It’s a busy morning here at Casa de Snark. We have Professional Painters coming in today to paint all of our interior doors and trim, the ceiling, and the accent wall we painted blue right before we moved in. They’re old (the doors) and starting to discolor…and the Amateur Painters who actually live here (ahem) are too lazy to paint all seventeen of them. We have more important things to do…like design the new Snarkwife/Capt. UberHusband dual home office. Oh yeah. That’s so much fun it gave me a headache and what I thought were the beginnings of flu symptoms yesterday. But hey, it’s cheaper than the projects we keep putting off…like renovating the bathrooms.

It’s strange…I don’t think we’ve had this many people in our house since our housewarming party. Seven years ago. Obviously we don’t entertain much. Son of a gun…we’ve lived here for seven years. Well technically, our mortgage began seven years ago last week. We didn’t move in until a couple of weeks later, though. Have I ever told you that story? Oh, it’s a doozy.

When we put an offer down on this house, the sellers (who had four children…all under the age of six) were all wiggy because we were using a VA loan to get the house. We weren’t using it because we had lousy credit, we were using it because we were impatient and decided to forego a 20% down payment in favor of the VA funding fee so we could get into a house sooner. We were 28 and 29…and sick of living in apartments. Actually…here’s a bit of Snarkwife/CU trivia…we actually bought a house based on what we could afford with only one salary. Hey, it was 2001. Economic times were tough.

So, our lame sellers thought we were a credit risk and no joke…were afraid we weren’t going to close, because the VA had some requirements for the house which required that Mr. Seller actually catch up on home maintenance he hadn’t been performing for the past three years. Like it’s our fault they have peeling exterior paint all over the place? Mr. & Mrs. Seller’s real estate agent would call our agent about ten times a day, asking if our funding was coming through…blah, blah. It was annoying. On top of that, as soon as they accepted our offer…they quit watering the yard. Our agent quickly took care of that issue. You don’t stop watering the yard in Texas in August.

The thing about the Sellers…they had to get out of the house ASAP. She was a stay-at-home-mom and he was an accountant for a local furniture store, but had recently chucked that job to go back to seminary. As such, they could no longer afford to live in the house. They wound up moving into a 900-sq. ft. house in Richardson which was about a hundred years old. 900 square feet. Two adults and four kids. Yikes.

So short story long…the Sellers were the ones who actually almost caused us not to close on time. Why, you ask? Because the hundred-year old house they were buying had asbestos issues. So, we did close…but allowed the Sellers to live in our house for an additional week while their new house was getting de-asbestosed. That was a funny week. I worked near the house at the time, and would drive by every day at lunch to see if they were making any progress in looking like they were moving out. The day we closed, they weren’t even packed. Oh, the joys of buying your first home.

But, now we’ve been here for seven years. We’ve watched most of our neighbors change out at least once…and are now eagerly waiting for Demon Spawn and his family to hitch up their wagon and head out. They dropped the price on their house last week…so it’s only a matter of months before the thing actually sells.

I just realized the painters have taken all of the doors off all of the hinges…I guess I’ll go next door if I need to use the bathroom, or give El Jefe and his boys a nice show.