This is our new house! This is our new kitchen, family room and living room! Yes, you read it right…we’ve bought a house. I hope the pictures work (the technical pro is in Chicago at conference that she’s helping with). Total number of days from applying for a home loan to having a signed purchase agreement…14 days! Number of days until we close on January 25th…40 days! We would have never thought it could be this easy.

Needless to say we are pretty excited about finding a new home. As luck would have it, it was the last home we were going to look at in Bloomington before we started looking South of the River. I’m sure we looked at over 20 houses in Bloomington before we came across this little gem located in a nice residential area in East Bloomington. We walked in and it was one of the few places that we both really liked when we first saw it. The current owners have put a lot of sweat equity into the house and have really updated it. Lynsey really liked all the detail and hard wood floors and a space for her baby grand piano. I liked the fact that it had a new roof, all new windows, new siding, and a finished and insulated garage. We both liked the big deck in the back yard, the nice office in the basement, and the spacious new kitchen.

The bonus is that we have already met some of the neighbors since the current owners, John and Lisa along with there adorable son Logan, are moving across the street and two house to the south. We figure that must be a testament of the neighborhood if they are willing to stay. John is a fireman for West St. Paul and a Bloomington Volunteer Fireman and quite the Handyman from what we can tell. He was finishing the backyard fence when we were leaving after the inspection on Thursday. Lisa seems nice as well, but we’ve only met her for just a couple of minutes. Overall, we’re really excited, but I don’t think it has all sunk in yet. We’ve got a busy six weeks ahead of us with the holidays and everything else going on. I actually have to go to a 3 day planning conference in the days preceding our closing. Then I leave for a two week training course the weekend after we move in. But we’ll get through it all I’m sure.

Thank you to Don and Carol Blacker (the Viking Council Scout Executive and his wife) for hosting the BSA Holiday Celebration last night at the Chanhassen Dinner Theater. The food was great and the show was excellent. We saw Forbidden Broadway, which was a four person rendition of spoofs on about 20 different musicals. If you’ve seen lots of musicals, you’ll love this show.

Our house hunting went well this weekend. Although we didn’t find our absolute dream home on Saturday, we saw a couple of promising ones yesterday as we visited a couple of open houses. Most notably one in Bloomington that has quite a bit of character. Our biggest problem right now is deciding how long do we keep looking before we buy something and are we getting a good value for the money. Everything that we seem to like is a little bit more than we originally had planned to spend. But we figure we’re going to live there for a long time so we should try and buy right the first time. Especially since we aren’t big fans of moving all the time. So, we are meeting with Scott again tomorrow and our saga continues…