So the next (travel-related) question: Where’s the honeymoon going to be? ;)

Congrats again.
Mark

I had been planning to propose for a couple of months, but once we had entered into an agreement to purchase the house, I knew it would be ideal to involve it in some way in the proposal. Before we closed escrow, my girlfriend had said she wanted to go in and look at the walls to see which ones we’d want to repaint before moving in. I figured that was my opening, so I got our realtor to let us in to the house for that purpose.

One thing that bugged my girlfriend about this whole house thing is that I never wanted to celebrate. I kept saying we had to wait for the inspections to be done, the final loan approval to come in, etc. Sure enough, that happened just before that weekend, so I was finally in a celebratory mood.

When we got to the house, I surprised her with a bottle of J 2001 Robert Thomas Pinot Noir, the same bottle of wine we had on our first date. I said that I finally wanted to celebrate the house, so we went into the backyard and had some wine.

We started talking about the house, and I said it was MY house (I’m the one on the title for now). She just rolled her eyes and I said, “But I want it to be our house” and I proposed.

At that point, she tried to put together a coherent sentence, I think, but all that came out was “Oh my god” and “I’m shocked” over and over again. She finally settled down enough to say “yes” and the phone calls started.

And CONGRATULATIONS!