Things returned to quiet here for a few days, but I promise it was for a good reason: Shannon and I went and bought our first home! That picture is Shannon sitting on our new stoop, a mere hour before we signed a metric ton of paperwork in which promised that we’d pay the mortgage, keep the property in good condition, and each surrender a kidney and a lung in exchange for the house. (And the thing is, we both felt that it’d be cheap at twice that price!) So, I guess it’s now official: at the end of June, we’ll be moving from Brookline, Massachusetts to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Our new place is a narrow little attached rowhouse, with two finished stories and an unfinished basement. It has two bedrooms, a little half-room that will make the perfect office, a half a bathroom more than either of us are used to, a small wood deck, and a little plot of dirt in the backyard in which Shannon and her mother are already mentally placing pavers, flowers, and little trees. And best of all, it’s ours to do with what we please!

Unlike a lot of what we saw in Capitol Hill, the house was already in nearly move-in condition; we only had to get a small boiler problem corrected and replace the floor in one room. We also chose to put in a new hot water heater and set up replacing all the windows in the front of the house (since all seven of them are the original, 100+ year-old sashes that are single-pane and have warped enough to make them hard to use). Otherwise, we have a little painting we want to do, a few other small pre-move-in projects that appeal to us, and then we’ll start the long journey of homeownership!