Closing in One Week.

Okay, it's been a long time (over a month) since my last post. I'm sure those of you who are already home-owners know why... this process is crazy and hectic! There's all of the back-and-forth over the inspection when you make peace over and over again with letting the house go, the conversations with the mortgage broker, digging up a tremendous amount of paperwork, signing another tremendous amount of paperwork, negotiating the best home owners insurance (which we'll talk more about in a minute) and finally sitting around for a little while thinking "there must be something I'm forgetting to do", watching HGTV and researching appliances online.
So, about that home owners insurance. First important point: you need it to buy a home. Second important point: Andrea and I have been burglarized three times over the last three years.

1. 30 days after we moved in someone reached in the 2nd floor window while we were asleep and stole my laptop (and a $2.99 Ikea lamp. Chumps.)
2. 30 days later someone actually kicked in the bottom half of the front door of our apartment, crawled through, and stole my new laptop and a bunch of jewelry. And sorted through our stuff, leaving via the back door which they left WIDE OPEN so all of my cats got fleas.
3. Maybe a year and a half later someone cut Andrea's bike off of the fence outside during the middle of the night and hauled it away.

• Important point: we had renters insurance - yay! We made claims for each of the incidents to replace the laptops and the bike.
• Second Important point: apparently actually having a need to use your renters insurance means that no one will give you home owners insurance.

That's right - everyone we called said "oh, I'm so sorry, I wish I could but it's against our policy to insure you." Now, you can't buy a house without home owners insurance so we were in a bit of a panic. I did get a quote for $2,000 (which is double what we'd be paying without having made claims with Allstate). Finally, Andrea whined and complained to an agent who was in the process of rejecting us and her "charm" prompted him to call his friend at Nationwide, give her a heads up, and have her look at our file by credit report and not by insurance history. Thank god, because we now have HMI for $979/year and are also saving another $45/month on auto.

So, with HMI taken care of, we've been procrastinating packing until we close (stupid, yes, but until just this weekend I really felt like this could fall through at any moment and we'd be jinxing it if we packed anything).

We've also been dealing with the fact that our apartment is being shown almost daily by Philly Apartment Company (in fact, there's a showing today at 2:30) so we've been trying to keep the apartment as clean and good-looking as possible so that someone rents it asap. It's getting exhausting.

And in the middle of all of this Hedgerow celebrated its 85th Birthday April 25-27th (complete with front page article in the Inquirer) so I've been completely insane. And Andrea's been working at Borders on Wednesday evenings and all day Saturday (in addition to her FT position at the Mazzoni Center) so she's been completely insane. We'll be on to greener, more insane pastures in just one week and there's some Sullivan family coming to help us out! Now, anyone reading this is also welcome to come help pack, haul or organize (although we've already charged Kendra with organizing the hallway closets in the new place). Let me know if you want to help!