Countdown

Yep, this whole moving this is for real. House went on the market on Tuesday night, first appraisal was Wednesday morning, first showing was on Thursday afternoon, open house was Sunday afternoon, first "second visit" was Sunday evening. We're living on borrowed time at this point ... 60 days from last Tuesday, the relocation company buys our house from us (if no one else has bought it already) and we're officially homeless.

Which is why we spent a long weekend looking at houses in Cleveland. At this point we still haven't decided whether to live on the east side (near Jason's job, but far from the areas where we've lived before) or west side (near our friends and doctors/dentists/etc., but farther from the job), so we have to look at houses in both areas. We're trying to spend less money on the next house than we will make on our current home, which unfortunately puts us at the lower end of the price range for areas we like. Most of the houses we looked at were either really small or ugly, or had tons of ambiance, crappy kitchen. One had a kitchen so crappy, the refrigerator was actually in the hallway outside, which was so narrow you couldn't open the fridge door all the way.

Jason and I used to joke around that our first house was the best we could find in the "shag carpet and mirrored-ceiling-waterbed" price range. Looks like this time we're in the "bad wallpaper and/or ugly paneling" price range ... not a problem, I can strip wallpaper and paint paneling, as long as the kitchen is good and the price is right.

We were doing all of this hunting with Liza in tow, of course, which was, um, interesting. I'll have to post a list of tips for other parents in a separate post - for now let's just say that the portable DVD player we bought was the best $75 we have ever spent. And thank god for pretzel sticks.

In the end, we found one split level and one colonial that are definite possibilities, assuming we don't mind stripping miles of wallpaper and pulling up acres of carpeting. I think Jason's litmus test for a property is pretty good: "Will you be upset if someone else buys it tonight?" In the case of these properties, I probably wouldn't be heartbroken, but it would annoy me. Definitely a sign we're moving in the right direction.

Meanwhile, we had about 15 couples come through the house on Sunday, with one coming back later that night to look again, but we haven't received any offers. The second appraiser came today to check out the house, so we should have our "buyout" number from the relocation company later this week. And in half an hour the estimator from the moving company is coming to figure out how much of a tractor trailer we're likely to need when we move. And I've got a stack of papers a 1/4" thick that need to be signed and notarized for the relocation company. Back to work!