We got a call from our real estate agent last night. Apparently, the owners of the house we bid on this week changed their mind about negotiating with us. The graciously decided to lower their asking price by…wait for it…$100!!!

Wow! I’m sold! Come on…this isn’t a pride thing. I don’t need them to give a little just so I feel like a man. I just don’t want to pay that much for their house. It’s funny, because our agent told their agent that she would have gladly given us $100 herself to close the deal if that’s all that was holding us back.

Actually, making this concession was a bit of a mistake on their part, I think. It shows that their resolve to get their full asking price isn’t as strong as we first thought. If we had been considering paying full price, we certainly wouldn’t be any more.

Now we wait.

Well, we found a house that we really liked in Oromocto. It was recently renovated, and it was in a good area. It was just what we’d been looking for, and although it was a bit more than we are willing to spend, we thought there was a chance the owner would come down in price to something more acceptable to us.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. The owner would only come down $500 in their asking price. I don’t even see the point of making that kind of concession. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t ask for a $500 reduction, so why would that make a difference in my decision to buy a house?

Needless to say, we were pretty discouraged by the whole process. Now, every house we look at is going to be compared to the one we didn’t get. This is most certainly going to make it harder to find something we like.

On the bright side, our real estate agent here is going to start showing our house tomorrow. He’s confident he can have an offer for us in a couple of weeks. If we can have a firm offer on our house, it’ll help us when we’re placing offers on other houses.

Wish us luck!

So, I finally dropped my Mac off to get repaired. I’ve been having this random problem where I’ll get kernel panics every few days. I’ve been putting it off because I just didn’t want to go without my Mac, but the warranty only has a couple of months left on it, so now is the time to get it taken care of.

I guess one of the big drawbacks of an iMac is that you really can’t do any of the repairs yourself the way you could on a PC. Nothing except the RAM is user replaceable on the iMac. Not even the hard drive. That’s why when you buy an iMac you buy as much as you can. I think the only thing I didn’t upgrade when I made the purchase was the hard drive. And that was because I had a server with almost a terabyte of space.

Anyway, the folks at CompuSmart tell me it’ll be ready in 2 or 3 days, so hopefully everything goes smooth and I’ll have my Mac back before the weekend.

Well, our passports finally arrived today. It only took about 6 weeks which is pretty good considering all the horror stories we’d heard about processing times.

It’ just too bad we won’t need them for our trip to Florida next month. We ended up buying tickets to fly from Maine because it was about half the price of local flights.

I guess it’s a good document to have though, and you never know when you might want to make a spontaneous trip somewhere.

~posted from my blackberry…

I forgot how much I dislike house hunting. It’s especially bad now that Erin and I both work in Fredericton. The only time we can see properties is after work, so that means we don’t get home until 7 or 8 at night.

Last night we went to see 3 properties, and all 3 of them were terrible. I find it odd that some people take no pride in the appearance of there homes. One place we saw had a nice new hardwood floor, but the owner didn’t bother to do any of the finishing work. All the trim around the floors was missing.

This in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but there were many little details like this that took away from the appeal of the house. I guess we’re looking for something more polished than that. I’m willing to compromise a bit on location and size to get something that looks nice.

We have high hopes though. We like our real estate agent because she seems to have our interest at heart, and she has a few more places for us to look at next week. Hopefully we can find something quicker than the last time we were house hunting.