Moving Sucks

I hate packing. It's making this place a mess. There are boxes everywhere. It makes things stressful because there's this impending deadline. We have 2 weeks until we move. We've been furiously studying cabinets and tiles. We went to Home Depot and Home Expo last weekend. It was good that we went to Home Expo first. They had a very large showroom that had a lot of full kitchens to explore and for renovation ideas vs. Home Depot which just has a cabinet door in one section and tiles in another. Home Depot doesn't really "put it together." You basically have to know what you're looking for and hope that it will match.

What I found is that we may like a light fixture or a set of cabinets, but the styles don't necessarily go together. Designers on HGTV make it look easy. It reminds me of when we were planning the wedding as well. You may like individual pieces, but if they don't work together, you can't use it. I guess you can say the same thing for furniture in general. You might have a chair that you like, but it doesn't match the couch or the wall paint color.

And of course, Edwin and I each have our favorite styles. Edwin likes oak with the wood grain that you find in older houses- very classic and goes well with Craftsman style homes like ours. I like things a little more modern with cherry cabinets and a smooth finish. The model kitchen we saw looked very nice, but I wonder if it will look "old." I mean, that is kind of the point, but I don't want to spend all this money on a renovation to have people think that it wasn't renovated when we sell it and not get our money back. We will probably end up with with the oak because I think that it goes better with style of the house. I'll have my cherry cabinets in our next house. LOL.

We have also been looking at refrigerators. We're considering buying a refrigerator using craislist. In my mind, I have always had a "used" refrigerator in any apartment that I have ever lived in. I have seen a lot of listings where people are renovating their houses and have to get rid of their appliances. Now, that being said, I don't want anyone's cruddy 10 year old refrigerator either. The one that I am interested in is a stainless steel counter depth refrigerator that has only been used for 6 months. They are selling it for half the price that they paid for it because they bought a new house and don't need it. For half price, I can deal with a slightly used refrigerator. It's probably a much nicer refrigerator than we would ever buy otherwise. We're going to try and look at it tomorrow. I bought my wedding dress on ebay. Why not a refrigerator? I think that you can get some pretty good deals that way.

We also signed our loan docs this week. It was pretty painless. I really like our mortgage broker Rosemary Gee. She's been very good at explaining things and being responsive. I got very frustrated with another broker because he kept giving me the run around. I would ask questions and not get very clear answers. I asked for example rates and loan options and I never got anything on paper. During our first and last meeting, I had to write everything down because he didn't give us examples on paper. I think it was because he didn't want to commit to anything. When I told him the loans that Rosemary got us, he said that it didn't exist and that we should go with him. I asked him on 3 separate occasions to email me with loan rates and options and he never did. I went to my bank and asked for rates and they never got back to me either. They just told me that mortgage brokers were blood suckers. The most ironic thing is that our first loan is with my bank. Dumb. The second loan is a line of credit. What's nice about the line of credit is that we can pay it off faster if we want to and we can also take any of the principal we pay back out if we need it. It means that we don't need to have our cash reserves sitting in a bank gaining less than 5% interest when we are going to have to pay more than 5% in interest. Therefore, we get to pay off our debt faster and have access to emergency money if we need it. It's nice flexibility that we did not expect. Have I bored you yet? We hand over the big check this week and we close escrow on August 30, so T minus 6 days until we are officially homeowners.