Home is where the heart is. And by heart, I mean money. And by is, I mean spent.

I have tons of eloquent ideas floating around in my head about how to describe the last month or so. Great, big ideas. But if experience has taught me anything, it's that my writing ability is greatly outpaced by my eloquent ideas. So let's try the short version.

If you're going to all the trouble to try and do an adoption, you might as well throw all caution to the wind, and try and buy a house at the same time, right? We thought so, too, so that's what we've been doing for the last month or so. A sweet little house in West Seattle was available, and we decided to pounce on it, so we've been wading through the paperwork, the loans, the ... gah! The EVERYTHING involved in trying to make it happen! It's so much! The adoption stuff sucked, but there weren't really any time constraints, so when you got overwhelmed, you just took a break from filling out forms or requesting documents until you could face it again. Homebuying (negotiation, really) has all these time limits associated with it. So when you need a break you TAKE ONE WHEN YOU'RE DEAD! FILL THIS OUT! DECIDE ON THIS! GO GO GO!

We'd negotiated with the seller on price, and closing costs, and everything was cool, we were just waiting on the inspection. And that was yesterday.

Our inspector was awesome. We walked around the house, inside and out, and she told us about anything and everything, good or bad. The house is good. Solidly built in the 50s, which was a good time for home construction. They had respectable technology, access to solid building materials, and things were made to last. So, the structure of the house is sound. The wiring is a little outdated, but not dangerous, and easily upgraded on a lazy schedule. The plumbing doesn't leak, and water flows in and out the way it should. But...

Oh, the "but." This wasn't what we wanted to hear.

But: The roof is on its last year, probably. And this is the 3rd roof, so the next one has to start from scratch. When you put on a roof, you can just put it on over the old roof, but you can only do that 2 or 3 times, and the current would be number 3. Not a huge deal, but it's a bit more expensive than just tossing on another roof. You tear everything off, rebuild the roof deck, and shingle away.

But: The furnace is original to the house. It's an old oil furnace, and back in the 50s things were built strong. Heavy duty. Massive. That's well and good, but that doesn't change the fact that this was over 50 years ago, and the useful life of one of these oil furnaces is somewhere around 30-40 years. After that, it's just sort of waiting to die.

With a roof OR a furnace needing replacement, we probably wouldn't have worried too much about it, tried to get some of the cost deferred to the seller, and gone ahead happily with our "Little City Farm." (Fun story on that, I'll try to remember to post that one.) With both of them needing attention, we're unsure of what's going to happen in the negotiations. Those are happening now, so we'll see.

If you have fingers, pleased to be crossing them.