Return to the blogging world

I have been absent from the blogging world for a while as life has been going through it's ups and downs. Eight days ago, my wife and I purchased our first house and in eight more days we will be leaving the Tampa area to move into our place in Tennesee. The whole process of figuring out if it was time to buy, getting approved, finding houses we liked and then making offers on them was a lot harder than I had expected it to be. It's a very big decision to try and purchase your first home. We decided that in order to stretch our housing dollar in a time of over-inflated housing prices, the time had come to find an affordable place that we would be comfortable in for years to come. We also enjoy the fact that our families will be closer to us in Tennesee. I will be able to work in my home office and keep my current job thanks to my gracious employer and management team who have made this whole thing possible.
We had our downside to the process. The first couple of places that we had our hearts set on were manufactured and the banks are starting to have trouble covering those types of places. Of course when we got excited about a place and started getting the kids involved it became a double edged sword that hurt us twice when the deal fell through and we had to explain that this particular house wouldn't be ours to the kids. Finally we have found a wonderful place that was meant to be ours. Our agent found it the first day it was on the market and we had a contract on it by the end of the first week. Everything else seemed to fall into place after that. The bank covered the loan, the seller didn't counter on our offer and the appraisal came in higher than the amount we bought it for.
Now we have the hard part, packing up the apartment and getting ready to move. With two kids, a cat, a bunny and a lot of belongings we have been paring down our clutter as much as possible. There is a lot of motivation when you are paying someone to move it based on total weight so the tough decisions haven't been too bad to make. If it hasn't been used in a long time and has no future purpose besides taking up space, it found the way to the dumpster. I think once the stress of everything is done, we will be very happy in our new home.