The joys of home ownership have kept me from doing much blogging, not to mention the lack of things to write about. Buying a house has somewhat dampened my interest in real estate and the market. The long list of chores still undone on the new place have taken away a lot of the time available for writing.

Still, I do have this blog and I want to write something. In the mean time, feel free to leave a comment if there’s something you want to talk about.

Don’t make me beg…because I will.

By the way, I may not be looking for a house any more, but I’m still very interested in reading, writing and talking about housing, real estate and the market in general. If anyone out there is still on the hunt for a house, please leave a comment and let us know what you’re seeing. Things are pretty dead now, but I expect there will be a bit of an upswing right before the $8,000 home buyer credit finally ends in April.

If you’re a newcomer, there are tons of posts about Babylon Village real estate in the archives. Click on that “Older Posts” down that the bottom of the page or try one of the categories or tags on the right-hand side of the page.

As for me, I have a couple posts in the hopper. The first part of sold homes for September will be up later in the day or tonight. And once we close, Debra and I will be documenting renovation and decorating, for those of you who are still mourning the loss of HGTV.

Hey there HIB readers! Well, between work, trying to get the house situation locked down and chasing Aurora around I haven’t had much time for posting. Here are some updates, for those of you who are interested.

As of Tuesday last week, we are officially in contract. Yay! The documentation showed up at my lawyer’s office after much chasing around, tears, threats, wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. This was only three weeks after all the details are particulars were worked out and agreed to by all parties. Good job there by the seller’s attorney who managed to drag his feet, dodge my attorney’s phone calls and e-mails and not deliver on things he promised.

FYI, between the taxes, maintenance and upkeep on the house as well as the opportunity cost of the money from the sale, the seller is losing over $50 for every day delayed. The sellers attorney has so far cost his client over a $1000. Well done.

Right now, we’re in contract and have an approved mortgage. I sent the last of the last paperwork to my mortgage company on Friday. The only thing we’re waiting on is the survey, then the whole kit and kaboodle gets shipped off the bank for their final blessing. Once that’s done, we can schedule the closing.

One amusing note, I got the bank appraisal late last week and as I perused it I realized that all of the comps in the appraisal report were homes that I’ve written about here on HIB. I suppose that’s to be expected, but I still thought it was funny.

Thereby hangs a tale, unfortunately. The house we’re buying is an estate sale. The seller is is out of state and apparently wants to fly in to attend the closing in person. So there’s no telling when that might be. It would have been nice if the seller’s attorney had informed us of this fact early on in the process so that we could have scheduled this well ahead of time, but that would make things too easy.

So, here we sit. It’s January 10th. My lease on the apartment we live in now is up on January 28th. If I don’t get out by that date it’s going to cost me a ton of money for an emergency one month extension, even if I only need a few days.

Monday, I will again call everyone I can to try and speed the process along, but ability to affect the outcome or time line is pretty limited. I have to hope that the seller and/or the seller’s attorney wakes up and realizes that it’s in their best interest to get this thing done as soon as possible.

Anyway, that’s enough of my troubles. I do have some actual real estate posts on my thumb drive. I’m going to try to get caught up on those sold homes posts Real Soon Now.

I’ve got a few posts ready to go including the huge listing of Sold Homes in August. There are thirteen homes that were sold in August so I’m going to break up the post into three parts again. The first one should go up tomorrow.

I’ve got some other random things in the hopper. I hope you enjoy them.

We’ve got some bad weather on tap for this weekend, but we’re still going to go out and see some houses. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The comment section for this post is an open discussion, so I invite any and all readers to pipe up and say something. Feel free to leave a comment and ask a question, make an observation, tell us what you’re up to or just introduce yourself and say hi.

I’m very interested in hearing fellow home shoppers, especially their impressions of any open houses that they’ve seen, but I’d also like to hear from any sellers and their experiences and observations.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone. Happy hunting.

For those of you who are curious about who is actually reading this damn thing, I present a snapshot from my Google Analytics account for the month of October 2009. Traffic was up a bit this month, owing in part to a late month surge in posting by yours truly.

The only think of real relevance that’s not on that chart is absolute unique visitors. FYI, we had 786 uniques this month. Not to shabby for a hyper-local blog like this one.

Hey, all the cool kids are doing it, so I figured I better not get left behind.

So, it’s been nearly a month since my last post.  Things have been busy here at work and I’ve has some freelance stuff to do as well. Not to mention that my Aurora had her first birthday and there was the whole party thing to plan and pull off. As you can see, there’s lots of stuff on my plate.

More importantly, perhaps, Debra and I finally got the money we’ve been waiting for that we’ve been planning to use for our down payment.  I put in our mortgage pre-approval this morning and we should hear back on that by the end of the week. So with all that going on and our lease on the apartment being up at the end of January, we’re ready to start making serious offers.

What does this mean for HIB? I’m not really sure. I’m going to pull back from doing open house reports and other home reviews — especially ones we might be interested in making an offer on — for obvious reasons. I’d like to do more writing about Babylon itself, doings and goings and history and such as well as some more photography, as time allows.  I’m also going to try and post more on the general state of the real estate market and other relevant topics. We’ll see how it goes.

As always, feel free to write your what you like or think is relevant in the comment section or to submit an article to me as a guest post. As we hopefully enter the end game here, I’d like to thank everyone who has read, commented and become part of  this blog over the last couple years.

I know I promised a post a day and I fell pretty short of that goal. Frankly, it was pretty unrealistic of me to shoot for that and then a few things came up this month that really sunk it.

A bunch of freelance work came my way that I had to deal with. My big client, lastminutedeals.com needed some work done ASAP, including some work on their main page which is scheduled to go live on 9/1.

In addition, I have a lot of work to finish up on Big Blue Interactive before the season starts. I’m redoing the entire back-end administration system and that has to be ready for the kickoff against the Redskins on 9/13.

I also got a call a couple weeks back from an old old client, top LI Advertising Agency Austin & Williams. Some Perl scripts I did for them for one of their bank clients back sometime in the last millennium are still in use and the bank wants them changed/upgraded/futzed with.

Not mention that I have a big project in the works for my day job at Brookhaven Laboratory and that needs to be delivered on 9/1 as well.

But don’t worry, HIB fans. I’ve got some posts in the pipeline and I should have a little time to actually post them in September. I saw three open houses today, so there’s content on the way.