Dancing through life...

The past month and a half or so has been full of the suck. To recap:

-At the beginning of June, I was let go from a job that I hated and was desperately trying to get out of for close to six months. I am now convinced that the true reason for her wanting to get rid of me was that she's crazy, paranoid, and a little jealous of my intelligence. Despite how much I hated working there, I was still pretty bummed. That wasn't how I wanted it to end.

-My old supervisor from AERCO came over and got me drunk that day, and gave me some good advice.

-I had five interviews during the first week I was unemployed. Positivity abounded.

-We were supposed to close on the house we're buying on June 30th. A few days beforehand, the bank decided to double check our employment statuses. They found out I had been let go, and told us we couldn't close. That's when I started to feel completely awful about myself, and my life. The same day, I received the letter stating that my application for unemployment had been rejected, and if I wanted my money I would have to go to court.

-A few weeks passed. I had some promising interviews, but no job offers. I began to feel more depressed. Finally, I got an interview through a temp agency for a position I was a shoo-in for. Unfortunately, they had *just* hired someone else for the department, and their corporate offices wouldn't give them to budget to hire me just yet. They said that they would be hiring four more people by the end of the year, and they definitely wanted me, so I should hang in there. At this point, I decided that the universe hated me.

-I got a phone call from one of the companies I interviewed with that first week, asking for a second interview. I went in the same day, and thought I completely bombed it because of my nerves.

-More interviews, more rejection, more depression.

-The house sellers decided that they were going to give us until August 25th to close, and if we didn't make the deadline they'd keep our down payment. (Not an insignificant amount of money, mind you.) I was a total fucking mess. We told them that wasn't going to happen, of course, and our lawyer started trying to find us a way out of this mess.

-Monday, I got a phone call from the company I had the second interview with. They wanted to offer me the position, and asked if I could come in today to discuss salary, etc. I said yes!

They're paying me more than I was making at my last job, which is completely awesome. I start on Monday. It's a small property management company in Scarsdale, and all of the people there seem really nice. The commute from the new house is going to be a bit of a drag, but it should be fine. I am so relieved!

My new employers are faxing a letter of employment to our mortgage broker, and we should be able to get the ball rolling on a new closing date very, very soon.

If I haven't responded to your comment, post, message, e-mail, etc. recently, please understand that it's not because I was ignoring you. It's because I was ignoring the whole damn world.

In completely unrelated news, I went to the Maritime Aquarium last week with my parents, and watched a meerkat fall asleep on his face! SO CUTE! Mom and I are going to the New York Aquarium tomorrow, and we might do the SEA LION ENCOUNTER. How cool would that be??

I have a bunch of pics I'm really behind on posting. I suppose I'll get around to them eventually.

The sellers accepted our offer on the house yesterday! As soon as our agents congratulated us, they told us to schedule the inspection for today, if possible. They gave me several names and numbers to call.

We ended up going with Mr. InsideOut, who were in fact able to inspect the house today. Awesome.

The inspection went well. I was kind of worried that they'd find something terribly wrong with the house, and the deal would fall through. Everything looks good, except for the following:

1. The sellers need to provide a Certificate of Occupancy for the addition and the deck.
2. They also need to get the electric inspected. It's all up to date and shiny, but there's no little UL sticker on the box. They also may need to put in an external breaker switch of some sort, due to the distance of the meter from the breaker box.
3. There's a cracked window we've asked them to repair. If they say no, no biggie.
4. The recent deluge of rain we've had revealed an issue with the drainage on the property. The back yard was definitely a bit swampy. We are going to have to look into getting that taken care of.
5. The breaker box for the hot tub (did I mention the hot tub? There's totally a hot tub!) probably needs to be replaced. If the breaker box isn't the problem, there might be a short in the hot tub itself. We'll see. Shouldn't be too tough to diagnose. The problem might even be caused by all the water in the back yard.

The roof looks in decent shape, though it will have to be replaced at some point in the future. The boiler's got quite a number of years left, as it's only in its twenties, and that particular design can last up to fifty years. Everything that needs to work, does, and the attic even has room for storage!

Now we just have to wait for the sellers to get back to us on the aforementioned issues, and then it's on to the next step! I imagine that has something to do with a contract.

At some point I'm going to have to go to Home Depot and bring home paint cards. Lots of 'em. Maybe a carpet catalog, too.

We saw another house on Saturday morning that we really like. We haven't put an offer on it yet, because there's a strange sort of a situation with it.

We got there, and there was a notice in the doorway that said that someone had come by in January, found the property abandoned, and would be contacting the mortgage company. The house has been listed since November of 2008, and we have no idea what the deal is. Our agents left a message with the listing agent, and haven't heard back yet.

I really hope there's not a major problem with this one. It needs a bit of work, but we really like it. It's got a nice sized kitchen with a wood burning stove, a family room, a formal dining/living room, sitting area, two bedrooms, and a full bath on the first floor. The second floor is all one bedroom, and another full bath. Both baths have tubs, and there's a full walk-our basement with laundry which you can access from INSIDE the house. It's got plenty of room and LOADS of potential.

All four exterior doors would need to be replaced right off the bat, as well as all of the appliances. There's some ceiling and wall damage that my dad could fix, but overall the house seems in decent shape. The stairs and floors aren't tilted, and there's only one spot of water damage resulting from the wall damage in the upstairs bathroom. There's room outside for a little veggie garden, and the house is located near a train station.

Hopefully our agents will come back and tell us that the price is very negotiable, because even if we could afford the list price on this one we probably wouldn't pay it. Considering the work that needs to be done and the fact that it's been sitting unoccupied for god-knows-how-long, it's listed WAY too high. Who knows? Maybe they'll come back and tell us it's being foreclosed upon, and we can practically steal it!

In other house news, the seller's agents from one of the houses we saw two Sundays ago are VERY KEEN to have us put in an offer. That house doesn't really need any work, but it's much smaller. We're going to try to take another look at it this weekend.

Things seem to be moving along smoothly. I am pleased.

We put an offer on a house a couple of weeks ago. It was not accepted; they went with another offer with a bigger down payment, and a waiver of the home inspection. We really liked the house, but there will be others. We've moved on.

Last weekend we didn't manage to see anything due to the snow. We're trying to see three more on Sunday.

Our agents have been having a problem with listing agents not calling them back about showings. This confuses the FUCK out of me. I know some of them are short sales, which means the agents won't get as much of a commission, but seriously? Everything I've read says that the housing market is still in pretty bad shape. You'd figure any sale is better than no sale!

I'm also seeing listings for houses that went under contract ages ago. Do they just not take them down? I don't get it.

Some of the listing agents should probably take marketing classes, I think. So many of the listings just have really terrible descriptions. And the photos! Don't even get me started on the photos.

Anyrate, the info on the three we're seeing this weekend looks good. Hopefully one of these will be the one! We're aiming to close by about the end of April. Rich is working for most of this month and next month, then he has a lot of time off in May. Moving then would be extremely convenient.

We'll be calling in the cavalry when it comes time to move. Rich doesn't believe that I'm as big and strong as I really am, so he wants help moving the furniture. It's quite possible that my birthday part this year will be a moving party!

( Behind the Cut! )

Our agents (we have two!) are going to find some more listings for us to look at. Hopefully we'll be doing that next Saturday morning.

This is very exciting!