And so it begins!

In the beginning, there was man and wife. Man and wife moved into a LUXURIOUS North Raleigh apartment and all was wonderful. Or so they thought. A mere two hours after getting the keys to their new apartment, man's XM Radio was stolen out of his lovely little Honda. A few months later, wife was told that her lovely bird feeder was a nuisance to the people on the first floor. And so began discussions to find and purchase a house! While renter's insurance is a good deal, renting itself is not.

Brian began seriously looking at MLS listings around October 2007 and we decided that our goal was to move when our lease expired at the end of May 2008. The original plan was to make an offer on a house in mid-March and to close in mid-May. We were mainly looking in the Wake Forest/Rolesville area, as N. Raleigh was too expensive, Cary too Yankeeish, Fuquay-Varina and Holly Springs too far away, and Durham too ghetto. We met our REALTOR (TM), Sharon, right before Christmas and planned to do some preliminary house visiting one weekend in January. After we survived all the Christmas cookies, we found three neighborhoods that we wanted to visit--one in Wake Forest, one in N. Raleigh, and one in Knightdale. The two former neighborhoods sucked, but we fell in love with the neighborhood in Knightdale, which we have determined is the new RED of Wake County (mark our words!). The lots were a decent size and the house sizes were very generous in comparison to cost. The neighborhood is named Churchill and it's a new home community. The houses we visited that weekend were spec. houses that were on the market in our price range. In fact, we absolutely fell in love with one house--the Bayfield.

What we quickly learned was that the current real estate market is, indeed, the suck, and that builders were willing to offer many incentives to entice buyers to build new homes. After much angst, thought, and number-checking, we decided to build the floor plan that we love in this neighborhood. The plan is to close on June 4.

Coming Soon: Priceline NEGOTIATOR!


And with that, I leave y'all with four lovely pictures: