The new home possibility is basically on hold until tomorrow when I can speak to a mortgage broker, though there have been a few more developments since that first heady discovery of the place.

Meanwhile, we've been painting up a storm! We've got the living/dining area, hallway, entryway and inside of front door all painted. That just leaves the two bedrooms, the bathroom and the kitchen. Oh, and when we replace the balcony door it will need painting, and the cabinets in the kitchen are going to get painted.

It looks all right with just oak baseboards, though I realize it would probably look even better with crisp white trim. I just don't know if we're up for all that work, and it would be expensive to hire someone to paint it all. (There's a LOT of oak in this place.) So I think we'll do everything we can before deciding, and see how much money we've spent and what it looks like with more things finished.

If we do purchase a new home this early in the process, we'll definitely be minimizing the staging in this place if possible. Looking at some of the other places in our building, really you just need enough furniture so people have a sense of space and where things might go. We'll see what we can get away with.

Developments on the possible new place: We looked at recently solds in the area and, though nothing quite compares, it seems to be a bit overpriced. We asked our real estate agent and she agreed. She's still analyzing data, but meanwhile she said she'd talk to the listing agent tomorrow and try to get more info about why it's priced the way it is.

Meanwhile, we're trying to prepare to hopefully get preapproved at the asking price, just in case. Between US and UK savings, we're about $5K short what we would need to qualify. Our friends really want this place too, so they loaned us that amount! I should be able to pay them back by mid-August. Or, if we don't get this house, we can return the money earlier than that. We just need it in the bank to have the equivalent of 10% down in there.

I've done the numbers and if we moved in by July, with first mortgage payment due in August, we'd struggle to make the first two mortgage payments and still pay our friends back. However, the place is a duplex and the part that my family would have is currently being rented, for slightly more than what we'd need to cover the mortgage payment. We believe they're month-to-month, so we might basically be able to choose the month we want them out. That would be helpful because we'd be able to pay our friends back and not have to come up with the money for the mortgage right away. We need to find out more about the rental situation before we make an offer.

There's a huge basement that would become available (clearly not being used by the slovenly upstairs renters), so we could start moving our excess stuff there right away, which would make staging our condo for sale a heck of a lot easier.

The other issue is that the down payment would wipe out the money we have saved for the UK and US renos. We found out that the UK renter is renewing his lease, so we've emailed to find out if that's contingent on renovating right away or if it actually pushes the reno date back a lot. That would be great news because we'd have time to save up the money for that again. We hope they'll get back to us tomorrow (today was a holiday in England too).

The US reno, however, needs to be done right away if we hope to sell and get out from under that mortgage payment (and the association dues!). So I see a couple of options, none of them ideal, but all of them workable and not ruinous in the long run:
- Ask my dad for a loan with the promise that we'd either pay him back when/if the WV money comes in, or by a certain date (sometime next year).
- See if we can take out a small home equity loan on the new place right away. You used to be able to do that during the housing boom, but there might be rules against it now. Same payoff plan; either as soon as we get the WV money or, if that doesn't happen, sometime next year.
- Put the renos on the CCs and (gulp) carry the debt for a while. Same payoff plan. (Hopefully we could find a 0% offer and pay it off before interest starts to hit.)

Any of the three would be taking on debt, but I feel confident I could pay it off in a couple months. If (as CCF brought up) one of us lost our jobs, we would still be able to pay the bills but wouldn't be able to pay off the debt for a while.

Anyway, August and September would be difficult if we had to carry mortgages on both places, but starting in October (when NT's tuition stops taking big chunks out of our pay) it would get quite a bit easier. And starting in January (when NT and I will get more take-home pay due to smaller flex spending deductions) it will get even easier. Next September, our daycare expense will decrease by about a third,

I'm curious to hear from the broker tomorrow to see if 10% down is a requirement across the board for places of this price. Because also, if we could do 5% or even 7% down, it gets a ton easier as well (because we'd be able to keep the money for at least one reno and might not have to borrow anything).

If the old place sells, it gets easy faster. And if the WV money comes, there's no problem. But I need to make my calculations as if neither of those things happen because even though both are likely, neither is 100% a sure thing.

And really, nothing is a sure thing yet. If this home falls through, here's our plan for the future:
- Slow down the home search, but focus on multifamily for the searching we do (now that we know the multifamily option could actually work).
- Continue the US reno, and see how long we can put off the UK reno so we can keep that money for a possible down payment in the future.
- If no other houses come up, making an offer early next year would be much easier.

But I really hope this place works out! It was the first place that satisfied most if not all our needs, and it was the only one so far I could imagine calling home.