Some news...

And it's not good news. Our landlord is kicking us out. (That's the downside of not having a lease). He wants to remodel our place and rent it out for a lot more money than what we are paying. This means that we now have 2-4 months to find a new place to live. While this is a decent amount of time, you must remember that we've been looking at houses for about a year now. How we can settle on something so soon, especially considering the amount of crap that's on the market right now, is beyond me.

We are deeply upset by this development for a variety of reasons:

1. We have to accelerate our house search. If we don't find anything to buy, we'll have to find another place to rent, which means we'll be locked into a lease somewhere, which we don't want to do.

2. We wanted to be the ones to break the news to the landlord that we would be leaving. I think we would have found it quite satisfying. It's like your boyfriend/girlfriend breaking up with you before you can break up with him/her.

3. On a personal level, I will be very sad to leave our apartment. As much as I've complained about it over the years, the place contains so many of our memories and "firsts." It was our first apartment, the place where we adjusted to living as a couple, the place where we spent our wedding night, the place that kept us safe through the hurricanes, the place where we've come home to each other for the past 7 years. I'll miss the gay bar on the corner, the barbershop quartet, the various wacky neighbors who have caused me grief, and many other things about it.

4. We seriously need to find a place to live. And SOON!!!

Here's where we stand. We've put our offer back in on Finch, though we are not very hopeful of a positive outcome. The agent for Catalpa contacted us to let us know the sellers are re-countering with $225,000. (Their last counter was $230,000). Now that we know the state of the electrical system in that house, we still think that's too high. We're going to try to get an electrician to give us an estimate on how much it would cost to update the house and use that as a bargaining tool. So far, we haven't seen any other homes that are interesting or in our price range.

-- Yana