Appointment has been set

On Wednesday I called Bexar County, and I made an appointment for this coming Tuesday, which is the next step in the buyout process.  At this appointment, we will officially accept the offer and sign the paperwork.

When I called to make the appointment, the lady asked me if I was happy with our offer, and even though we are, there are some things we wanted to bring up with them, in the hopes of getting the offer amount increased a little bit.  Bexar County had told us all along that we should negotiate the offer when we get it. So, knowing we wanted to negotiate for a bigger amount, I really didn't know what to answer her, but I did tell her I thought the offer was fair.  She asked if I would like to negotiate the offer over the phone, and since I wasn't prepared to do that, I told her that it would be best to do it at the meeting, which was to take place at our house.
Well, after thinking it over, we decided we did not want to meet her at our house and thought a neutral place would be better - like the nearby library.  So, Guillermo called her today to change the meeting place and also let her know what we thought was undervalued in our offer amount.  And it was no problem!!  Our offer was increased very favorably and now we feel we are absolutely satisified with it and are ready to sign.  So, Tuesday, 1:30, we sign the paperwork.

Once we sign the paperwork, it will take about 2 months to receive the check.  Then we have approximately two months from that point, to get the house totally emptied out and turn in the keys.  The neighborhood is negotiating with the city to allow us to have as many garage sales as we want, and to waive the permit fee, during these next few months.  The city has indicated that they have no problem with that, so we all will probably have one garage sale a month until  about May.

The red room doesn't look as neat anymore, as we have been making piles down there.  A pile for the garage sale, a pile for storage and a pile to give away.  This is not helping with using that room to figure out how our stuff will fit in storage, but probably starting in March, we'll turn Fernando's room into the place where we'll store all the things we would like to give to family to either hold for us or for them to outright keep.  Right now, we are still in the mode of "Well, maybe we can use this later", so we throw it on the pile to put in storage.  Time will tell whether we will have to get harder on ourselves.

Oh, and took that green Ghana print to Michaels today - it's going to have a black frame.