Well, it's been a long few months, and there's a lot to post about. I suppose the biggest change deals with our house. Sarah and I decided that with the market coming down, and the equity we gained in our townhome, it would be worth looking at a new place. We searched for a little while, and found a small community that was being wrapped up by a fairly well known builder. It was very close to our townhome, so it was perfect as far as location, neighborhood, and even schools!
We went into a contract with them, to get the home built, and that's when the problems started. See, apparentely their approval process works differently when you're self-employed. Therefore while it wouldn't have been a problem to get approved if I had a normal, salaried job; they wouldn't approve me with the same income when I was self-employed. Thus began a lengthy process of fighting to get approval within a market that was becoming less and less willing to lend.
We're still in the process of sorting it all out, but it doesn look like we'll end up in the house after all. We didn't want to wait to sell our home though, because with the market declining, I wanted to get everthing we could for it. Thus, we put it up, and luckily for us it sold RIGHT away. Literally. As in, over the weekend we had put it up, it was sold. This was great, and we got what we needed to get, so I'm happy that that part went smoothly.
Unfortunately, that now meant we needed to move into an apartment while we continued sorting out the new house stuff, and waited for it to be built. We looked around for a while, and found short-term leases with a nice complex in Bel Air. We arranged the move-in, and the transition went very smoothly. I was looking forward to spending a few months in an apartment. I remembered apartment living to be awesome from when I was in college. No yard to take care of, easier space to clean, move convenient location... except for one small thing.
You see, unfortunately, I forgot about having neighbors. While I think our neighbors are fairly nice people, some of their quirks REALLY get to me. The person above us has three small children who run around ALL THE TIME, and the pounding has gotten to the point where it actually wakes us up at night, or makes it almost impossible to listen to the TV in the evenings. The person above them is very talkative. Nice guy, but if you see him in the hallway, you'll spend 30-45 minutes talking to him while you try to get on to whatever you walked outside for. Then there are somewhat sketchy people coming and going from the building at odd hours. I'm not sure who're they're visiting, but it doesn't look like the most legitimate group of friends.
Ah well, hopefully it'll all be worth it. In a few years, I'll probably look back at all of this and just laugh. At least the cats are adjusting, they are actually spending a little more time playing and aren't quite as scared of the noises by this point.
As for the work front, we're picking back up again slowly. The economy hasn't been very nice to us, but the business is getting by, which is more than I can say for a lot of small businesses at the moment. As long as we can bear out the storm, I think we'll do just fine. We have a few very nice prospects on the table, and once we finish them up I have big dreams for the result. Hopefully it'll live up to them.