Saturday, July 09, 2005

So, we're moving

I have been so caught up in my day-to-day life, that I haven't had the time or energy to update this blog in FIVE MONTHS! How lame is that! (Note the lack of a queston mark.)

This winter, we decided that we would put our house on the market this spring. We love our house in Beford. However, we need to cut our expenses. We'd already made our decision, when our taxes went up again. The town's inability to decide on getting a high school cost tax payers a huge pile of money, since Manchester was able to blackmail us for $10 million over the course of three years, after we wouldn't sign a 20 year contract (and we hadn't built our own high school yet). So, the town was saddled with paying that on top of paying to build the school. Brilliant!

We ended up finding a townhouse/condo in Merrimack that we really like. It's not much smaller than our single family home in Bedford. The condo fee is high ($330/month), but there's a chance that it'll go down in a couple of years. The property was mismanaged for a few years, and the new management company had to play catch-up. In any event, the fee was exactly the same as another development we liked, where the houses weren't as big, and the amenties weren't quite as good.

In all, we'll be paying about $450/month less to live in our new house than we're currently paying for our Bedford house.

Coordinating a sale on one house with the purchase of a new one is an absolute pain in the ass. Every time we turn around one side of the transacation or the other is throwing another monkey wrench at us. I have been so stressed out I've been violently ill several times in last month.

We both hate having to give up the house that we love. However, Ben's been great at coming up with ideas of how to make the new house more appealing and more our own. In the near sixteen years of our marriage he has refused to paint a wall anything other than white. Shockingly, he actually suggested that it might be interesting to paint a wall in each room with an actual color. Also, he had an epiphany about building a window seat in a nine foot niche in the living room. The window seat will give us extra seating and inconspicous storage for our massive CD collection.

I'll try to post again closer to the move (7/27).