FINALLY Funded!

So the old house is finally closed, the money is in our hot little bank account, the buyer can put his For Rent sign out front and we can go on living our lives. I shed some tears as I left closing Friday afternoon where we signed our house away. I asked Paul, our real estate agent, if he thought this guy was an investor and he said yes. He said that the buyer's agent kept saying, "he's moving, but not quite yet." If you sold your old house, wouldn't you be moving to your new house? So the downward spiral of our old neighborhood continues. Actually, it's still a very nice neighborhood, the vast majority of people care about keeping up their house and their lawns, but I worry it's destined for a lot of rentals. I don't know why, it's much prettier than most of the neighborhoods around here, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I read in a Time magazine article that your house value goes down by 1% for every foreclosure within 200km of your house. Glad we got out before the one diagonal from us went into foreclosure. We've had several foreclosures in our old neighborhood, so perhaps this is what is affecting value.

To celebrate finally closing our our old house, I just booked a condo in Port Aransas. We're going there for a long weekend in September. I'm really looking forward to it. Originally, we were going to take Stella with us, but we just really need a weekend alone, so she's going to Houston to have fun fun fun with her Meme for the weekend. We were supposed to use Tim's Grandmother's timeshare, but unfortunately everything within driving distance, including every single time share in Texas, is booked. We thought about flying because Tim's Grandmother offered to pay for the timeshare fee, which would have brought our lodging costs to zero, but it still was more stress and cost than we wanted to put into a little weekend getaway. Hopefully she'll let us use it again and we can plan better in advance. I'm a little concerned that we'll get bored in Port Aransas because everyone describes it as "quiet" and "off the beaten path", but we'll have CABLE again, so I'm sure we'll enjoy vegging out in front of the tv for hours on end when we're not on the beach. And we'll be all alone so who knows what else might happen:)

Our new house was supposed to have the roads finished today. Somehow I'm doubting that has happened, since when I drove by Monday they were still working on laying the supports for the entrance to the neighborhood. They're supposed to start framing our house next week, but that seemed to depend on getting the roads finished, so we'll just have to see. I had a dream last night that I saw them putting out all the materials to frame our house in front of our slab, so hopefully that's a prescient dream. Still hoping for November close. Still worrying that if it doesn't close in November, I may run screaming off a cliff.