We're in Escrow!

So, on Sunday night, April 15th (also my birthday-THANK YOU to everyone who gave me birthday love, you guys are the BEST!) we flew in late to Minneapolis (sidenote: our flight was delayed due to the fact that we were flying into an identified possible tornado zone, and if that wasn't fun enough, once we actually flew it was by FAR the STINKY-EST flight I have ever been on.  Happy Birthday to me!  Seriously.  Those people must have been seriously ill to produce such retched gas for the entire flight.  Multiple people.  Wowza.).  Early the next morning we checked out a rental car and headed the 70 miles to Rochester.  We got snowed on a tiny bit that morning in Minneapolis, and froze all day Monday as we searched for homes.  We saw 16 houses the first day, as well as went through ALL the information and paper work with the realtor before searching.

Monday night we went over to meet some good Rochester folk who had invited us to dinner.  They actually ended up throwing us a little party and inviting a few other "Mayo Families" over.  It was lots of fun, and so nice & friendly of them.  We were exhausted after only being in our hotel for 4.5 hours the night before and running around looking at homes all day, but we had a great time.

On Tuesday we saw 8 or so other homes, then went back in the afternoon to look at our top 2.  At that point we had a really hard time deciding between 2 homes.  They were very different.  Home A was a little smaller, the bedrooms were all really small and it had a detached garage, but it was SO clean, updated, in perfect move in condition, had a wonderful fenced backyard (which is REALLY hard to find, no one has fences there!), the garage was HUGE even if it was detached-WAY over sized, and it had really great views from the front window and the deck.  Home B was 100sq feet bigger-which was obvious in the bedroom size, it had an attached garage-BIG bonus!, a great fireplace (which the other one doesn't have), but on the downside it was older, not well maintained at all, horrible mismatched carpet, yard needing work, dingy, dirty, no real big problems, but LOTS of little honey-do's that add up.  It was the same price essentially as house A.  Home B had lots of room for improvement, which would increase the value.  Home A was already at the upper range of its value, but needed no repairs.  The bottom line ended up being that repairs cost money.  At this stage of our lives, we don't have the time or extra money to spend fixing up a house.  If it were a couple years in the future, we totally would have bought house B.  However for right now we decided to get house A.

We made a written offer at the end of the day Tuesday, and headed straight from the Realtor's office to dinner with some new friends.  They were a great little family and it was wonderful to meet them, they were fantastic.  Unfortunately I had a HUGE migraine by late afternoon on Tues, so I wasn't feeling well at all, but I still managed to enjoy myself.  If it had been a dinner date with anyone we knew even remotely well, I would have canceled, but I managed to make it through.  At dinner Dan (our Realtor) called with the home owner's counter offer.

We went back to the hotel and talked about it a bit.  At this point, I honestly felt so terrible that I didn't care what we did.  We decided to accept, and the next morning we signed on the dotted line that says, pending an inspection, we are buying your house for X amount!  We will close on June 29th.

It was a long and stressful few days.  I am relieved to be home, and am so glad that we found a home!  Now here is the part you actually care about: PICTURES!

 Back yard looking at deck

 Nice big deck

 Front sitting Room

 Other side of the front sitting room

 Dining/Kitchen area

 More Kitchen

There are also 4 small bedrooms and 2 full baths, evenly split between up and down (the home is a split level, as are 90% of the homes in that area), and a good sized living area in the basement in an L shape.  We will probably have this defined in 2 sections, either family room/office or family room/playroom.