Home is where your mortgage is

So yeah, I'm buying a house. Again.

Assuming nothing blows up at the very last minute, I will be closing two weeks from now on an adorable Queen Anne cottage located in the same 'hood where I already live. We're pretty much past all the major hurdles, so I don't see anything going wrong at this point. I didn't want to mention the house too soon because these things fall through from time to time.

My lease doesn't end until the middle of June, and the only reason I started looking at places so early was that I knew I'd be hella busy (and mostly out of town) during the month of March. I wanted to have a faint idea of what was out there so I could hit the ground running in earnest in April once my work life slowed down to about a hundredth of its current pace.

But when does my life ever go as planned?

Of course I found the right place quickly (though I did see about 10 other places first). Right location, right size, right style, right price. Another house that I'd pined for from afar (ok, it was across the street from my current place) sold just as I was starting to seriously look, so I knew if the house was almost too good to be true, it would not wait around for me. So I made an offer a few days before I left for New York and have been in the midst of paperwork and meetings and home inspections ever since.

The beautiful thing is the sellers weren't really in a position to move until the end of May, so I'll be renting the house back to them for two months, so I won't be juggling both the cost of the mortgage and my lease during that time. It's a win-win (unless you consider that I'll be DYING to move in, but it's the frugal thing to do.)

Unfortunately I didn't qualify for any of the first-time homebuyer benefits as I am not a first-time homebuyer. That dang townhouse in Nashville that I had to sell when I relocated to Knoxville is the house that keeps on screwing me, but oh well. As the lady whose handling my mortgage said with a laugh: "You can handle the monthly note." I think that was her way of calling me a tight-wad with my money.

Now you'll all have a place to stay WHEN you come visit me in Knoxville.