The Weekend Is Over

For me it is, anyway. Sunday evening sees me back at work after a few days off. It means, of course, that I won't be able to watch the Super Bowl, but you might imagine that I'm not terribly heartbroken at the prospect. I'd like for the Pats to win and all, seeing as they're the locals, but life will go on just fine if they don't.

There's been very little knitting this week, but it's been a productive one overall. On Friday, David and I sat down with someone at the bank and did a mortgage pre-approval. We've been in informal talks with Landladies Wendy & Paula to buy our little house for a while now, and the time has come for those talks to get a little more serious. I had sat down and crunched some numbers previously, and it turns out that the bank agrees that we can afford what I knew we could afford. This is a very good thing.

It also works in our favor, at least for purposes of negotiation, that the housing slump has hit our neighborhood (a nearby property on the waterfront with a separate rental-or-guest cottage has been listed for a couple years now and has dropped from $2.4M last I looked to $1.675M currently). There are no plans for this house to go on the market, but it does affect the appraisal. We live in a mostly high rent district, there is no doubt, but our humble little house is 300 or so years old and, as with many houses of a certain age, it has a fair number of quirks that make it a bit less attractive on the open market - like the non-accessible kitchen plumbing that runs along a poorly insulated outer wall. Or the somewhat leaky windows. Or the nonstandard everything. So hopefully we'll be able to work out a purchase price that is amenable to all parties and do so while interest rates are nice and low.

Aside from that, David & I did some reorganizing today to reduce the clutter in my little office space and to reclaim what has been a storage room for David's business as a guest room, so that visitors will have a bit more privacy. Since we're trying to have my 14-year-old niece visit more often to give her time away from her dad and brother and other uncle (They're all sharing a room at my parents' since my brother split from wife #2.), we felt it should be a priority. Doing so also meant moving a futon mattress out of its storage space under the daybed in our upstairs guest/TV room. This, in turn, meant that I was able to move almost all of my stash bins into that space and open up that room a bit more. This, as Martha would say, is a good thing.

And I don't really have time right now to properly acknowledge, but I've been given the You Make My Day blog award by both mollybeees and janel. Y'all make me blush, seriously. And then I really never properly acknowledged it when Mike nominated me for the Rockin' Guy Blogger thing way back when. I'm so bad with these things, really. And so, to seriously distract all of you, I am going to point out that Tuck is famous and then make my getaway.