So . . . I'm STRESSED!
Now I really have a good idea what my clients go through. I'm not sleeping much at night. I'm tossing and turning worrying that everything is going to get done on our new house that I requested. The house is progressing nicely. Today all the windows will be in and they've started on the furnace and all the duct work. Next week they'll start on the siding and electrical. Now's when I need to make sure that everything I added to the home gets put in so nothing has to be torn out later. This morning I caught up with the foreman of the furnace crew and casually asked him if he knew anything about putting in an electronic air cleaner. He didn't. So now I have to try and make sure the builder knows to let THEM know without stepping on anyone's toes. They'll also be the ones to run the gas lines, so I need to make sure they know to run additional lines to the kitchen and back patio for the stove and BBQ. AND next week with the electricians coming in, I need to make sure they know about the additional outlets I added. Also about the whole house audio wiring too. Once all that is in and good, then I won't have to stress as much. Then it'll just be making sure the right colors, and materials get delivered. STRESS!AND to make matters worse, I've got to start getting my current home ready to sell. Thankfully my parents made me an incredible offer yesterday. They're going to come up from California and help us move and get my old home ready to sell. This is the part that's really sticking in my craw (As Erick likes to say). If I sell my current home, I'll have ZERO problems coming up with 10% down for the new home. If I don't, I'll have 5% or so. So I'm trying to work with my lender, Shawn Portmann, to figure out the best way to do this. Shawn is awesome because he can get ANY loan done. So I have no doubts on the loan. I just need to sit down with him and figure out the best way to do this. (OK, just sent him an e-mail and he just called me back) We're doing an 80 - 15 - 5 . . . so I'll put 5% down, finance 80% on the first, 15% on the second and all will be good. It'll raise my payments by a couple hundred a month, but I'll still be good. One less stress event to worry about.
Teri and I are going to clean our garage this weekend. It will take literally all day Sunday to do it too. Hopefully we'll get rid of a lot of clutter. Then next weekend, we're going to our storage unit and cleaning it out. We'll take a lot of stuff to Goodwill, get rid of some others and the rest will go into the newly cleaned garage. Then sometime the following week, we'll have a PODS delivered. We're going to pack it full of stuff in the garage, attic, and everywhere in the house we can find stuff we're not using day to day. They can come pick it up a week later full of our stuff and store it in their warehouse. Then after we move into the new home, we can call them up and they can deliver the PODS to our driveway. I think that will clear out enough stuff in the house that I can start getting to the little nagging projects I want to complete before we move. And if I can get them ALL done before we move, then maybe I can sell my house and just do an 80-10-10 mortgage instead.
Sorry, I'm just rambling on and on trying to get my thoughts on virtual paper. :-) I'm hoping it'll help me sleep at night. [sigh] We're also trying to get some answers from the builder about the kitchen sink. I know it sounds strange to be worried about a kitchen sink, but hear me out. See we're having granite slab countertops put in. We want to do a stainless steel undermount sink. But to do that, you need to know the dimensions of the cutout for the sink so the granite guys know how big and what shape to cut the hole in the granite. And don't even get me starteed on the kitchen faucet! It's been a pain to try to get an answer about this stuff. Everything else has gone swimmingly however. We pick out our lighting next Thursday, so that should be the last choice we have to make.
So the "diet" is going OK. I put that in quotes becuase I don't want to call it a diet. I want it to be a life change this time. All week I've eaten breakfast at home. 3 of 4 dinners have been at home and 2 of 4 lunches have been packed. I'm drinking between 2 and 3 liters of water a day and I still haven't had a sip of soda since January. Now I have had a couple of lemonades or strawberry lemonades here and there. I don't mean to pretend that these are any better for me than soda, but they have been few and far between. I'm afraid to get on the scale. While I've changed WHAT I eat, I haven't changed the quantity very much. I'm still eating a lot. But I'm hoping the changes I have made have been for the better. Just not having JITB every damn morning should be worth something right? The pants do seem easier to fasten, but that could just be wishful thinking too.
Anyway, enough for now. Those of you lucky enough to be on my home update list, I'll probably have something new for you to look at later today, so look for that e-mail. :-) Peace.