pyesetz | Selling my house

The "for sale" sign is now spiked into the lawn. I've spent the last two weeks trying to clean up the disaster area that is my house, so now there's only two rooms left that are impassable. Meanwhile, there's a worldwide "credit crunch" and the bottom has fallen out of the real estate market. Two weeks ago my realtor thought the house might fetch 90% of what similar houses (but in good condition) had gotten recently. Now he's using 80% in his example scenarios.

Yesterday I spent $800ºº on yard work. Vast quantities of "volunteer" plants were removed from the property. The landscapers filled up their dump truck with wood-chips! The house looks a lot more inviting now, but every dollar I spend will increase the amount of debt I end up with on the new house in Baden. I should have sold a long time ago, but I just couldn't get all the international-move political crap settled at a reasonable speed.

Today I printed out the mortgage documents for the new house that my mortgage broker had emailed to me. They're totally screwed up! It looks like the mortgage was set up as a 5-year fixed and then "amended" (by writing in the comments area) with a different rate. Nowhere does it actually say that the loan is a line of credit (no fixed time-limit, no prepayment penalty, automatic approval for further withdrawals after I pay it down some). I am not signing the documents in their current form! Maybe I should call the bank directly and ask them what kind of loan *they* think they're offering me.

Next week I'll call the moving company. Unless I can get lucky somehow, my schedule for September looks like

Fri 21^st: Move out.
Sat 22: Betwixt and between (that day just happens to be Yom Kippur, the highest of the Jewish High Holidays).
Sun/Mon 23-24: Drive to Canada.
Tue 25: Sign mortgage documents.
Wed/Thu 26-27: Sit in hotel room and/or buy appliances for the new house.
Fri 28: Take possession of new house.
Sat/Sun 29-30: Paint new house and/or buy appliances.
Mon Oct 1: Move in.

This is a horrible schedule but I just don't know what else to do. It looks like I won't be celebrating Sukkot this year because my Sukkah will be spending half the holiday sitting on a moving truck!

Maybe I should try moving the settlement date from Fri to Mon? That would make things a lot easier, but the settlement date is written on dozens of different documents and I expect a lot of resistance to changing it.