Friends

Seriously bad news on the commercial loan front. All the best will in the world has not proven effective. In the current banking climate, no one will give us the loan for the building. There is also no selling anything even if we wanted to. They'll give us about 2/3 of what we need to fund the loan. The rest is the cruising kitty and an investment from my mom. Ironically, this means that the property will start making us money in two months rather than costing us for the next 3. However, it's not enough to sustain us. We're going to play games with the cash, I'll pick up another writing contract, and DrC will work 3 months next summer instead of three weeks, and we'll be able to stay out here until May 2010. However, after that we have a hard stop due to lack of funds.

There is part of me that is totally crushed by this. There is another more sensible part of me that says WTF. It's not like realistically we could have kept cruising forever anyway. If nothing else would have stopped us, teenage girls would have put a halt to the whole thing in more or less two years anyway. There is also something rather settling about knowing The Date. We don't have The Plan yet, but at least we know when we get off the boat. It enables us to put boundaries around where we go and what we do. And finally, even before this all went down, I was pretty certain we were going to run out sometime in the summer of 2011 anyway.

Already, the family is brainstorming "What to do next!" There are many ideas floating around. By then, both properties will be completely self-sustaining. If we sell the boat, we can literally move anywhere, do anything, start over. We'll be broke, but we'll largely be unencumbered and we should be able to pull a small amount of starting money out when we offload Don Quixote.

The thought of selling Don Quixote makes my stomach clench.

However, I'm sitting in one of the prettiest docks in the world, listening to the gulls, and contemplating actually going to get a pastry and latte to celebrate circumnavigating Vancouver. I refuse to get depressed because I can't play hookie from making a living for the next forty years.

BUY MY HOUSE!

We're listing today. I'm going on a little higher than my agent recommends, but I need some negotiating room since people are coming in with ridiculous offers these days. He thinks we're still in the ball park - and we're lucky right now as there aren't many competing houses in our price range. There is still so much more I could do to fix this place up, but we hit our time limit. Our agent says it looks good. I have heard other people say this when they move, but it probably looks as good as it ever has.

In the last few weeks we refinished the deck, refinished the front door, repaired and replaced the front window sills and trim, installed new storm doors, disposed of a mountain of blackberry brambles, replaced 2/3 of the carpet, took three loads of random crap to the dump, a load to RePC, and a handful to good will. We cleaned out every drawer and cabinet, packed away boxes of books, knick-knacks and clutter. We ripped up a some rotten wood on the deck, cleaned out the attic, fixed kitchen trim, washed every window, polished cabinets, and buffed stainless steel appliances to a high sheen.

And innumerable small projects I have already forgotten.

I need to fill out the disclosure statement and mention the car port and the crawl space. I have made a lot of repairs to the crawl, so I am trying to figure out how to word it. There shouldn't be any more problems with it, but it is ugly.

We are almost through the last hoop with the new place. The rules for financing changed in between when I got pre-approved and when I went in to fill out the loan application. I never thought I would get nailed by all the jumbo loan, Freddie Mac stuff. Even with good credit, no debt, a good employment history and salary, it was hard to get enough money to cover both houses during the transition. We worked it out, and are approved for everything, but I won't feel good until the ink is dry.

All this... and we still have moving to look forward to....

Stacey and I worked for 13 hours straight yesterday. We're having carpet in 4 rooms and the hall replaced. There are only 7 rooms in my house. The goal was to move everything outside and tear up the old carpet. But, we used it as an opportunity to attack all of the clutter and get our non-essential stuff packed. We went through everything: every drawer and cabinet - every file - and sorted it: good will, garbage, recycling. I have a mountain of garbage in my carport the size of a box truck - which is what I will probably rent to haul it to the dump. I even retired my linux server - I didn't use it enough to justify it sucking the power and collecting dust, and I can outsource my hosting. I hope RePC will take all of that crap.

We boxed up probably half of our stuff and stuck it in Kirk and Shanti's garage. The rest of it is in the shed, piled in our bedroom, in the kitchen or under tarps on the deck.

The old carpet was truly foul. The stuff in back was only eight years old and not too bad - we even kept the carpet pad. The stuff in front, however, was probably over 20 years old (I'm guessing closer to 30). The cornucopia of smells that wafted out as we peeled it off was truly breathtaking.

By the end of the day everything should be back in place. I probably won't set up my stereo again - lots of stuff like that: the PS2, VCR, whatever - will stay packed.

Hopefully, we'll be all set to list on Tuesday.