Crunch Time

Unfortunately this post is not about all the sit-ups I've been doing. The boy and I are trying to buy a house.

He has been surprisingly animated about the whole thing. I'd been led to believe that guys wouldn't really get into the whole "this one looks good" thing. My boy, though, is all over this. So much so that left to his own devices he ran our realtor.com picks up to 45 houses. Honestly, that was just insane. True, he was picking cheap and well updated place. But they were HU-NORMOUS. I'm talking 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, three floor housing extravaganzas. Internet, I had to reign him in.

Now, after two weekends of go-sees we've narrowed it to a nice field of 8 we're making appointments to see the inside of. We did most of our neighborhood house stalking in the dark because of that damned daylight savings time. One positive thing about that is we got to see how well lit these areas were, and if people seemed comfortable outside after dark.
Now that the boy is guided, he's picked sensible places. No mare than 2 bedrooms & bathrooms. I seriously don't know who the hell he thought was going to clean 5 toilets. We all know it wasn't going to be me, right?

We're trying to get our move on by the end of February when my lease is up. I realize that technically it wouldn't have made any sense to start looking earlier than this month, but I feel kinda rushed now. Is that normal? And what about all the fees and stuff? I have a feeling we're not planning for some financial burden with this house buying thing. I'd hate for us to commit ourselves and think we've got it all covered and then realize we're up the creek because we forgot about one little thing that costs a few grand to take care of before we can move in.

Any suggestions? Ideas? Advice?