Author: ken Page 6 of 11

I have talked to two banks (the one that currently holds our mortgage and the one we hope will give us our next mortgage), four insurance companies, our builder, and sundry others. Lorena called the gas company, AAA, and a service to help haul of a bunch of “stuff” we do not want to take with us. Moving money around to make ends meet is always a challenge at times like this. I am more grateful than ever that Lorena can handle a lot of these kinds of things with me now. What a gift is a capable wife.

We are rapidly moving toward the end of our stay in Virginia. We have been finding housing, insurance, a house building loan, and all the other stuff we need at the Texas end of our move at the same time we are signing documents for the sale of the house. We the inspection and appraisal behind us, we think the only things we have left are the termite inspection and sewer pumping. The picture with this post shows the last box of documents we plan to sort through, after which there is mostly just big stuff like beds to deal with.

This picture was taken from our front porch. This is all our property here in Virginia and we feel blessed to have lived here. There is lots of wildlife, forested areas, beautiful agricultural crop fields, rivers, and everything that makes Virginia such a beautiful place. It is not Oregon or Washington, but it is as close as it gets to that, as far as we can tell, on the East coast. We will not have that in Texas, but it truly is time to downsize and move into town, not that I want to admit that.

I had a long discussion with Brad, our friend and the builder of our new house last night. We have been through the plans so many times, there were not really a lot of decisions to make. The only thing missing from the cost estimate is the price of the rainwater cistern. From what I have investigated, it might be a good bit more expensive than what we can manage, but hope springs eternal in the hearts of men. Still, we have enough information to start things rolling at the bank, so I will spend some time on the phone talking to bankers today. I put reminders in my calendar to start turning off services for our house here in Virginia and turning them on at our apartment in Granbury.

Today the house appraiser for our house buyer’s bank came by. As he was leaving, he said there was going to be no problem with the appraisal. The inspection is complete and we have a sense for what it will cost us to get all two items fixed which is not much. So today, Lorena got storage worked out, I canceled the lawn service after one more mowing and scheduled the truck to come get our stuff. We have found an apartment where we want to stay and I hope to apply for that tomorrow morning. Things are coming at us fast now with much to do, not the smallest of which is the downsizing of our household a bunch more. In the meantime, we are enjoying our visitors like this deer that we almost certainly will not see after we move into town.

There is a lot of packing we need to do to get ready for the move, but the temperature is in the low 100’s, the humidity is high and it is Independence Day weekend. It is hard not just to throw up our hands and take a nap. I got stuck doing a bunch of work for my day job that needs to be done before I take time off to do the move, but Lorena actually got a few things done. Today we will do more and need to dive into it hard next week. After our church meeting this morning, we hope to run down to Costco and Home Depot to pick up more packing materials so we can pack a few things this afternoon.