[Been running 3-4 days a week last run was Wednesday evening, very hot and humid, 3.2 miles]
Today is August 1st.
July was a job search month and a sick month. Both my wife and I were incapacitated for about 10 days during the month. She thinks it was probably COVID. I don’t know, or particularly care.
We seem to be back to normal now, more or less.
Last Friday we were well on the mend. We drove down to the Laurel area together and looked at some houses. By the end of the day we were really happy about one in particular. We worked hard to get an offer in before 5 pm. But, the situation was an estate sale and the seller decided to wait through the weekend and accumulate what offers came in.
When we found out there would be a face-off we juiced up our offer a bit. But in the end we did not prevail.
With that possibility in mind we went back to Laurel this past Monday and saw a couple more houses which ended up not being suitable. Later on Monday we learned we had been thwarted on House #1 so we made an offer on House #2 which was our 2nd place choice from the Friday outing.
Pretty quickly we found out there was some confusion at the seller’s end and a purchase contract was already in place. So it really wasn’t for sale to us.
That gets us to the end of Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday we looked at houses online and made a list of offerings we wanted to see in person.
Today we again traveled to Laurel and looked at three houses we had not yet seen, and drove by two others. By the end of the day we put in an offer on the best of the bunch and that offer was accepted.
Now we have to push forward with our financing and with preparation for moving. Closing day is approximately 2 weeks after my start date at the new job. I’m mapping out a way of working M-F and staying nearby, then coming home on the weekends. Also I will be boxing things up. I don’t know if we will get a moving company involved or try to do it ourselves.
We have had some discussion with various friends about our house being available for sale. I think if nothing develops from that informal marketing we will eventually contact a real estate agent to get it sold.
I am also contemplating the future of our low power FM radio station. I’ve made contact with a company that may be able to rent us some tower space in town. We would move all of our system to their site and operate it all via remote control.
There are lots of things to be done.
I did get some touch-up painting done in the last two weeks. When we had the hardwood strip floor put in I had removed the baseboards. Later I put them back in. But the walls had some damage which I had not repaired. Now that is all done in the living room. I may have some more of that to do later.
The contract we are now in is at the top of our spending limit, as things seem to usually happen.
We had been so excited in the last couple of years about how we were getting within sight of paying off the mortgage on this house.
Our hope has always been to get the mortgage paid off before I retire.
For the new house we think we can scratch up enough down payment so that when the current house sells we end up at about the same amount of remaining mortgage; not lose a lot of ground on the pay-off quest.
I’ll probably be working 5+ years to get that done. A lot depends on how profitable the current house turns out to be. I don’t really have a retirement date in mind anyway.