From what I can tell so far, there are a few good things about owning a house.

1. It is a good investment. We can't deny that any longer -- we ran the numbers and considering our mortgage payment will likely be the same or less than what we pay for rent, plus we'll get the tax credit, it's the best thing to do, even if the value of the house stagnates (which is unlikely over 5 or more years). Even with ALL the money we'll have to pay for upkeep and repairs. We'll still come out WAY ahead. Drats!

2. We can do whatever we want. We can add a half bath, paint the living room black, tear down walls, whatever. (Of course, we have to PAY for everything...)

3. We won't have to lie to anyone about how many cats we have.

But the rest of it? It sucks.

I keep asking myself if we are really ready for this, especially owning an older house. After our inspection on Tuesday, I was looking over the report, and I can say with certainty that there is no way I would ever know 3/4 of those things would actually be problems! There is some pooling of water near the basement window when it rains. Assuming I even noticed something like that I would just assume it would drain eventually. But apparently it can cause the whole house to fall down, or something like that. Who knew?? I sure as hell didn't!

But I guess we'll learn. Or else our house will fall down.

Regardless, it looks like we are moving forward. There were a few somewhat big surprises that came up during the inspection, while things we thought would be problems, like the roof, aren't. At least not yet. So our realtor (who I think is just fabulous because she does SO MUCH WORK and never appears to ever ever sleep judging from the emails I get from her at midnight, then at 6 a.m.) is negotiating with the seller over these things. We're pretty sure the seller won't want to make the repairs, so we're angling for a price reduction or a rebate at closing. If all goes well, we'll hand over a huge check next Thursday (our down payment), then we'll go around begging for a huge amount of money. It just keeps getting better and better!

So most of the time I'm freaked out. I find myself laying awake at night worrying about a billion house-buying related things. But I can not deny my underlying feeling of excitement. Even though there was that terrifying article in the Boston Globe about how people who make $300,000 and have excellent credit can't get mortgages, I feel like this could really happen. And that makes me happy. Because despite the headache that comes with owning an old house, the three things I listed at the beginning of this post really do overshadow all of that. At least that's how I feel right now. Check back with me in a year!