The about page has been updated to more accurately reflect my status and the current state of the blog.

I really meant to tell the tale of buying the house, the delays, the frustration and the ready to chuck it all and rent a yurt somewhere out in the Midwest where we could never be heard from again. I really haven’t had the energy or desire to write that story. I still have all of the literally hundreds of e-mails documenting the process in excruciating detail should I feel the need to write it out.

Suffice it to say, that you should never hire a litigator to be your real estate lawyer, even if he’s a family friend. That’s probably the best piece of advice you’ll ever get from this blog, so keep it and cherish it.

OK, so where am and what’s going on? Well, as you might imagine, things have been busy. Trying to set up house with both Debra and I working full time while chasing around a little Energizer Bunny of a daughter hasn’t been easy. In fact, things really stalled out early on. Once we got all moved in and did some preliminary set up work, we basically all went “woof” and took the next couple months off.

Things have actually been progressing well with the house of late and I plan to write about that more in subsequent posts.

On a personal note, things have been going really well. My little side business doing web sites and programming picked right up a couple months ago and I’ve been pumping out the HTML and PHP. It’s mostly sub work now for one of my old clients, but I have a bunch of new things coming down the pike as of this writing. By the way, if anyone out there needs a website done or redone, drop me a line. I have a new website in the works for myself, but that always takes a back seat, as you might imagine.

As far as the family goes, Aurora has really taken to the English language. She knows hundreds of words now, speaks in three and four word sentences and occasionally goes into long rambling monologues, not unlike her father. She’s also pretty much grown out of her 2T clothes.

Debra has been figuring how many bulbs she can buy to plant this fall and where the Christmas tree is going to go. My wife is always thinking ahead.

And last, but not least, my son Ben has come to live with us. It’s hard for me to say how happy this makes me. He’s been here a couple weeks now and still settling in. By the way, he’s looking for a job, so if anyone is hiring, let me know.

Well, that’s about it for now. More to come in the next week or so. Stay tuned.

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.