We are now the proud owners of two houses. If you look at that from a total monetary value (and ignore the fact that the bank actually is more of a proud owner than we are!), it seems quite impressive. However, as excited as I am to now be in official possession of the house in Sacramento, I’d be even more excited to be, at the very least, in escrow on the first house. Still, the adorable Craftsman bungalow in the wonderful neighborhood is finally ours, and that’s enough to make us a little bit giddy, despite any lingering stresses like ‘holy crap if we don’t sell this thing soon we’re going to be paying two mortgages’.

We had the final walk through Tuesday afternoon, an event which took some complicated scheduling, since we had to work it around jobs, meetings, and the ability for at least one of us to get to the veterinarian in time to pick up Azzie and Tangerine (who spent the day there getting teeth pulled and/or cleaned and costing us a rather astonishing amount of money in the process). I wasn’t expecting to get the keys Tuesday night, so it was a bit of a shock when the real estate agent showed up, handed us our keys, and said ‘Congratulations!’. We went back over after dinner, with my parents this time so they could get the grand tour. We’re already rearranging which room will be which, from our previous plans. Considering the official move date isn’t until next Thursday, we’ve still got time to do yet more virtual rearranging between now and then; however, if we now make the turquoise room the library, this means my plan to take my time ripping out the carpet and repainting the room have gone kaput. Ah well – the good part about the carpet is that I don’t have to protect the floor when I’m painting in there, and if we’re truly lucky, underneath it will be the original wood flooring (although that carpet is tacked down pretty tight, so I suspect it’s not going to be as easy as it might sound).

And speaking of ripping up carpets and putting down flooring, we tracked down the nearest Lowes to our new abode and went there on Saturday, and picked out the flooring for the entire downstairs. We’d been thinking of bamboo (more sustainable) but bamboo isn’t so easy to install yourself, and the flooring plus the installation came to a bit of a nasty sticker shock. Plus we know we love the laminate we’ve had in the current house, and when we started checking out their laminate selection we found not only a style we both really like, we managed to pick one that is on clearance. And the guy helping us – who happened to be a floor manager – discounted it even more, just to be nice. Of course he also noted that there is no reason for us to not install this ourselves, and got us to promise to come to his laminate flooring installation class next Saturday so we aren’t attempting this completely blind, and then set it up so nearly 70 boxes of flooring and all the acoutrements will be delivered Saturday afternoon. So guess what *we’ll* be doing starting Sunday morning? Luckily my knitting mom has had experience in this, having installed the flooring in her home office, so she’s volunteered to come over and bring her tools and her miter saw, so I figure our chances of at least getting the bedroom floor redone (and really, that’s the only room that *has* to be done before we move in) before Thursday are pretty good.

As for our current house, the contingent buyers have reluctantly backed out. They had 30 days to try to sell their house, and it just didn’t happen. I feel bad for them, since I’m sure the anxiety I’m currently feeling about selling our existing house isn’t half of what they’re feeling, not being able to close on ours, but now that the contingent deal has expired, we’re back on the active market. And the fact that there’s someone coming over to look at it tomorrow afternoon is a good sign we’re doing the right thing.

Anyway. Richard is so far the only one getting to traipse back and forth to the new house, since I rather inconveniently scheduled myself for a three day software training in San Francisco this week. Richard drove me to the train station in Davis at far too early in the morning on Wednesday and I took the train, and then the light rail, down to the city, where I was able to disembark just about right across the street from the class site. Very convenient and, despite the short delay right outside Richmond due to a fire somewhere near the BART station, it took me about the same amount of time to get here that it would have taken if I’d driven my car, but with far more time available for sock knitting, and far less rush hour traffic and associated swearing. My hotel is about a fifteen minute walk away, past oodles of snooty and expensive sort of stores and right around the corner from Union Square. The room is small, but it’s just me in here and I don’t need much space, so it’s perfectly cozy. There’s free WiFi, and a table low enough so I can use my computer without being reminded (like I am in most hotels) that desk chairs and desks were never designed with short people in mind. The bed is comfy and my room is nice and quiet and I have my choice of any sort of pillow I could possibly want (no really, they have a long list of pillows available, including one that plays music). There’s even a little lending library on the floor below me, so I managed to pick up a fluffy and mediocre mystery to entertain myself with while eating dinner last night.

Despite the coziness of the hotel, and the fact that the class has been mostly informative and somewhat useful, I am looking forward to checking out tomorrow morning, and then zipping out of the classroom the second the training is finished, to get back on that train and go home. We’ve managed to get a lot taken care of over the past few weeks, in preparation for this rather big transition that’s happening in our lives, but the number of things that still remain to be done to get us through this is feeling a little overwhelming and it will be good to have the work week done and behind me, and be able to focus only on our uncomfortable abundance of house.