Sold!

J.'s friend R. pulled up in front of our house as I was loading up some return items for a trip to Target and said 'you must have sold the Mariner!'.  I said 'YES!  About an hour ago'.  A really nice young couple from Michigan drove all the way from San Mateo to buy it.  They pulled up to our house in a new Porsche so not like they were 'just starting out'.  He works for a car company in San Mateo and must be doing fairly well.

One more thing off the long list of things related to the exit of our guests.  It's nice feeling things are getting back to normal. 

J. and R. went to the Valley's Got Talent show at Gallo last night and I piddled around the homestead. 

I spent the morning cleaning out the two upstairs bathrooms.  One full (and very heavy) bag of trash and another one in process.  Tons of cosmetics and toiletries - I was brutal.  If it hadn't been used, it was gone - no matter how expensive it was.

I can't wait to have my very own bathroom in our new house where all my products can reside happily together.

Feel like we have to keep working away at getting things cleaned out and organized to avoid complete and total chaos this coming summer.  While cleaning out, we are making lists of things we need to do to the house before we can list it.  Right now, that includes redoing the small area of grass in the backyard and resurfacing the bathtub in the kids bathroom.  We'll have to start thinking about those updates by January to March to be ready to list the house in May or June.

(We're not positive of the timeline for selling this house but we're penciling in some ideas which helps jump start all the things we need to do).

We got a sort of pre-approval from the lending company for the new house but with the timing of selling this house sort of undetermined, it's hard to know what will need to happen to qualify.  In a perfect world, we'd rather deal with the financial challenge of two house payments for a few months vs. getting ourselves completely freaked out about moving twice - and actually, that is the least of it.  I could deal with knowing we will need to be temporarily housed somewhere for a few months.  It's figuring out what to do with all the pets in those few months that gets me concerned.  Super hard to find rentals that allow pets and definitely not going to be able to have them in a hotel so....we have to figure out all this timing.  Makes my head hurt. 

Sometimes, I just want to pull out the statements for our investment income and say 'really?  I'm pretty sure we will be OK'.  But mortgage qualification criteria don't treat investment income the same as earned income.  On the books, we need my job income to qualify. 

It will all work out.  We are blessed.  Very.  Paperwork is just that - and it will all end up OK. 

When we took the tour of the place with the land owner, a bright orange dragon fly flittered by repeatedly - and I said (as I always do) 'Hi, Mom!'.  I'm sure she will be helping out from where she is to get things to go as smoothly as possible - much like she did when we relocated from Hayward to Tracy 18 years ago.