Okay, I'm back.

No pics yet, but for those of you who remember that this blog started out as a tale of my purchase/restoration of the cottage, I am pleased to announce that I am now also the proud owner of the dump next door!

(You can see a thin slice of its decrepitastic-ness in the picture linked above.)

And now for the surprising news: I am moving there - at least for a while.

By myself.

I am actually quite pleased to finally become a real Northsider!

Victims or Miscreants?

Here's the Strib article.

Here's Johnny Northside's response.

I already have a fully formed opinion on this, but please do read and judge for yourself.

Well now... THIS should be interesting!

Thanks to their handy-dandy blog, I just learned that North Minneapolis's Hawthorne Neighborhood is charting a bold new course in the battle against foreclosure-blight.

I don't know where this case is going to go, but I DO know that many of the good boys and girls of North Minneapolis are getting rather PISSED about the current state of affairs... and I don't blame them one bit.

I can't wait to see what happens next!

A new house to be a-bloggin'?

Alright people, hopefully I haven't annoyed you TOO much with my vague and foggy references to a new house that might or might not become the Rantys' new abode.

I've been deliberately sketchy about the details for the simple reason that I was afraid it wouldn't go through, and I didn't want to have to address a bunch of people asking "Hey! What's up with the new digs?!" for the next six months if in fact we weren't able to purchase the place.

Howevahhhhh....

I now believe it's going to happen. Our loan+appraisal came back okay(!) from underwriting today. The appraisal was an X factor for reasons unrelated to dollar value. (I will explain this appraisal situation in a later post, since I'm still doing some research about the particular problem we encountered, and want to be able to describe it clearly and accurately.)

Anyway, it's important to note that the deal is not done until it's CLOSED. Stuff can still come up, go wrong, get screwy, etc. The difference is that we are now over BIGGEST hurdle, and I feel pretty comfortable that I can deal with whatever standard pre-closing blips might come our way in the remaining days. (And I am treating this Friday close as a maybe. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it ended up getting pushed to Tuesday. We are cutting it SUPER close to get all the documents in order in four days!)

Now then, because I cannot contain my excitement one minute longer, and because no one guessed in my super-difficult trivia-about-the-house post, I have decided to reveal The Future Seat of Rantydom, in all its broken-down-reposessed-squirrel-inhabited-splennnndor:





















So if all goes as planned, I'll be back to official house-blogging sooooooooooon! Hooray!