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Marissa just had her third birthday last week. Today she went to the doctor’s office for her checkup and she had to have a shot. Erica said that Marissa sat on her mommy’s lap with mommy’s arms wrapped around her. She watched the nurse clean her thigh with an alcohol wipe, then watched very quietly as the nurse administered the shot. She didn’t even flinch.

Erica told her that she was a very, very brave girl. The nurse gushed. Marissa said very seriously “Me 2, No. Me Wee, Mmmmm,” which means that now that she is three she is very brave indeed.

I just gave our loan officer the go ahead on the mortgage for our house, so the first stressful thing is out of the way for me, at least for a day or two. Hopefully I won’t be second guessing myself on it. He gave us what seemed to be the best combination of payment/interest rate/closing costs and a loan program/process that I was sure I completely understood. At this point in our lives my two most important concerns were the monthly payment and the closing costs cause things are going to be a little tight on both of those. Things like whether we have to pay mortgage insurance, etc., were of high but slightly secondary importance. Next time around when we have some equity in our house and hopefully a more liquid situation in general I’ll spend more time finagling to get the very best deal.
I also scheduled an appointment with a Home Inspector. He will be at the house at 9am tomorrow and will be calling me to come hear his report and do a walk through about 3 hours after that. Hopefully he doesn’t give us anything new to stress about.

I’ve also talked to a representative from the Utah Department of Transporation about plans for development in the area where the house is located. He told me that they are in the planning stages of a freeway widening project as well as a rebuild of the interchange that is about half a mile south of the house. The widening project he estimates won’t be done before about 10 years from now, so it will impact us little, if at all. The interchange project may be sooner than that, but the associated Environmental Impact Study has not even been started yet, so any actual construction will be at the very least 2-3 years from now. The current interchange only provides on and off ramps on the east side of the freeway, and our house is on the west, so it would be nice to have better access. The area is quite close to Utah Lake so the tree huggers will definitely have a lot to say about any proposed development. I’m pretty excited to be moving to an area with nature so close again. Here’s a link to google maps showing the area:

http://maps.google.com/

Our house is on one of the east-west streets toward the top of the image. You can see how close we are to the lake and lots and lots of open ground. Some of it is already earmarked for development (and already subdivided in the county records parcel map) but much of it will remain protected wetland perfect for exploration.

They accepted our offer on the house Friday night at about 8:30. As it turns out there were three offers that day and the offering prices were all about the same. The other two offers asked the sellers to pay their closing costs, though, and we did not, so they chose ours. So now we get to run around like chickens with our heads cut off for the next few weeks dotting Is and crossing Ts. Joy. My wife is uber-excited. She has already started packing up our apartment, which is nice for me, since cleaning goes along with that process and she is doing it while I am at work. I’m farly certain, though, that she’ll have posted a list of things for me do to when I get home this afternoon.

Well, we just made an offer on a house. It’s not a perfect house, the chief downside being that it is farther south than we would ideally like to live, but we have looked at umpteen thousand houses in the past month and it is the best one we’ve seen so far, so we jumped on it pretty quick. Do you always feel railroaded when dealing with a Real Estate Agent? The one we worked with on the offer is even a guy that is friends with and well trusted by my wife’s grandparents, and even though he deferred to us on everything, I still felt a bit railroaded. We set a very short expiration on our offer, so of we don’t hear that they have accepted it by late tonight then I will breathe a little easier, because at least then I won’t be locked into anything until we make another offer. Erica really loves the house and it seems that she has completely forgotten about how much she hates driving long distances (it’s not really that long a distance, but when you have to do it every day it gets to feel like it). We’ll see how it turns out. I suppose if we get the house and hate it enough we can turn around and sell it after a few months or a year. I’ve heard of buyers remorse but is there such a thing as offerer’s remorse?

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