...just posting it here in case you don't see it in General.

I just wanted to tell you all the good news - we have been house hunting for the last few weeks, and after a bad experience last weekend offering on a house we liked and getting jerks for sellers who were totally unreasonable, this weekend, we found a wonderful house and it's now under contract for us! The closing date is April 29, which works out well because our lease is up June 30, but our landlady is so nice that she's letting us out a bit early - we'll take the month of May to move and get everything switched over, and we'll be in our new home by June 1.

It's in St. Charles (west of St. Louis County), which is a little farther out than we initially were going to look, but out there, you can get so much more house and so much better house for your money. Our house is a pretty 1.5-story with finished basement. As you walk in, the ceiling is so high - it's very pretty and inviting. It has 3 bathrooms (a 4th is in the basement, if it won't be an office - we're not sure yet), 2 full baths, and 2 half baths. It also has a screened in back porch with hot tub, as well as a patio, and a decent amount of yard left after that (it even slopes so I can sled in the winter if I want to - I've gotten used to doing that at our rental house). The master bedroom is huge, and the basement has been finished professionally - it has so much space - it also comes with the pool table! The sellers were really great, and they're paying most of the closing costs and throwing in that pool table with its accessories, which is awesome because we were planning to eventually buy a pool table, but it would've been a while before we could afford to do that. Oh, and with 2 flights of stairs (instead of the 1 flight of stairs we have now), our cats will have a great time getting even more exercise as they chase each other.

The only drawback here is that we won't have enough furniture to fill it for a while, so it's going to be a little-by-little process, so if any of you come to visit any time soon, you'll see a house that needs some furnishing. The house is 19 years old, but you wouldn't know it - it looks just as modern as new homes being built today. The subdivision is the "Waterford Estates," which sounds fancier than it is (it is nice, though). We're on a cul-de-sac, and we do live a little farther out than now, but we're actually much closer to some of the major interstates to the city, so hopefully it won't be too bad. Many people in our Metro area have a longer commute b/c of the nice neighborhoods in which they chose to live.

Anyway, I just wanted to share the good news. We're really excited because this house is move-in ready - there are a few things we might change in a little while, but nothing needs to be painted or anything right away. Wish us luck as we move toward closing day! We saw 8 houses on Saturday (we had seen lots of others up to that point), and there wasn't a single one that was bad (we had a top 3 out of those 8), but we really feel like we found the house that was meant for us in the home we bought.