This feels familiar

Tonight Ken and I pulled together our paperwork for the home equity loan as it is due back to the credit union by Monday. (Never fear: We are mailing it to a Philly address from within Philly tomorrow. It will get there Friday, if not actually tomorrow.)

The amount of paperwork is necessary, but it is still a bit staggering. Thank goodness we're better organized about our finances than we are about the rest of our possessions that are strewn randomly about the house. Though, to be honest, the deed to our house was being stored for some crazy reason on the top shelf of our coat closet. (Major kudos to Ken for remembering it was there. I would've sworn it was in my old rolltop desk in the boys' room.) I'm having flashbacks now to the closing on the original mortgage and my horrible trepidation leading up to it. Thankfully we went through with it because soon afterward the housing bubble hit, and if we hadn't bought when we had, we might only be shopping for a house right now.

But back to this fun process. Paystubs, check. W2s from 2009, check. Proof of homeowners' insurance in sufficient quantity, check. Aforementioned deed, check. Copies of our drivers' licenses, check. Promise to sign over the first-born child of our first-born child should we default on this loan and he/she not be able to spell Rumplestiltskin, check. Err, OK, not that last one. But I think I did accidentally include the kitchen sink in the envelope. We'll be getting a new one, anyway, and I just wanted to be sure all bases were covered.

So that's all taken care of, and next we wait to see if they need any more info, and otherwise we'll schedule the closing and put this stressful part of the project behind us so we can move on to other stressful parts.

Meanwhile, Ken is out in the garage continuing to fine-tune the organizing and purging that he and his dad did in massive amounts this past weekend. I won't show "before" pictures, but soon we'll have some "afters." I'm very impressed with the radical change, I can tell you. And once there's some open space out there we'll start filling it with all the plastic tubs and cardboard boxes that I've been dutifully packing up from the living room, dining room, and kitchen so they can be safely out of the way of the dust and debris.

One foot in front of the other....