BIG praise and minor racket

As you all know, today was D-day, the day we get booted out of temp housing. Did we end up with a house and not have to move three times in three months? Yes and no! Here's the low down:

WE'VE FOUND A HOUSE and have accepted an offer! Woowoo! Pending a good and clear inspection on Saturday afternoon, we will be living in Alexandria, VA in a "trendy" area called Del Ray. It's a three level brick row house in walking distance of the metro and 6.2 miles from the White House. It's bigger than our apartment in Iowa City, but only by a little. Yep, it's three floors, each 15x20 feet. Main level living room, dining, kitchen and little sun room, upstairs 2 bedrooms and full bath, and walkout basement with family room, laundry room and half bath. The back yard is the same width as the house and about twice as deep.

The plan is to close September 15th or before. Kurt called several weeks ago to extend our temp housing stay by 10 days, and plus they corrected their initial mistake and gave us our 60th day back, leaving us in this apartment until September 17th...right?

No! Kurt, by the Holy Spirit we're sure, thought to himself today, "I haven't received any confirmation from the corporate housing company about our extended stay, so I'll call our relocation guy here at the Fed to check in." So five hours ago, Kurt calls me and asks, "Are you calm, are you sitting down?" And I'm thinking, Oh no, oh no. Something's fallen through with the house. So when he said, "We might have to move out of the apartment tomorrow," I was like, no sweat, no problem. We'll load our things onto the elevator, push the button for one of the 20 other floors in the building, and do a couple trips. Well, Kurt calls back and says, "We may have to move to Chinatown, in DC, tomorrow." Aaargh! So, after some hard hitting phone calls by our guy at the Fed, the best we know now is that we'll move to another building in VA, or maybe another place in the building, and we'll found out what the deal is in the morning. So the girls and I started packing up the apartment at 5:30 pm this evening and made some progress. Anyway, long story still pretty long, we *hopefully* have a house! and we don't have to move all of our belongings (i.e. stuff in storage) three times, just our things here in temp housing, and tomorrow!

More pictures to come...!