"We’re going to need a bigger boat."

I’m going to give everyone who has never been through the Machiavellian process of buying a house a little tip to prepare them for the experience:

You will never, ever be fully prepared for the experience of buying a house.

At the beginning of this foray I was operating under the misguided assumption that actually finding a house that I wanted, in the right neighborhood, the right size and at the right price was the hardest part of this little venture. We spent years mentally and financially preparing for this, going so far as to move back in — for as long as it took — with my mother in order to eliminate as much of the extra financial baggage we’ve gathered up over the years. Anyone who knows my history will realize that this was a "trial of Job." Once we were in a better spot and the interest rates had plummeted low enough, we set out to see about a loan and to find the perfect domicile.

Getting a loan estimate is easy. Any homeless guy on a street corner can give you one. Our debt-to-income ratio was dandy, so we qualified for a decent sum right off the bat. "That wasn’t so hard," I said to myself. Fool!

We then proceeded to spend a helluva’ lot of time looking at houses. Our tastes being what they are, we saw a lot of nice places that didn’t suit us. We continued to search. The hunt went on. And on. We looked high and low, the whole while the interest rates dropped further, and then silently crept back up without making so much as a peep. We were starting to get a little worried that we would never find a place to our liking, much less before the rates were high again. Still, we weren’t going to compromise and settle for a piece ‘o crap just to keep our interest rate low.

Then we got a lucky break. Our agent told us about a house in one of the nicer neighborhoods we had been sniffing around and it hadn’t even been put on the market yet. We would have a chance to snipe this place before anyone else had set foot in it… provided it was to our liking. We got the address and drove past it two days before we were slated to see it officially. We were pleased with what we saw, considering what they were asking for it. Holy smokes, it looked great on the outside, if not a teensy bit small. Here’s hoping it’s nice inside.

It was.

We were supposed to go look at five houses that night, this one being the first. We never made it to the other four, we had however driven past them a few days before, and so had a partial opinion on them. What, you think we don’t do our homework? C’mon, this is Stuff and Lady we’re talking about here.

One foot over the threshold, and the good vibes struck instantly. The place was immaculate. The old folks living there now (the original owners, by the way) took spectacular care of the house and property. It was a little dated, but in great shape. We can always modernize the place as we go.

At 5:30pm we were shown the house. We went back to the real estate office, wrote up a bid on the house and submitted it at 7:30pm. By 9:00pm the bid was accepted, and we were under contract. Talk about fortune smiling on us.

That was when life got difficult.

There are so many things to accomplish in the thirty day contract period between the acceptance of the bid and closing. Our house owning friends gave us lots of advice, but they didn’t prepare us for everything. I will find myself in the middle of a discussion with them about our latest home purchasing nightmare, and they’ll interrupt and say "Oh yeah, I remember going through that, it was rough." and all I can reply is "Gee, thanks a lot! You could have mentioned that when you were giving me your self-proclaimed ‘comprehensive report’ of what pitfalls to expect. Fuck! Would have been nice to see THAT one coming".

In the beginning I started likening the whole experience to taking a walk and getting stones in your shoe. While it doesn’t keep you from reaching your destination, you do have to stop, take your shoe off and shake the stone out before you continue.

Fuck that. I was very, very wrong.

My new, and more appropriate analogy is that the boat you willingly boarded has sunk in the ocean and you have to swim to shore. There are fins circling in the water ahead of you. You don’t know which of them are sharks, and which are dolphins. The sharks will take a chunk out of your ass, and the dolphins will, at best, look at you with a great deal of indifference. You can, if your will is strong, punch a shark square in the nose to drive it away with no guarantee that it will not come back more pissed off than before.

We’ve knocked the crap out of our share of sharks on this little swim. Our fists are getting sore, and it’s getting harder to keep our heads above the water. There are only two fins directly ahead of us, and if our luck holds out, they’ll turn out to be a pair of friendly dolphins that will leave us the fuck alone. After that, all we have to do is cling to a piece of flotsam and drift to shore.

There are so many things to do, get, sign, arrange and pay for before you can close on a house. You better make damned sure the funds for your down payment and closing costs are from an über legitimate source — monetary gifts do not count unless you’ve had them in the bank for a long while. Have an extra, extra reserve of cash on hand for the unforeseen expenses that are unavoidably going to surface. Get your debt as low as you can. Don’t jump on a FHA loan first thing; you’ll make out better with a conventional one. Put as much down on the house as you can at the time of purchase — the closer to 20% the better — unless you go FHA, then it won’t matter.

That’s just the few common sense details I can list. I don’t have the energy to go any further. I’m water logged, cold, and looking for the nearest bit of floating debris to hold on to.

Fucking sharks.