A house closing just added to our to-do list!

Last week I first mentioned about putting an offer down on a house...then the counter-offers started and evidently didn't go over well with our ever confusing sellers. Oh well. It's nothing personal, it's just business. So today our realtor came up with a very creative solution to get the most of our 4% seller paid closing costs to lower our interest rate even more so that even if our purchase price was higher, our monthly payment would be the same as the lower purchase price. Seeing as we'd only use 3 of the 4%, it seemed sort of silly to let the remaining 1% go to waste. So he worked it out with Amy, our mortgage broker, and he called the seller's new realtor. I think I liked the old one better. He divulged more information, hehe Anyways, long story short, they accepted our offer. The way the paperwork is getting figured out is they send us a new counter offer (since they so rudely failed to do that last time), along with the professional inspection report they've already had done. We can still decide to hire our own inspector, but if we sign off on theirs, we save a couple hundred dollars. We'll look it over and decide. We're still going to have Brady's dad take a look and give us his opinion and talk about whether or not to do our own official inspection or not.

Tonight we've been getting our loan documents all sorted so we can fax them into Kurt tomorrow. That way he can get us locked in at our interest rate and we'll be on track for our closing on or before October 17th. For those of you coming out for the wedding, obviously the house won't be set up, it'll just be a ton of boxes, the beds, and all blank walls...except for the plasma ;) I'm sure if Brady gets the opportunity, we'll have the plasma hanging with the surround sound hooked up. We won't have cable yet, but I'm sure he'd be more than happy to test out the acoustics during Top Gun or something of that action-packed nature.

So it's very exciting stuff! I know nothing is finalized until they hand over those keys and Ty pops out from a bush to say "Welcome home Travis Family, welcome home"...oh wait, we won't be married yet, hehe But still, you get the idea. We know we have to dot our I's and cross our T's, but we're well on our way. At least it's a fairly abbreviated closing.

Oh and due to both of our returned superstitious paranoia with the complications during negotiations after posting "teaser" pics, no more pictures of the house until we are completely set, good to go, green light, reaching for the keys :)

Instead, here's the picture of us after we got our marriage license! (For those who haven't seen it already on Myspace or Facebook)

Oh and I had been looking through iPhoto and thought I'd share a before/after for you. Gracie is our beautiful American Bulldog. Sweet as can be. Lovable and huggable....and the biggest baby you'll ever meet. Here's Gracie at about 4 1/2 months old, not long after I got her. She was Annie's exact weight of 31.7 pounds. Yes, she was a BIG puppy! See what a baby face she had? :)

AND NOW! Very tall and lean and an estimated 90-95 pounds!

She's such a love bug and she loves to cuddle. A big thing for us was to find a house with a decent size area for Gracie to run around in and have room to roam during the day. Well, we think she'll be very happy with the house, though it could take her a while to master the stairs. She's a bit awkward looking on the staircase at my parents' house in Payson...blame it on her lanky legs. She'll learn though. Plus there's a dog park very close by! My little Annabelle (AKA Annie Banks McKenzie) will enjoy the outdoor space of the house as well, especially the GRASS! I can't wait to see their reaction!