Buying A House Kinda Sucks Until You Get Those Keys

I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I was for awhile, and it’s because I’ve been caught up in the very stressful and time-consuming process of buying a house. I’ve always been a big fan of HGTV but I never realized how stressful and anxiety-inducing the house-buying process actually is until my husband and I finally made our way entirely through it. The end result is well worth it, but the journey was a bitch.

We finally closed on our house a couple days ago, and I’ve never been so happy in my life than the moment we got the keys and I could stop freaking out. Why was I freaking out? For one thing, we were required to put in 60 days notice that we were moving out of our apartment, so we (and our dogs) would have possibly been homeless if the mortgage fell through during those 60 days. Also, I was just a big walking ball of stress by the time I got through the months of paperwork, digging up obscure bullshit documents, and the constant anxiety.

After surviving this experience, I have a new theory that mortgage brokers get bonus commissions based on how many heart attacks they make their customers have (which is pretty fucked up in a country with an awful health care system). The initial pre-qualification is cheerful and happy, easy to pass, then you have to dig up a massive pile of pay stubs, bank statements, 401k statements, explanations of every time you’ve run your credit, a live animal sacrifice to the mortgage gods and an oath to surrender your first born. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but just a little bit. After you’ve jumped through all those hoops, everything seems fine until the last week or two before the scheduled closing, when the underwriters demand another pound of flesh, I mean, bullshit documents, in a last minute attempt to invalidate you and deny you the loan, leaving you to scramble to find another rental that’s available immediately (good luck). If they’re unable to do so, you happily close and collect your keys (like we did thankfully!). I don’t even want to think about the other scenario.

Now that we have the keys and everything is final, I’m so relieved. I’ve been through some ridiculously stressful times in my life, but the first-time homebuyers’ experience is like none other. I didn’t sleep well for several months. I worked several projects at a time 50+ hours/week and ate a lot of ramen so I could put away money towards the down payment, closing costs, and additional expenses we would incur to accomplish our goal. I haven’t been to a hair stylist or a nail salon in a year and a half (and my crusty heels tell the story, yuck 😒). But guess what? After all that sacrifice and hard work, we finally get to move into our new house and move forward once again, onwards and upwards!

So, at the end of it all, it feels amazing to have our own house, and the trauma of the home-buying process is still well-noted but beginning to wear off as we get excited about all the house projects we want to tackle. This is our space and we can finally make it our own and build equity instead of burning rent money in a barrel every month. As much as the process does entirely suck, I would recommend it, because all’s well that ends well!