Home Where I Belong.

The home buying process is a crazy one.

You get ready to make the plunge. You find an agent, who tells you great things about home owning and how fun the process is. You figure out your budget, you get the bank to tell you how much they'll give you, you want to throw up at what the payments are going to be. You figure out that maybe your budget should be a little lower, reset your expectations, and you start.

Your agent takes you out...what do you like, what don't you like, what is again wrong with this place. You wonder how to put into words that you just know this place isn't "it," that there is nothing exactly you can pinpoint as wrong, but it just isn't right.

Then you discover the MLS, the listing service. You get the listings from your agent each time a new one hits the market, and you drop everything to check it out. You go through the listings yourself and bug the agent, hey, lemme look at this one.

You go to more open houses. You find something you like, get excited, then are crushed when, for one reason or another, there is something wrong with it and it isn't a good buy. You keep plugging on, discouraged.

Then you go out and find several that you like. You have to make a decision. And that might be the scariest step yet.