Building Barry, Day 8

So, after a week of emails and phone calls and visits to model houses and Excel spreadsheets and Long Serious Discussions, Wednesday was the day we had to submit our final architectural choices for our house. Anything that's going to show up on the plans for the house had to be nailed down, unless we fancy paying through the nose to change it later on. So unless it's worth $1500 PLUS the cost of whatever option we're changing, what we've got is what we're getting. (Cue the sad, regretful glances at the description of the tray ceilings we gave up in favor of more windows)

(A suspiciously fisheye-looking shot of the interior of the model home in our plan, which is like what we ordered only ours will have a morning room to the right of the dining area, white railings, and no fireplace.  And we won't have cherry cabinets in the kitchen.  And we've only got one window behind the dining area.  And the back wall won't be baby shit brown.)

Wednesday was also the deadline for submitting our loan application, a fact which was somewhat complicated by my trip to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival last weekend. Nothing like going out of town for three days to move the process right along! But, on the positive side of things, there were sheep.

And alpacas.

And angora rabbits.

So yesterday and today Jason and I scrambled to make copies of paperwork and sign paperwork and meet with loan officers and all that fun stuff. Our rate isn't spectacular because we needed to lock it in for almost 8 months, but it's still way better than our current loan.

    One of these is our loan agent, and one of them is Jon Cryer. I'll leave it up to you to decide who is who.

This week we also rented a storage locker, and we started the process of staging the rooms so they will show better. This basically means that anything that isn't absolutely necessary for our lives in the next six months, or necessary to make the house look lived in, goes in the big metal box. Toys that live in the basement? Storage. Cookie cutters and jello molds and the giant roasting pan for Turkeyzilla? Storage. Jason's unused 40K armies? Storage. There's going to be a lot of trips to that big metal box ... Let's just hope I remember to pay for it each month so I don't end up starring in the worst episode of Storage Wars in recorded history.

(Imagine how easy it would be to keep the house "show-ready" if I put her in storage, too)

(just kidding)

(mostly)

Monday we moved around some furniture to make the house look more "normal." TV is in the big family room now, and my craft stuff is in the smaller room we had relegated the tv to some years ago. Jason's craft stuff is being relegated to the basement, once we get the floor down there repainted so it doesn't look like it was attacked by a herd of wolverines. And the paint throughout the house needs to be touched up, or in some cases completely redone, to cover up picture hanger holes and Unfortunate Shower Curtain Rod Incidents.  Looks like it's going to smell of ammonia and desperation around here for the next week or two ...