Category Archives: Friends & Family

We close on the sale of our Capstone Lane house in seven days: next Monday, 8/26. Our house now looks like the Box Fairy came to visit; there are full, partially full, and disassembled boxes everywhere. Our friend Andy the painter is coming to repaint two rooms today; I have about a dozen items on my to-do list (including cancelling dentist appointments for next month, calling the satellite TV people, and arranging the final details for our moving trucks.)
Most of the equipment in my workroom is taken apart and packed. In the process, I’ve been doing a Thomspon Deep Clean®, during which I found some Valuable Stuff. I also accidentally shipped a perfectly good replacement disk drive back to Maxtor, instead of sending them the broken one they were supposed to get. Time to add “Call FedEx” to my to-do list.
In the meantime, I am pushing to finish chapters 8 & 9 of my book before we move. Since the truck will arrive on Friday sometime, that gives me a pretty tight deadline. Off to work.

The incessant parade of minor real estate annoyances is beginning to get to me. I am torn between being thankful that we’re able to buy a home and move on one hand and, on the other, the urge to start living in a cardboard box. We’ve completed the home inspection on both houses; our repairs are (mostly) done here, but we’re waiting for the Ohio seller (oops; I almost wrote “remote end”– guess what I’ve been writing about?) to tell us what they’re going to fix. We’re also waiting to get a final closing date on our Alabama house. We’re also waiting for our mortgage lender to decide if they need blood samples, fingerprints, brain scans, or anything else. On top of that, we’re waiting for the results of the Ohio radon test, and we’re waiting for the buyer to tell us what color they want the boys’ bedroom painted, and…. I’ll stop there before I begin to hyperventilate.

On Saturday, I had the boys at the barbershop to renew their summer tennis-ball haircuts. Arlene called and said “Gosh, I wish you could come up and look at houses”. So I did: the three boys, the boat, and I all headed north on I-65, leaving about 1630 Saturday afternoon. My plan was to stop for the night somewhere around Louisville. Unfortunately, I didn’t plan on the annual Street Rod Nationals, held each year in Louisville during the first week of August. Every hotel we checked, from fleabags up to the Louisville Hilton, was full. We sure did see a lot of cool cars, though.
Actually, David and I (the others were asleep) ended up in the middle of a parade/drag race in front of the Executive West hotel.

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It is done. The house is officially under contract. Our time on the market: a respectable 62 days. The only bad thing is that the buyer wants to close no later than 3 September, which doesn’t give us much time to find a house, move our stuff, etc. We have to get David enrolled in school, get bandwidth for me, find doctors and veterinarians, and so forth. Fortunately, we have family and friends in the area, not to mention what appears to be a good ward of the Church. I’m very thankful to Heavenly Father for making this such a smooth process so far– our family prayers have definitely been answered!

I can already tell that today is going to be great, this despite going to bed at almost midnight and getting up at my usual time of 0430. Why? Well, first, I was able to get out of bed; that’s always something to be thankful for, although it’s easy to forget sometimes. Next, I finally got the book review template to work the way it should– if you look on the right-hand column of this page, under the “What I’m reading: dead trees” section, you’ll see some links that now connect to a MySQL database of book reviews. I still have some kinks to work out, plus a huge backlog of reviews to type in, but the basic feature works OK and the template doesn’t look too bad. Try it out.
The big news is that late last night we spoke to our REALTOR and got the full scoop on the offer. The money’s a little low, but they want to close very soon, which suits us just fine. We issued a counteroffer, which we, our REALTOR, and the buyer’s agent all expect to be accepted. Hopefully by the end of the day we’ll have a contract, which is the other reason today has such great potential. I also get to play hooky this morning and take the boys to the Space & Rocket Center. What else could I possibly ask for?
Update: a friend of mine who lost his job as an Exchange admin a couple of months ago just got a new job. Good karma all around!

I just got a cryptic phone call from our REALTOR:
Janet: “Who was the last agent to show your house?”
Me: “agentName. Why?”
Janet: “I need her phone number.”
Me: “phoneNumber. Why?”
Janet: “She’s supposed to be faxing me an offer for your house.”
So, I’ll believe it when I see it, but we’re cautiously optimistic. Think good thoughts for us!
UPDATE: the offer was legit. It was a bit low, so we’ll be countering. However, I’m about to book Arlene a plane ticket so she can go househunting.

By special request, before-and-after pictures of Matthew and his birthday cupcake.

before…	after!

Baby Matthew celebrated his first birthday yesterday. I have some hysterical pictures and video of him “eating” [sic] a cupcake that I’ll post later today. He was really excited by the cupcake, but puzzled at the icing. I expect he’ll handle it better next year.

Selling a house is frustrating, and I think the biggest reason is the amount of uncertainty. Will our house sell in a week? A month? A year? What about our poor ex-neighbors who listed their house, bought another one, and then couldn’t sell the first one for 500+ days? We sure don’t want to end up like them. We have a good Realtor, and since we’ve worked with her before we have some idea what to expect… but that doesn’t change the fact that the house might sell tomorrow, not until after Christmas, or not until the cows come home.

Close behind the uncertainty is the hurry-up-and-wait factor. We’d much rather have this house sold so we can get serious about finding a new house, packing up our stuff, and moving. We’d obviously prefer to move before the new school year starts, but if we can’t, is that worth getting a bridge loan and betting that our Alabama house will sell soon? Who knows.

Peter, my friend and business partner, got flying lessons for Fathers’ Day. After he picked me up at the airport, we compared notes on instructors, equipment, and so forth. As I expected, it costs more to learn to fly in Seattle than in Decatur, AL, but for the extra money he’s getting newer equipment (a Cessna 172S instead of the old-but-sturdy 150 I’m flying), access to a simulator-equipped classroom, and some other goodies. He’s awfully excited, and I wish him the best of luck.