What's new in the Williams household? Well... an actual household!! Jason and I are currently in full swing of the house buying process. I'm still in shock myself, waiting for the panic attack I'm sure to have any moment now, but here's the story (the more I tell it, the more real it becomes.)

Last year when we moved to Fort Worth, we signed a lease at our apartment complex for three months. We figured it would give us (ok, me) time to find a job and then we could focus on finding a house. Only I never really found a job. Nevertheless, we went with our realtor (a longtime family friend of Jason's parents) to look at a dozen or so houses. We found one or two that would have been nice I'm sure, but nothing that made us drool, or want to go into major debt for. So we decided that we would sign another lease with our apartment complex, and try again in another year. We wound up moving to a bigger apartment across the property, and here we've been for 10 months now.

The new year rolled around and we knew that we wanted to try, try again to find a house. So off we went with Jarod the trusty realtor on our second installment of drive-bys and walk-throughs. This time, I had a better job (though still not a career) and so we went a little higher in price range. And we were shocked to find even less than we did this time last year! Every house we looked at had something wrong - missing appliances, foundation issues, washing machine hookups in the kitchen, etc. We didn't even make it inside one of the houses because the neighbor was feeding his 10 foot long python a big fluffy white rabbit - ON THE FRONT PORCH. So we quickly moved on.

Just when we had resigned ourselves to signing yet another lease (at an increased rate thanks to the bastards running our complex) Jason spoke with his dad about a house that he was renting out. Turns out the tenants' lease had ended and they were paying on a month-to-month basis. A lot of phone calls and a visit to a mortgage company later, and it looked like we might be able to buy the house from Jason's dad.

The most recent developments have come in the last 48 hours. Jason's dad called the tenants, told them the situation and gave them 45 days to vacate. Then he had Jarod send them a list of other properties for rent in the area. To clarify, Jason and I are not trying to kick them out or anything. We want them to have as much time to find a nice new place. After all, our apartment lease isn't up until the end of March.

Well, the tenants called Joe back today. Apparently they are looking at moving into a rent house right across the street! And what's even more unbelievable is that they are thinking they can be out mid-February. So it looks like the house we were planning on having in April may be ours in the next two weeks!

As for the apartment, Jason's dad is going to pay our last month's rent if we decide to move in Feb/March (it's cheaper for him than having to pay mortgage on a house no one is living in.) Since we get a month's grace period of paying nothing on the house from our mortgage company, we can move in any time starting this Saturday and not have to pay anything on the house until April. On top of all of that, Jason's dad is paying all of our closing costs AND Jason is getting a raise starting this week!

So there's our crazy house story. It happened all of a sudden, and while I'm scared to death, I'm also really excited! Who's up for a housewarming party?!