So HW and I are buying a house, which most of you know already. (Pictures of the new place can be found here.) What you probably aren't familiar with is the entire home buying process, so I figured I'd enlighten you as to what exactly we did to purchase our new home.

Step 1: Find a realtor. I asked my coworker, Mike, what realtor he used when he bought a house about this time last year, and he recommended Melissa. We clicked with her immediately, for three reasons:

1. She's extremely competent.
2. She's very tall.
3. She laughs at most of my stupid jokes.

Step 2: Contact a mortgage company and get preapproved for a mortgage. Get pre-approved for a $300,000 loan. Dance with joy. Realize you can only really afford a $180,000 home. Dance with somewhat mitigated mirth.

Step 3: Establish a price limit for your new home. We went with $175,000.

Step 4: Look at some homes. Every day, Melissa would email me a list of homes, and we would go out about once a week to look at the ones that fit our requirements.

Step 5: Realize that none of the homes that fit your requirements are located in areas in which you want to live (defined in our case as "areas where we wouldn't need to put snipers on the roof to deter serial murderers"), and bump your price limit up by 10 grand or so.

Step 6: Look at more homes.

Step 7: Increase price limit to $190,000. Become extremely concerned about your ability to buy a home outside of the ghetto.

Step 8: Look at more homes. Weep openly in your realtor's van.

Step 9: Increase price limit to $200,000. Resolve yourself to eating nothing but cat food and ramen noodles for the next 30 years.

Step 10: Find a glorious home, and put in a bid. Find out that the seller is insane, and refuses to bargain at all on the price. (We found out later she dumped her agent, found a new one, and bumped the price up even more.)

Step 11: Look at more homes. Consider moving in with your parents and spiking their eggs with strychnine so that you can inherit.

Step 12: Find another nice home, and put in a bid. Haggle back and forth for a week. Meet your realtor at a supermarket (Zingo's, in our case) to sign the papers.

What, you think you're done? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Now the work just begins!

Having finally settled on a home, you have to make mortgage arrangements (you thought you did that already; you were wrong), find a lawyer, bribe civic officials, and sleep with the zoning commissioner. These, and other issues (somehow I found myself owing a favor to the Godfather) will be covered in the next column.