We made a contingency offer on the house we've been looking at. T and I spent an hour with our real estate agent initialing and signing a boatload of papers pertaining to this. We made the seller a slightly lowball offer, but the house has been on the market for a long time (longer than we originally thought), so I'm sure they'll listen.

We had our house painted this week, which led a couple of our neighbors to ask if we were planning to sell. They were pleased to hear that if all goes well we'll still be in the neighborhood. We're happy with the paint job, but the flower beds got trampled in the process. We did some triage on it this morning, so hopefully it'll look OK by the time we get our house on the market.

There are still a couple of minor things to fix inside, mostly to repair some dog-related damage. Our dog Harry has a favorite window from which he likes to bark at trucks, other dogs, and miscellaneous passersby. He's dinged the sheetrock on the wall and taken some big gouges out of the windowsill with his claws. The new house has lower windows and faces an esplanade that's popular with dogwalkers, so we've been plotting dog containment strategies. The layout of the new house is conducive to keeping him in the back area, in and around the kitchen, so that's likely to be our plan.

The fun really begins when we hear back from the seller, and when we put our house up for sale. March and April are gonna be hella busy.