Kernersvegas

By now, I should've closed on and moved into my condo in Greensboro. Negotiations with the seller were quite brief and the inspection turned up little of concern. I knew when I made the offer that I was buying the most expensive unit in the community of about 200 condos, but I figured that it was worth it since there's steady demand for housing in that area and my unit would have a brand new kitchen, furnace, water heater, and even a gas stove for back-up heat. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be.

Bad news came back with the appraisal, which valued the unit at about 5% less than what I'd agreed to pay. The seller, who was not using an agent, had made noises that he wasn't willing to lower the price since he'd accounted for his renovations and a buyer's agent's commission in the price. At the same time, the mortgage company wouldn't lend me all of the money that I'd need to buy the place. I had a few options before me if I really wanted the place. I could pay for another appraisal, but that seemed pointless. The appraisal looked reasonable enough to me and my realtor's research revealed it to be so; it even appeared that the appraiser had tried to help me out a bit by using comparables at the higher end of the scale and looking at a very similar community about a mile away (Whilden Place) where units sell at consistently higher prices. Other options involved even more money coming out of my pocket and none of them were at all appealing; some even seemed ethically questionable, though legal. I decided to let the condo go on the grounds that it didn't appraise and I couldn't get satisfactory financing. It took about a week of my realtor's arm-twisting and my own hand-wringing to convince the sellers to sign termination papers on the sales contract, but they finally did and I look forward to picking up a check for my earnest money before the weekend.

During this drama, Leslie, my friend with whom I was staying in Kernersville, made me a very good offer to rent space in her house. A bit of budget forecasting showed that this would be a very good move, even after accounting for the additional fuel and car maintenance costs, and would provide each of us with a built-in pet-sitter.

I've spent the past week settling into my new digs, the large bonus room above Leslie's garage. She installed ceiling fans and a closet system and I've been dragging things out from storage to make the place homey. I brought Cilly to his new home and he is acclimating well and becoming acquainted with his new canine cousin, Leslie's dog, Emma.

With the housing question answered, I turned my attention to other law school housekeeping matters -- applying for student loans and purchasing a laptop. The loan applications are in and I hope to hear something soon. I'd assumed that I'd buy a Dell laptop, but I don't care for the looks of their current line. I'd seen some nice Hewlett-Packard laptops at Costco, so I compared prices around town. Costco's prices were about the best around (bested by Sam's by a few pennies, but beating hp.com by a few hundred dollars). I was still nervous about shelling out so much money for a computer with an operating system that I'd never used (Windows Vista) from a manufacturer with whose products I had little experience, but Costco has a good return policy for computers, offers technical support, and extends the manufacturer's warranty on computers that it sells, so I finally settled on configuring a system myself on costco.com and expect it to arrive soon.

Meanwhile, Chris has been having his own housing drama, but I can hear the fat lady warming up so a climax seems to be drawing near; he'll move into his new condo this weekend.

Though I've heard the -vegas suffix applied with varying degrees of admiration and derision to many -villes (particularly Nashville, to become Nashvegas), Kernersvegas is a particularly apt moniker for Kernersville for me, since Leslie moved here about a year ago from Las Vegas AND the fact that I'm about to roll the dice in the crap-shoot of life in a quite fabulous way. :J