Closing day was really quite uneventful, all things considered. Maybe you need that point where it hits you “I’m a homeowner!” I mean I realize I’m a homeowner now, but it didn’t hit me quite like I expected. I guess it’s kind of like your birthday really. You’re a year older and every year someone asks you “How does it feel to be X years old?” And the answer every time is “No different than X-1 years old.” So I guess the day was no different than any other day, besides the fact that I didn’t go in to work. I think part of the reason may be that we’re not actually living or moving into the house yet. The house needs a lot of repair and we hope to be in by Christmas, but the fact that there’s no electricity at the house limits our going over there since it’s pretty dark by the time I get off work. Maybe if we had bought one of those brand new charmless suburban cookie cutter houses where we could move in right away it would hit me more. I guess it’s all still a bit surreal, but the reality is…we are homeowners!! And that is very, very exciting. :)

The closing was scheduled for 11:00am, so we drove by the house one last time before going to the attorney’s office. Just to make sure the house hadn’t burned down overnight and all. We hadn’t been to the house in a little while and were greeted with a gianormous branch in our back yard (that’s when you make a mental note of “Do I need to add a chainsaw to the never ending list of items we will now have to buy for the house?”). The leaves were already brown, so it must have laid there for a few days, torn down by one of the few heavy Georgia thunderstorms we had had in recent days. In addition we had a quick shock discovery in the crawl space: insulation and other items were sprawled around the place. We thought “Oh no, did someone break in here again?” before Patrick realized the exterminators had been at the house the day before and must have removed these items to check for termites and other unwanted guests. What a relief. While we were doing our last minute checkup our real estate agent, Mary Jane, took down the “for sale” sign and the lockbox from the door. She went ahead and handed Patrick the key – here we go! Then it was on to the attorney’s…

I think by the time you get to the closing of the house you’re kind of numb from so much paperwork. We had signed a million and one papers already for the loan process, and now at the attorney’s office (who was very nice by the way) we were signing some of the same papers again – ohh goody. Only this time with our full names. *gasp* This was quite a change for both Patrick and I. We were sitting there laughing the whole time about how messed up our signatures looked since we both go by and sign our middle names under normal circumstances. As we were signing all our documents they also asked for our checks (there goes our money!). And then that was it. We were homeowners. There were no fireworks going off (maybe just a little bit in our minds though), no champagne corks popping (alright, at least not until later that evening). Instead it was just a beautiful sunny day and we held the key to our new house in our hands.