Hitch Up the Wagons, Ma

At long last, we're moving!

Well, sort of. Not the way we originally envisioned it, but close enough.

We signed a lease on a little four bedroom house in Moraga last week. With the housing market as volatile as it is (volatile in the way that that an airplane that has had its wings sheared off at 20,000 feet is volatile), renting seemed like a decent way to wait out the correction we're going through while still being able to get started in our new area. It also takes some of the pressure off selling our house right away. From the beginning, we knew that if we got to April and still hadn't sold our house, we would have to start getting creative. We have some serious nibbles on our house now, which is great, but even if we got an offer tomorrow, the escrow process would take us well into May. We have children to register for school and were looking for a way to reduce our stress over the selling/buying combo. Renting will allow us to get going in the Bay Area, put aside the proceeds for the sale of our house, whenever that happens, and find something at our own pace sometime in the fall rather than being forced to buy something we weren't quite happy with just so that we could register for school.

Fortunately, a house popped up for rent in the neighborhood we had targeted. This is a rare occurrence, so we jumped on it. We had a bizzare experience finalizing the deal, but it's done now, and I'll start living there more or less full time this coming week. Cheryl and the kids will be driving up with me tomorrow to spend the week, and they will be back for the last week of April as well. Then they will all move up for real after June.

This is a half-step toward making a full move, but an important one. It has relieved a lot of tension that was beginning to build about how we were going to finally get our house sold fast enough to get us out of SoCal and find someplace to live that we liked at the same time.