Ooooklahoma!

Well, Leslie and I just got back from looking for a house in Oklahoma.  We were there for almost a week while Morgan and Emma stayed with Leslie's famly.  We were worried about being able to find a home that we liked in that amount of time, but apparently it can be done.  We got there last Thursday and then met our real estate agent and started looking at houses on Friday morning.  We saw 22 houses the first day (even though we had to drive three hours from where we had stayed the night before and we took a fair amount of time out to have lunch with some people I will be working with)!  Then we saw three more the next day and afterwards started into our second look at our top two houses.  We really liked the layout of one of them, but as we looked at it more closely we found out that it had been a pretty quick flip job and it looked a lot nicer on the surface than it actually was.  The pictures are of the other one.  It had been on the top of our list.  A lot of that had to do with the awesome back yard.  The lot is over half an acre, which is about twice as big as most of the others we looked at.  There is also a little creek beyond the back fence that sometimes has turtles and crawdads in it.

Well, we decided to put in an offer that afternoon (of the second day) and by that evening we had a counter offer.  The sellers agreed to pay our closing costs like we requested, but wanted the full asking price.  We came back with a counter-counter saying we would be willing to pay that if they left some appliances and furniture (we're afraid of moving into an empty house and having it stay that way for a long time - after we close on a house we won't have any money to fill it up with anything).  We decided to ask for the fridge, the washer and dryer, the patio furniture (including the glider swing), and a dining set they had.  I think our agent was a little worried about us when we told her all that.

The next day was Sunday, so we didn't do anything about the house, but we got to go to church and meet a lot of people.  On Monday morning we found out that the sellers had accepted our offer, including leaving the things we had asked for plus the red furniture in the living room.  We found out that our agent had just decided to add that to our list when she communicated our counter-counter offer since the worst they could say was no and we couldn't ask for more later.  When we went back to look at the house a third time, we realized that the red furniture is real suede leather (besides the two pieces in the picture, there's another chair and an ottoman).  The owners might have figured that it wouldn't look good anywhere else but in the yellow living room of this house.

Anyway, we're really excited about our new home.  We've met some of the neighbors and they seem really nice.  The next-door neighbor already offered to let Morgan and Emma come play on their swingset.

Now, we're just working on doing everything else that goes along with buying a house, like getting the appraisal and the inspections and homeowners' insurance (and of course you have to get quotes on auto insurance, too, since everyone makes their homeowners' insurance go down a lot if you have other policies with them).  And all of this has been done in just a few days.  The house we ended up buying was not even really on the list of houses we were interested in from the pictures online.  The two that we had liked most before we actually saw them both got crossed off our list pretty quickly.

So, now we're back in Utah and living the student renter's life for a little bit longer.  It is really nice to be back with Morgan and Emma again, though.  We sure missed them while we were gone, and we're so thankful for all the help we got from Leslie's family.  Now, I'm trying to get my dissertation finished up in the next few weeks so we'll be ready to go do something with this house we're buying.