Still waiting... sort of

(originally written July 25, 2011)

Well, at least now we’re making some headway!

Garry and I found out today that our commitment letter will be finished todaywhich means that all of the financial parts of it are fine and we are good to go as far as the bank is concerned.

*happy dance*

Tomorrow the grant committee is meeting and we will know around 3:30 or so if we, indeed, will be buying the house. It’s going to be a LONG day tomorrow folks.

From there we’ll set a closing date. Since the grant people need a few days to get everything together we won’t be able to close this week like we had hoped – we’re shooting for next week, either Tuesday or Friday, but my guess will be Friday.

We’re so close… so very painfully close.

Yesterday I did a live  broadcast for the radio station I work part-time for an open house. She’s the only person who really uses live broadcasts for open houses and I was a little skeptical, but we had pretty good traffic coming through the house considering it was suffocatingly humid outside and about a billion degrees. It was really a fun broadcast to do too.

During the broadcast I met a lady that stages homes for sellers. If you’re not familiar with the idea of staging – the short of it is where you decorate or “set-up” your home so people can imagine living there. Usually this entails taking down all personal photographs, political, religious (etc) items and leaving up tasteful, neutral decor items. A common “staging” is setting the table with your best serving set for a nice dinner.

Anyway, it’s a great concept and a lot of folks in our area don’t really “get it.” (My mom was ALL OVER staging their house when they were selling their home and moving to Florida. She would get fresh flowers every day we had someone coming to look at the house)

Something else that people don’t really think about when they’re selling a house is that you should repaint your walls if you have an “odd” or really saturated color because if the color is really dark, it can look like a cave. If it’s a weird neon orange color people won’t be able to look past the crazy color and see the real merits of the room. Lucky for Garry and I our house only had a dark sage-green color that wasn’t too bad. Not our choice, but not terrible either with the rest of the walls being white or neutral. That goes the same with “theme” decor. Lots of people do it. It is a great way to show off your sense of style, but if you’re selling a house that doesn’t mean that a buyer cares. Actually, they could care less if your favorite place in the entire universe is Cape Cod. Tchotchkies are really distracting too!

Staging is becoming more and more popular around the country. Usually your realtor will let you know what you need to do to stage your home (repaint, pack away items, store extra furniture somewhere) and even though it might be incredibly painful to paint over your favorite color - you really should listen to them.

Anyway…

We’re 40 days out from our wedding. I’m going for my dress fitting on Wednesday which is a little scary since I haven’t lost any weight since finding out I need to lose about 10lbs to fit into my dress. Let’s just hope she can let it out enough or fix it so I can wear it – otherwise it will be a mad scramble to get a new dress.