great and I think we’ll have it all in shape before we move in.  Of course we don’t know when that will be, but it will probably be 2 weeks from this weekend.

And with that, I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.  We did, and we have a lot to be Thankful for.

It’s pretty darn sweet.  We spent some hours over there tonight cleaning the place up.  It’ll take some work, but we’ll have it up and running before long.  We’re really excited about it.

Hope your Tuesday was as exciting as ours!  And in case I don’t get back to blogging before Thursday, Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

We close at 3pm today!!  Woo-hoo!  Ready or not, here we come!

No closing tomorrow.  More loan troubles.  I’m not totally certain what’s up, but I’m not too happy.  Hopefully Monday?

Here I sit, about half past 2, writing this blog post.  You’re thinking “wait, shouldn’t you be closing on the house right now?”  Well yes, yes we should be.  But…

The loan didn’t go through.  Now it’s not quite as bad as it seems, but here’s the story.  Due to my crazy percentage job (Overall I’m 87.5%, 100% Jan – June, 75% July – Dec).  My recent paystubs have my overall pay as fairly low, because I’m at 75% time.  So, based on that, we were approved for a first-time home buyer loan at a good rate, good program.  They do the employment verification and see a discrepancy between what my pay stubs say I make and what HR said I make (due to the percentage).  Going with HR I make about 12.5% more on the year than the paystubs say, which is correct.  But that pushes us over the income limits for the program by $1,500.  They caught this at 2pm yesterday, 24 hours before we were supposed to close.

So they disqualify us for the loan.  We do make enough to get an 80%/20% loan.  So they’re working on getting that through for us.  It should all be good to go this afternoon.  We’ll be closing on the house tomorrow at 8 am.  18 hours late, and our monthly payments will be a little higher than they would have been, but we’ll still get the house.

So getting the loan through in 40  hours time isn’t bad, it just caused a fair amount of stress and headache on all this.  But tomorrow we should be homeowners!!

For those of you who maybe traveling this coming holiday season, don’t forget to pack all the cords to plug in your essentials, such as your iPod.  However, if you do forget your plug in adapter for your iPod just go to the grocery store, buy an onion and some Powerade and you can charge your iPod.  Don’t believe me?  Check it out for your self.  Hilarious, but cool.

As for house stuff.  Well I don’t really want to get into that right now.  If all goes as planned, we close tomorrow at 2pm.  Check back after that for more info.

It appears that 2pm on Thursday is the magical time when we’ll become the proud owners of a house!  We’ve got a few things to get done before then, but it should all be fairly simple.  Woo-hoo!

And congrats to my wife on starting her new job!

First the Vikings lose big. That’s not so fun. Adrian Peterson gets injured. I hope it’s nothing big, otherwise the season could be down hill quickly… We’ll see.

And in the Sunday night game Peyton Manning just threw his 5th interception, and he’s my quarterback for Fantasy Football. That’s not so great for me.

So it’s really only a bad day for me in the world of football. Otherwise it’s been good. Some of the guys came over today and watched the game. The Chili that I made got good reviews. So overall it’s a good day.

I even finished my paper that’s due for school. That’s pretty nice. We’ll I sent it to my peer reviewer anyway. It’s not totally done, as I’ll probably do some revising after I get it back from her. So it should be an easy week for class.

Hope you enjoy your week. Happy Veteran’s Day!

Is kind of sad, in a way.  Working on some homework for my graduate degree, I’m doing some research on the history of same-sex marriage.  Now in my undergrad I took a course called Rights and Liberties in Conflict.  That course dealt a lot with issues such as abortion, segregation, same-sex marriage, and many other cases.

In that course, during the discussion of same-sex marriages we never once talked about (and I looked through my notes again, which is another benefit to taking notes on a computer) the Supreme Court case of Baker v. Nelson.  The case is the basis of why same-sex marriage is illegal in the United States.  My professor simply talked about it in a human rights context and more or less argued it should be legal.  He never once mentioned Baker v. Nelson.

For anyone interested in politics, and who doesn’t know about Baker v. Nelson I would encourage you check it out.  It’s rather interesting.  And it happened right here in Minnesota.

This is something I wish I would have learned 4 years ago.

To owning a house.  We’ve got the paperwork in order (as far as I know), and the inspections have occurred.  We’re pretty pleased with that.  We’ve got a better picture of what all needs to get done.  There are a few more things we need to take care of, but I’m hopeful it will all happen on time so we can still close next Thursday.

Work has been going well, and school is keeping me busy.  I guess that’s the same old stuff.  So I’ll leave it at that.  Happy Weekend!

But very busy indeed.  We tried to have the house inspection done on Wednesday, but the Bank we’re buying it from had the water and gas turned off in it between when we last looked at the house and Wednesday (so about two weeks).  With our offer in there, and supposedly one more, the bank still shut that off.  So… we’re waiting on that.  We did get a pool inspection done, and that passed everything.  We were a little worried that the pipes or something would have been broken, so that’s a relief.

As previously mentioned closing date is supposed to be November 15th, but there are a few hold ups (namely the bank) to getting that done.  We are still waiting on a few things from them and to get the gas and water turned back on.  So hopefully we can still close on time, but that’s still a question mark.

Other things this week: Eye doctors appointment, inspections, going out to eat a few times, and some other fun stuff.  I can’t really complain, the week off was nice.  Busy, but nice.