Have I mentioned that Dre and I have gotten the ball rolling on the whole homebuying thing? Well, we have.

And even here in the very beginning phases, it’s really scary. We sat down with a mortgage broker last week, and she tried to reassure us that even though we’re not the typical borrowers (I’m a contractor, Dre’s a currently unemployed freelancer, etc), she thinks (THINKS!) she can get us a loan. “It’s like a puzzle,” she reassured us, as she started rattlig off interest rates and ARMS and 80/10/10s and other numbers that made my eyes glaze over.

We also have an attentive real estate agent, highly recommended by Mark. I like our agent a lot, and we went out driving around with her a couple weeks ago doing some preliminary house poking around. Obviously, we weren’t ready actually buy anything, but she wanted to get an idea of what we liked and what neighborhoods worked for us.

Seattle is funny: it’s divided into rough quadrants, with I-5 as the north-south axis and the ship canal as the east-west dividing line. We currently live in the most populous chunk of the south-east quadrant, on Capitol Hill. Poking around looking at houses we could afford (that’s a big definer there, folks: a contractor and a freelancer can’t afford much), I found myself leaning towards the south-east quadrant…just farther south and east.

Yes: Rainier Valley, here we come! If we’re lucky, maybe we can find something in Genesee Park. I realize these names mean nothing to those of you out of Seattle — in fact, “Genesee Park” doesn’t mean much to most of the people we know in Seattle. With a few exeptions, most of the folks we know are way up in the north end of town, a part of town that neither Dre or I find particularly worth the cost. There are parts of me that fret about moving to the south end — will we ever see our friends? It’s a long way from Greenwood to Rainier Valley for some folks. We’ll see.

So, hopefully we’ll be hearing back from our mortgage broker soon, and we’ll have a loan. Then we can begin the really scary part of, like, making offers and shit. I am somewhat terrified.

Here is a map to illustrate my point. Notice the bright orange key.
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