Some day we'll look back on this and laugh, and that day is today

Winning first prize in the chucklehead category, one real-estate appraiser who somehow failed to notice that looming behind and just off to the right of our house is a bigass garage. Like 14'9" tall and with interior space of 742 square feet. This garage is so large and so noticeable that when we run into people in the neighborhood whom we don't know well and we start explaining where on the block we live, they nod their heads knowingly and say, "Ah, you're the people with The Garage." Yeah, it's hard to miss. But the first-rate appraiser hired by the credit union to assess our property value marked the form thusly:

Garage or carport: None

Wow. You'd almost have to stab yourself in the eye and stick your head in a bucket to pass by our house and overlook the garage.



(And here's a shot from the backyard, with the garage to the left and the house in front of you.)


But instead of increasing our home's value on paper by adding in the worth of our beloved Garage Mahal, said appraiser/chucklehead subtracted thousands of dollars from the estimate because one of the comps has a 1-car attached garage and he thought our house had none.
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Ken begged me to let him be the one who gets to call the loan officer tomorrow and point out the mistake. I love him too much to deny him that bit of joy in his life. But how much do I wish I could trail him to work and lurk outside his office while he makes that phone call? Maybe I should make him record it for quality assurance because I am going to be in agony until I hear how it went down.

Of course, we'd already reconfigured our money-borrowing plan to fit the unexpected strictures their initial appraisal had landed on us, but with this new piece of information--the presence of a garage that's half the size of our house--we're guessing they could bump up the appraised value of our home just a tad. All the better for us since we'd like to stay in the sweet spot of having the lowest possible interest rate on the new loan.

While Ken is at work tomorrow having all sorts of fun at the credit union's expense, I'll be taking a personal day to keep purging our house of unwanted items and reorganizing the possessions that earn the right to remain. It's not fun exactly; I wouldn't use that word. But I definitely feel productive when I tackle a room, chuck a third of its contents, and box up another third for an upcoming yard sale (not ours; a friend of mine has generously offered to have our stuff plopped on her lawn in a couple weekends).

In fact, with the progress I've made to this point, the house feels bigger already. Almost as spacious as that garage out back.