Recording home purchase

[Eric Schwartz]

For most purchases, I just transfer the balance from my checking
account to a relevant expense account, and poof, I'm done.  I just
bought a house, though, and I realized I have no idea how to track
that.  Hopefully, I'll sell one soon, and then I'll have to figure
out how to track THAT, too.

Note: this is all in .us for those who aren't from here.

Complicating this is a cheque I'd written for the deposit money, which
was cashed and recorded a week or two before I actually bought the
house.

I went back and edited the split to direct the $ from
Expenses:Miscellaneous (I only put it there because I'd forgotten
what the cheque was for) to Assets:Fixed Assets:New House.  I then
entered everything I could find on the closing statement into one
big freakin' split, but I couldn't get it to balance, because (I
think) I wasn't putting things in the appropriate column.

Here's some numbers for the sake of argument: Let's say I bought a house
at $100,000.  I put $1000 down on it to secure my contract.  Two weeks
later, I write a cheque from certified funds for $10,000, of which
$7,000 goes to the house (the rest go to loan fees, appraisers, and god
knows what else).  I also take out two mortgages, for $80,000 and
$13,000 respectively, to pay for the rest of the house.

How the heck do I book this?  The only other Fixed Asset I have right
now is my old house, which I had when I started using Gnucash, so its
value came from Equity:Opening Balances.  I'm fairly anal about my
bookkeeping-- I record my income as a split that accounts for all my
estimated taxes paid, for instance-- so I'd like a solution that lets me
account for the niggling little details like if the seller credited me
with some money to make repairs with, and specifying who exactly got
what money from my closing statement.

Any help is, of course, greatly appreciated (no pun intended!).

-=Eric Schwartz