A Moving Experience (Addendum) — The Dust Settles…

Outta Pocket
I’m not sure whether it’s purely a Southern colloquialism, or merely one I’d never heard prior to moving to Tennessee, but it certainly fits. As the locals are want to say, I’ve been ‘out of pocket’ for well over a week now, i.e.: AJ’s been out ‘o circulation, ’Net-wise. I’ve had no Internet access outside of work, and, for that matter, no home computer during most of that time, having only just gotten both Michelle’s and my respective machines up and running this past Saturday.

I’ve been feeling completely out of sorts, holed up in a one-bedroom apartment with no Internet; a fish out of water; in non-communicado mode by necessity rather than by choice, and it’s been driving me bonkers.

So this morning I’m stealing just a bit of my employer’s time to throw out a line to announce that ‘we made it.’ The house is sold. We closed last Friday.

Phase One is OH-VAH.

I honestly had some doubts that it would happen — and it almost didn’t; that’s how hairy things got at the end.

When all was said and done, we shelled out a grand total of $4,924.50 in out-of-pocket repairs to get this deal done — obviously far more than we wanted to — or really could afford to — but had to do so nonetheless.

It doesn’t mean we can no longer afford our new home, it just means that we’ll have to buckle down a bit more this fall to save a few extra thousand bucks to add back into the down payment and whittle down our upcoming monthly mortgage commitment. Or we may instead try to buy down a few percentage points on the interest rate (which only God knows what it’ll be come the time we’re allowed to lock in) to make that monthly payment a bit more manageable.

There are a few other opportunities and mitigating factors available to us that will make things a bit easier financially, and I’ll explain them later in another post. They could go a long way in soothing the sting of all the money we’ve been forced to dole out lately, so that’s a good thing.

I guess the hardest thing for me now, however, is to believe in my heart of hearts that the cash we invested in our house was actually necessary, and truly was the right thing to do. After what we’ve been through these past several weeks, it’s hard not to view those repairs as tantamount to an extortion fee the buyer’s agent forced us to pay in order to sell the house.

Lots more on that, later as well.

The good news is, regardless of how much money we’re left to work with, we’re in. Our new home loan is pre-approved and all we have to do now is wait until construction is completed — hopefully on schedule — in late January 2008.

One thing is for certain: we know that this is something we never want to do again. As Michelle has said often these past few weeks, “We’re gonna rot in this new house! Once we’re there, we’re never moving again!”

And as well as I realize that you can ‘never say never,’ I agree with her on that point, and I hope to heck she’s right.

Net Returns
The good folks at Comcast will be by the apartment tomorrow A.M. to hook up the cable Internet service we’ve so desperately been missing for the past week and-a-half, so I’ll be back in cyber-black once again, and hopefully back in full post-mode soon thereafter.

I can now go back and update this story from the beginning, providing all the background details as I wanted to from the start, but was precluded from doing by the volatile nature of this yarn’s day-to-day twists and turns.

So when I’ve got all the changes in place, including a fully parsed prologue and chronological story line, I’ll backdate and re-post it all, then provide links for you to easily find everything in the same scheme as the existing posts.

Then its back on the train to what hopefully will be a very blog-intensive autumn of 2007. I’ve got a lot to catch up on and plenty of time on my hands to do it, what with no yard work and all.

I’m anxious to see if I’m up to the task.


finis