A busy day

So, let's see what we've accomplished today...

We've called two real estate appraisers. One, a real estate agent, gave us an "over the phone" estimate, free of charge, based on the price that "similar" homes have sold for in the region. Then we called a "professional" appraiser, who will be coming out tomorrow to do an on-site visual appraisal. This involves finding the same information that was available to the first appraiser, and tweaking it (up or down) based on the features and conditions of our particular property. This appraisal will not be free, but we will receive it in writing. It will be suitable for determining a reasonable asking price, and justifying that price to potential buyers. We're in a bit of a hurry to sell the house, so we figure our best chance of doing that is if we ask a fair price.

For now, at least, we're going to try to sell the house ourselves, using a service available locally. Once our house is listed, I'll probably link from my blog and website to the official real estate site. I asked them if I could back link from their site to my own (so I could post more information, more pictures, etc.). They don't do that!

Meanwhile, we will start looking for new accommodation in earnest. If I find an out-of-town job, then we won't have to move to another local house, but if the job hunt is protracted, we'll be forced to move somewhere locally, at least temporarily.

I had to visit the motor licensing bureau today to renew my license tags. My birthday is tomorrow, so that's the deadline. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people who apparently believe that if their tags expire in May, they have until the end of the month to renew them. Although that's not true (you only have until your birthday), that didn't stop the office from being crowded to bursting with people trying to "beat the deadline". Wouldn't it be cool for cops to hang out around the bureau so they could ticket all these "overdue" people? - That should help lower my municipal taxes, and leave people with a nice, fuzzy feeling about our men in blue.

In other "news", I've added a randomized weather banner to the top of my blog page, using techniques similar to those on Kare's site. I wanted to do the same update to my archive page, but for some reason, blogger is having trouble retrieving my archive template. I wonder if anyone else is having this trouble at the moment.

Well, that's it for now. We get our appraisal tomorrow, house pictures Saturday, and we'll be officially "on the market".