what summer?

When I started this blog back in February, I meant what I said. I wanted to step outside my comfort zone and chronicle the journey of my next thirty (and, hopefully, way beyond) years. It was --and still very much is-- my intention to live life to the fullest. To better myself, to bloom creatively. To dare to be all I did not during my first thirty years.

While I don't have any excuse for my hiatus from the end of February until my post at the beginning of June, I have a fabulous one from then until...now.

It was mid-April when Mike and I decided it was time to stop renting and become homeowners. Not only was it getting old paying a payment every month (rent) and having nothing to show for it, but our landlord always carried a high stress aura with her and she seemed to be hanging around our home  more and more. It got old; having her mow the lawn of her property next door (also a rental) and being concerned she was going to drop by just because she could. I was nice to her because we lived in her house (and because she had an extremely short fuse), and that made her feel we were "friends".

Our lease ended in March. She kept mentioning bringing over a lease extension for us to sign but did not, and we stopped mentioning it because of our decision to leave. As volatile as we knew she was, we felt that she would not take kindly to our leaving, even if it was to take the awesome, amazing step of home ownership. A "friend" would be happy for us. We were quite sure she wouldn't be.

On June 1st, just a few hours after my last post on this blog, she finally cornered me with the paperwork and I had to inform her of our plans. She reacted just as we thought she would, and returned later that afternoon with a notice for us to vacate the premises within thirty days, which she could do as we became at-will tenants at the end of our lease. "It's not personal, it's business," she said. Right. Three years of being perfect tenants and this is how we are treated when we want to buy our own home. I guess we were expected to rent for the rest of our lives.

At that point, we hadn't even found a home we wanted to buy, so closing on something in that time frame was not going to happen. What were we going to do? We toyed with Lily, our cats, and I moving back to our hometown while Mike stayed in a hotel, but in the end decided we didn't want to be separated. We would rent something, somewhere. In the meantime, we scoured the realtor listings.

On June 6th, we found our new home. It was a house we had originally decided against looking at due to being a short sale. We were in a time crunch, after all. Be closed and in wherever we were going to be before Lily started school. Short sales are notorious for not only only not being short, but being ginormous headaches. Our agent and theirs had talked, though, and there seemed to be the possibility of maybe renting it until we closed, if we decided we liked it. We LOVED it. We made an offer immediately and kept our fingers crossed that they would accept it and allow us to rent.

Our offer was accepted by the owners, but they weren't comfortable with renting it out to us. Frustrated --but in love with the house-- we decided to wait out the process and rented a small apartment, taking a fraction of our belongings with us --slept on mattresses on the floor, sat in lawn chairs. It was kind of like college, just less fun. The majority of our things went into two of those storage pod things and got whisked away to places unknown.

Our landlord made sure things did not end on good terms, as she does with all of her tenants who dare leave her, forcing us to bring legal action against her. Really, I just want that chapter of our life to be closed, but not quite enough to let her win, I guess. I'll leave it at that, for now, since this is ongoing and I don't think I'm supposed to be talking about it. (Or, is that just on TV?)

We spent all of July nervously waiting for the sellers' bank to accept our offer (a necessary step during a short sale). I'm sure we drove our agent crazy, calling her every other day to see if there was news. Finally, we were told to do a home inspection in case there was anything the bank needed to fix before we closed. There wasn't.

More waiting.

Finally, on August 11th, the sellers decide to let us rent until closing so that we can be in the house before Lily starts school...and on the 14th, their bank officially accepts our offer. We began moving in on the 15th, on the 17th we went to our bank to send our mortgage application "live", and on September 17th, we will be homeowners.

It has been a crazy, nervewracking ride. After Lily climbed onto the bus on her first day, there was a fleeting thought of, "Where did the summer go?" And then I remembered. I know exactly where our summer went. We spent it packing, cleaning, moving, cleaning, unpacking, packing, cleaning, and moving. In that order.

We're still unpacking. That, I think, is going to take awhile.