One mortgage???

Ah, what a feeling! We have a buyer for our house in Louisville! We would be getting a buyout anyway February 1st, but hopefully an actual buyer wouldn't want to fix all the things in the inspection report like the relocation company will. "Front steps need a rail". Yea, after 25 years of not having a rail, it's just not going to happen. It would look like C**P.

After weeks of dealing with a crazy couple (they wanted to offer us $20,000 less than our asking price and then get $7000 on top of that back for "repairs"), they finally disappeared into the horizon. We were kind of relieved, to be honest. If you ever came to our house in Louisville, it had been very well taken care of...before we moved in of course. But we didn't live there long enough to totally destroy it, and since it is winter, no one could tell what a mess the "gardens" had become. So to ask for $7000 dollars...ludicrous!

In comes our shining prince. A single gentleman offered us $30,000 less than we asked for. Is Lake Forest going down the tubes, or what? It makes our offer from the relocation company seem downright generous. Anyway, we talked him up a bit, so we could get the full amount from the relo company. He wants to close by next week! He has some special bank account that only really really rich people get. Uh...is this a dream? Pinch me. So it looks like all is going to be well in house-selling land.

So now what to do with one mortgage??? Our first line of business is to finish our basement. However, I just spoke with a neighbor, who told me that our town just passed a little easement that requires all finished basements have an exit to the outdoors. Our basement barely has windows. We would have to blast out the ground around the house to create a window large enough to exit out of. And since we live at the bottom of a hill, this would essentially create a huge trench, bringing water right down to our basement. Not a good idea. So we're going to have a contractor come out and see what the real story is. It that is the truth, we may just finish it ourselves and pretend we didn't know about the easement. Or we'll just permanantly turn our dining room into a play room. Yea.

Is this a boring post, or what? Here's a cute Andrew story for those of you who made it this far without passing out onto your keyboard. Today, I started pretending to be a dinosaur. Andrew freaked out and said that he also was a dinosaur. So I said, "Let's go chase people". Andrew runs around our first floor and starts yelling, "Mom! Mom! Here's people!". He'd found Lily in her swing, and was trying to scare her like a dinosaur. (for the record, Lily was just smiling goofily at him...Lordy how she loves her big brother!)