The work continues on the exterior of the house. Both back and front porches now have railings down the steps, which are brand new on the back porch because the old ones were looking pretty old and ugly. The plan right now is for them to finish everything up on Monday, although they have not even touched the interior yet, so it will be interesting to see if this actually happens. As I mentioned earlier, this house has a *lot* of trim.

My dad conveniently has a project where he gets to work from home for a few weeks, so I wheedled him into playing house sitter for us for the past two days – mainly just to be here to let workmen in and out of the house as they needed. Thursday the tile guy came and ripped out the magically warping marble shower surround, and did all the necessary patching of holes in the underlying sheetrock that result from having to pry well-adhered marble slabs off of a wall. He, too, says he will have it all finished on Monday, but currently we have only about one wall of tile installed, no fixtures, no doors, and we are both using the shower in the guest bathroom in the meantime, and also hoping that miracles really will happen and everything will actually be done on time.

My dad was also here to let the pest people in this morning. They came in and climbed down under the house and did whatever magical things they do to make the termites disappear, and when they were done, they filled out a form declaring that our house has now cleared all pest inspections, which is apparently a good thing to be able to include in the ‘buy this house’ descriptions on realtor.com.

Richard and I, in the meantime, have been busying ourselves with other house things – but mainly related to the house we hope to buy, as opposed to the house we intend to sell. Yesterday after work we met with a friend who also happens to be a mortgage broker (and who also came highly recommended by a few other friends who have already worked with him for their own house purchases) and went over our financial applications (the verdict – we both have excellent credit scores and we are definitely going to be able to do the convoluted financial thing we want to do to make this whole ‘buying a house before we finish selling the first one’ thing work). Once the financial stuff was done, then all we had to do was hash out the terms of our offer. Last night our realtor filled out the forms and then emailed them to us (ah, the convenience of modern technology!) and we printed them out and then he walked through every single bit of them on the phone and even though it was technically still Thursday when we signed them, it was only because we squeaked in under the wire with a few minutes to spare. Richard dropped off the forms this morning and we have given the sellers until tomorrow night to respond. It’s all very exciting and also more than a wee bit terrifying.