We have the keys! And we are loopy excited out of our minds.

But oh. my. goodness. All those papers we had to sign! Must have been at least 80 (I am so not kidding.) The neat thing was that there at the county courthouse we sat in a wing of the huge deeds room at tables along with other couples who were buying houses. I enjoyed that part--I was as excited for all of them as I was for us.

But the paperwork! And the lawyers.... sheesh. When we bought our first house in New York 15 years ago, we had 'just' two real estate lawyers present--the one representing us and the one representing the seller. Yesterday there were three--our real estate lawyer and a bank lawyer representing us, and a bank lawyer representing the sellers. And unfortunately the sale didn't go on the record yesterday because neither of the bank lawyers had even heard of a 13-year loan (and one of them was so ancient, the kind of lawyer who looks like he came with the county building when it was built eons ago). :) So some of the paperwork had to be tweaked, that required extra time and phone calls, and the window closed (literally), which made the sellers' bank lawyer quite unhappy for reasons I never did understand. In fact, I only understood a quarter of the jargon and the paperwork, just enough to get that New York state makes buying a house as complicated as it possibly can (Tom and I tried not to snicker over some of the papers we signed. The reasons for some were laughable.)

At one point, one of the lawyers, used some big, long words with the jist that Tom and I might have to wait until Monday to take possession of the house. Immediately I thought, "Oh! Just try to keep us from getting the keys today! Good luck with keeping my new old house and me apart over the weekend, especially because of typographical errors totally not our fault."

But it all worked out, for us, anyway, and we have the keys and we drove through the countryside to our old farmhouse, rejoicing. And this weekend we will be camping-out there inside the house and cleaning, laying shelf paper (I found two rolls of wallpaper upstairs--how fun!-- which I'll use), unpacking groceries and working out in the yard where the grass is getting tall so very fast.

So all this is to say my blog posts will most likely be few and far between for a couple weeks. Bear with me and keep checking back. I'd hate to lose any of you at this incredible time of my life... your kind, encouraging words have made this whole experience more special.


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Thanks for all your interesting comments to my last two posts!