The Family *roll

We removed the “inspection” contingency from our purchase agreement on the house today. Barring disaster, it’s ours! We are now legally obligated to blow our life’s savings on a 90-year old house with a 30-page inspector’s report.

I could bore you to tears about everything we’ve learned in the past 6 days. We now know just how much we don’t know about wiring, plumbing, stucco maintenance, roofs etc. What we do know is that the house is in no danger of imminently falling down and there is only a mild chance our child will be electrocuted.

But we’re so happy. The house is really what we had hoped for and we’ve fallen in love with it. We know we’ve committed many future weekends (and paychecks) to projects but, at least, it might help give me some purpose and focus after the move. It’s a bit of a buzz-kill, then, to listen to how passe home ownership has become: NPR and the Times tell story after story about how home ownership is an outdated American dream and how well renters are doing these days. If we rented in Northfield, we’d likely end up with something like this beauty.

So we’re buying. And now we have a daunting and binding contract telling us so.