Yesterday was the day we signed our lives away. We sat in our real estate lawyer’s conference room for 30 minutes and signed our names a bunch of times. The lawyer would push a piece of paper in front of us and tell us what it was about. After I signed several, I asked if any of them were optional and the answer was “No”, so I just kept signing them. There was even one I had to sign that said that if I forgot to sign any documents I would come back and sign them. That one definitely wasn’t optional.

It would have taken longer if we needed to sign duplicate copies for ourselves. They said they would just scan them and email them to us. That’s really cool. I was amazed through the whole home-buying process how much stuff could be done via email. Even if I had to sign a document, I would print it out, sign it, then scan and email it back. I hate fax machines. I was also able to get 2 months of all my financial records and W-2s all online, which is a good thing because our physical copies are all in a box somewhere being driven across the country.

It all ended up being all anti-climactic. We signed the last non-descript contract and we were done. Anne said the closing was “easier than buying stuff from LL Bean’s website”, which is pretty darn scary. I’ll have to watch our credit card statements to make sure she doesn’t casually buy any real estate while I’m not looking.

Total time from arrival in Boston to taking ownership of a house: 34 days.

We went back to the house afterward and I did a victory lap through all the rooms. That takes a while with 11 rooms and 3 floors!

The only thing we had to do to the house yesterday was install a mailbox so we could start changing over our addresses. Anne chased down the mailman and he told us where to put the mailbox we had purchased a few days ago. It was a hot day and the tools I had borrowed from my Dad were barely adequate to cut, drive and screw the mailbox parts into place. The whole process made us easy targets for our aggressively friendly neighbors.

People would stop by on their walks and say hello and tell us what a great neighborhood it was and ask us why our license plates are from California. They all asked if we had a dog. We didn’t but they said a kid was OK. Uh, thanks! Anne felt like we were in the Stepford Wives. They all did seem very nice though, it was just weird coming from a place where we lived for six years and probably only had that many conversations with any neighbors during that time.

After that, there was nothing really to do in the house, as much as we wanted to get a head start. The movers were coming on Monday, so for now we just have a big, completely empty house.

We’re looking forward to finally getting in the house, getting all our stuff back and back to a normal, although drastically different, life.