Before:



After, coming soon...the fun has just begun!

Well, that's kind of a relief...we met with our financial planner last night and dropped some fees to find out for sure that we can afford the really nice house we like, assuming it's still available when we hit the market. Of course, it's scary to think of spending that kind of money on anything, but it would be phenomenal to get it...it's everything we want...except for the price.

But when someone who knows that stuff can tell you, "it's definitely a minor risk, but it's a calculated risk that you guys can afford to take on, and there's always the back-door option of selling it if something happens where you can't afford it. I would go for it."

So, that's a relief, of sorts. Now the pressure of waiting for our condo to be ready to be sold, put on the market and hopefully sold for a great price. The pressure is on, baby, with just over two weeks to the work week. Tonight and tomorrow, I begin the process of demolition of the half-bath, which the show is not going to touch. If we don't improve it, then it will stick out horribly like a sore thumb once they do their work. I'll post before and after photos, I promise.

Well, I sacrificed the first half or so of the Bears game on Sunday to see two more houses on my own. The first one held promise on the outside, but suspiciously only mentioned how nice the outside was (and it was freakin' beautiful, in my opinion) and had no interior pics. I grew suspicious, and rightfully so. It was THE WORST HOUSE I've seen so far. Totally just hideously run-down, dirty, smelly as shit and in terrible shape. I wouldn't pay $100k less than what they were ASKING for that place. You'd have to tear out the walls they were so dirty, and the person who lived there was a chain-smoking fiend. Everything smelled like cigarettes...hey, to each his or her own, but come on, you're trying to sell the house! I usually don't have "feelings" like this, but when I went down in the basement, I was really uneasy. I felt like I was in a horror movie...it was just terrible down there--dark, finished rooms laid out poorly, dirty and disgusting and really claustrophobic feeling. It was a maze of rooms down there too...I almost thought I was going to walk into a room with a pit dug into the ground and the dude from Silence of the Lambs was going to ask me to put the fuckin' lotion in the basket. You laugh, but really, this is the first time I've EVER been afraid of a part of a house.

Thank God I got out of there...and moved on to the next house, which was a breath of fresh air. Nicely taken care of, restored in some aspects, but generally just kept up in true Chicago bungalow style--UNBELIEVABLE woodwork throughout, and room for expansion upstairs and some minor renovation downstairs. This one is in a new neighborhood for us too, basically a half-mile due north of us. That is a historic neighborhood full of bungalows, and it's actually a better neighborhood than we realized (though we had not really looked into it, honestly--we've concentrated our efforts west and northwest more). So I'll have to show Gina, and then maybe we'll have to consider that area.

Of course, any of these houses have to survive on the market for AT LEAST another four weeks or so for us to even have a shot, and for us to comfortably afford the really, really, really nice one, we need to have some luck in selling this condo for the right price. Good thing we've got some professional help from the show.