There are around seven or eight new properties that Jenn and I will be checking out on Sunday. Gregory, my realtor, sent over a few, and I searched around and found a couple, too. There’s one in particular that I’m really liking the look of, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s all of two or three blocks down from some good friends of ours. If it’s as cool as it looks like from the pictures, that’ll be the one. I know that one of the houses we’re going to look at is a nice size for the price, and I’m big on size (heh) but the kitchen looked REALLY small from the pics, which could be a problem… then again, it may have an offer on it, too. I guess I’ll worry about that Sunday.

Of course, Gregory’s going to Mexico for a week so I’ll be dealing with his partner, Terri, on Sunday. Which really doesn’t bother me so much, but it’s just one more thing to stress about.

The thing is, I’m starting to stress over things surrounding this whole house-purchase thing, and it’s generally things that are out of my control. I find it helps to call people and ask questions about the process and what I need to do at certain steps therein since familiarity with how things work and knowing what my part is in all of it is comforting. Sort of “imposing structure on chaos,” if you will.

There’s other stuff, too. For example, my parents are adamant that they see any house I want to make an offer on before the offer goes out. But they can’t make it to this side of town during the daylight on weekdays, so that would mean I’m waiting weeks - weeks where other people are potentially making offers on my house - just to make a first offer. I’m thinking maybe they can just see it after I get things moving, since the timing on things is just not going to work.

And we’ve got a bunch of stuff in storage, some large items of which (a mattress/box spring set, a display case) are going to be listed for sale in the want ads. That’s Jenn’s one job here - figure out, by tomorrow (she’s had a week now) how to list things in the ads. Like, what sort of requirements there are - description length, pictures (if online or whatever)… but she’s made no progress on it and just complains that there are no display cases out there like the one we’re selling so she doesn’t know how to price it. She’s a smart girl and I love her, but sometimes I would love to just be able to trust her to use the intelligence I know she has (she passed the national pharmacy tech certification test, after all) and solve the problem without my intervention and without procrastination. If I was able to do everything by myself, I wouldn’t have asked for help, would I? (Note that I very rarely ask for assistance on stuff from much anyone - I’m very much of the philosophy “God helps those who help themselves.” Plus, if we’ve gotta list these things for more than a week, we need to know how to do it yesterday.)

It occurred to me about 4:45 this morning that I didn’t know how I was going to go about converting my renter’s insurance policy over to homeowner’s. So I got up to pee and got back in bed and laid there thinking about that… and the fact that I’m not sure what Ann’s (my mortgage broker) part in making an offer is… or how I’ll be going about doing that… or even whether Ann’s received my loan paperwork in the mail that I sent her earlier this week…

I got up about 5:30a after laying there stewing on that stuff, took my shower, and went to work early.

Since then, I’ve called State Farm and talked to a nice lady named Jessica who explained how to go about getting the homeowner’s policy, so I’m feeling a little better about that. I’ll need to provide my information to Ann so she can file that away, uh, wherever those things get filed.

I still need to call Ann to find out what I need to do if I need to make an offer on something. I’d like to think the realtor and the mortgage broker get together behind the scenes to deal with the details, but somehow I’m scared to let that stuff out of my control. And when do I lock my loan rate? Before or after I make an offer? Does it matter? Argh, this will be the death of me.