Twas Brillig

Wordless Wednesday

(Yup! I decided to finally join in the fun! Took me long enough, I know…)

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We worked our butts off this last weekend, with the help of many family members.  My mother-in-law took my kids while my father-in-law and brother-in-law and nephew and I worked–packing, cleaning, sorting, organizing, loading the U-haul.  And then my brother J and wife joined us for unloading the U-haul.  My current home looks like we’ve just moved in (though we’ve now been here for two months)–there are boxes everywhere.  The garage is piled high to the ceiling with our furniture and boxes and exercise equipment, etc.

My old house is empty.  Well, mostly.  There are still some garbage piles that need to be hauled off and I’d like to wipe out the cabinets and drawers.  Otherwise, the task is done.

Hubby and I have been contemplating the money that’s about to be in our bank account.  After we finish paying off the old house’s mortgage, there will still be hundreds of thousands of dollars left–just sitting in our bank account, accumulating interest, waiting to be spent in the form of a down payment on our next house in about a year.  We’ve been imagining the kind of house that we can get with that kind of money.

It’s been so liberating–knowing that our frequent trips out the old house (a forty-five minute drive) will soon be done.  That the pain of selling this house will soon be over.  That the maintenance for the garden and the yard and the trees will finally be someone else’s problem!  LIBERATION!

Closing date?  TODAY.

And so, you can imagine our heartache when we received word late last night that the buyer’s loan was denied.

In this brand spankin’ new age of loan-reform (thanks to the huge mess of subprime loans and the thousands of lending companies being suddenly bankrupted and the whole market being turned up-side-down) obtaining a loan is a miraculous feat.  This family was prequalified for about a hundred thousand dollars more than we were selling our home to them for.  They make plenty of money, but it’s through his own business as an investor, which makes it harder to prove what he actually makes and it makes him just the very type of person that lenders nowadays aren’t interested in lending to.

What a mess.

They are going to try again–through various different companies, and then if that fails, we’ll offer a rent-to-own kind of arrangement with them and see if they’re interested in that.  And, if all of that fails, we will find ourselves back in that world of frantically trying to sell our house–to someone else.  Ugh.  I hate that world.

The point is, no matter how you turn it, our impending freedom has been pulverized.

I’m not devastated.  I’m really not.  We’re not in any worse of a position today as we were a month ago.  We’re incredibly blessed, and it’s wrong to whine when I’m so obviously being taken care of.  And I know that it will all work out the way it’s supposed to.

But, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I’m, well, a wee bit disappointed.