Closing

We closed on our house today!

Yay! And aw... at the same time!

Yay of course because we now are homeowners again. Boy was that a long escrow period. It was pushing 60 days because we had to get a 60 day lock on our (AWESOME!) interest rate, 45 was not quite enough. And we started a week or two after our offer was accepted. It was almost like being pregnant, just waiting and waiting and waiting, but without excruciating pain at the end.

The actual signing meeting was none like I've ever been to. In CA, as buyers we signed our papers a day or two ahead of time and the actual closing day was a pretty quiet wire transfer for the money. We could do the whole transaction without ever meeting the other party. Not so in MA. We were there, our realtor was there, the sellers were there, I suppose the seller's agent would have been there...except she was our agent too, our lawyer, their lawyer. The atmosphere was upbeat. We were happy with the price, our rate and the fact that they picked us at all. I think they were pretty happy that we were a nice family moving in and with where they are moving, they get to pay off their house and pocket a nice chunk of cash. They knew their lawyer for 20 years so it was like a reunion for them. We were just excited to have the house. It was friendly chatting all around. You'd almost never know it was a business transaction except that our lawyer occasionally would say, "Keep signing..." as we made our way through our ream of papers to sign.

The closing was a little sad though because, speaking of the selling family, we started to befriend them. They were a very devoted Christian family who was friends with some of my old BCEC friends as well as best friends with my new mom's group leader. And after I met the mom face to face for the first time, we realized that their youngest and my boys were actually in the same summer program at Eli's school this past summer when we first got to Lexington. What a small world! We went to the house almost weekly with appts for contractors and each time the whole family was at home (mom homeschools, dad works from home). They made us cookies when they accepted our offer, we made them rice krispy treats when we came for our contractor appts. We gave them a going away/road trip gift, they left us an area rug and some custom made cushions for a sit in bench. They were really happy that we hoped to use the house much like they did: hosting friends, potlucks, Bible studies and the like. (The house is set up well for those types of things.) It was by far the friendliest and most congenial real estate transaction we ever had. I think we would have totally been friends, except that the circumstance that brought us together was that they were moving away! It was almost sad to say goodbye to them as they left for their new home in North Carolina. 

When the signing was over, we got the keys and said our goodbyes. Me and Tom's first instinct was to go to the house, as if something about the house had changed in the two hours we were last there for our final walkthrough?? But something did change -- our outlook -- because the house was now OURS. The house was now finally empty and it was one of the first times that we were in the house without the selling family or our realtor also there. After we did our little happy dance, thrilled that it was finally ours, we drove off to resume normal life of work and picking up the kids. But when I drove away from the house and out the usual streets on the way to Tobey's school, things definitely felt different. It wasn't just roads that made their way through Lexington, now these were roads that we were going to drive every single day, OUR street, OUR intersection, OUR landmarks to tell friends how to get there, OUR Seattle's Best coffee, OUR Mobil gas station. In one 1.5 hour signing session, my entire outlook on our house changed from "the" house, to OUR house.

So now our sights turn back to our house and the work to be done before we move in in a few weeks. Now that the "pregnancy" is over, it's time to put all of our planning into motion. First up: tomorrow, the painters come and start taking down wallpaper. Yipee!

Full circle

I was driving through north Lexington, on our way to Tobey's classmate's birthday party at the Y. It was an overcast day, not too cold, and mid-fall when all of a sudden I had a flashback. Not a deja vu where I think I had been there but actually hadn't. But a real flashback.

It was exactly a year ago this week that we took our Boston "recon" trip, a weeklong trip to the Boston area. We packed the boys in the car and took our own driving tour of Lexington. The weather and time of year was exactly the same and thus, the flashback. I remembered north Lexington specifically because the streets on the map seemed more spaced out, like maybe there would be bigger lots and bigger houses there. So we headed in that direction.

There were a lot of flat level lots, different from the hillier tree lined streets of Lexington. The houses in this part of town were multimillion dollar, I'm sure. Although we knew we couldn't afford the mansions, we thought it'd be nice to get a similar lot and just a smaller standard colonial in the shadow of the mansions. Don't they say you don't want to be the nicest house on a less expensive block but rather you should be the cheapest house in the most expensive neighborhood? I think it was then that I thought I could really like Lexington.

Fast forward a year later, we are about to close on our own house in Lexington in just a few days. Amazing what can change in a year. Oct 2007 we were just starting to tell friends that we were moving and 12 months later, we already said goodbye and are ready to say hello to new friends here.