A new home on the horizon

April 7, 2004

Heather and I met with our financial advisors last Thursday, and discussed our current status and our goals.  It was decided that we are ready to start looking for a house.  We are going to be talking with a mortgage broker soon, and then to a realtor.  The big thing now is getting our condo ready to sell.
The place we are living now is right down the street from Arizona State University, and I feel that it will be easiest to sell the place over the summer because that is when new students will be looking for housing for the coming semester.  Based on that, our goal for a move-in date is August.  However, we want to make improvements to our condo before we get it appraised, so that is what we have been working on the last week.
We would like to replace the carpet, the linoleum, and our washer/dryer unit.  The problem is, we have too much crap.  I have nowhere to put all the stuff that is currently on the carpet in order to replace it.  Luckily, Heather's mom has agreed to let us use part of her house and her garage as storage.  So, for the past week I've been cleaning, throwing junk out, and boxing stuff up so that it can be stored.  My plan is to gut our place so that all we have are the bare essentials.  The emptier the place is, the better, because that will make it look bigger.
For the first time, I actually feel that moving into a house is becoming a reality.  I imagine it will become even more so when we start talking with the realtor and looking at houses.  I will keep you posted on our progress, and maybe even take some before and after pictures of our place to show the improvements.

Last Saturday we visited Grandma Howland in Mesa.  We visited and ate dinner with her, Jenifer, and Darby.  We took pictures, and I'll work on getting those up soon.  Grandma told us about her recent vacation to Thailand as well as showing off her pictures.

I've been working on using php to improve the way I post pictures.  I came up with a bit of a different way to navigate pictures.  I made it so that when you click on a thumbnail the picture opens in a new window like before, but now the caption is also on the big picture and you can progress to the next picture without clicking on the thumbnail.  If you want to check it out, (Link Removed).  Realize, this is in the testing phase, so some stuff may be a bit off.  Let me know what you think.

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