Problem? What problem?

I would have updated sooner, but I use Mozilla on my home computer and it does not seem to get along too well with MSN. And my IE is totally broken. Alas. But I'm here now, and I bring news! Of a sort.

We went to the new house on Saturday, and met up with both our realtor and the sellers' realtor. The contractor was supposed to be there at one; we waited until two. He never showed up (our realtor said, "Well, maybe that's why they call it Budget Waterproofing!"). This proved to be less of a problem than it could have been, however, because the sellers' realtor was able to shed some belated light on the situation. She was surprised to hear that she hadn't in fact called our realtor and told him what she knew (though she managed to find the time to go behind his back and call our lender to check up on us!). He informed her that she had in fact not called him back in a week, and she had the grace to look slightly abashed. Anyway, she told us that when the owner came home from her business trip on Thursday, she found that the water softener tank had leaked all over the basement floor (the source of the 'standing water', natch). In addition to that, the sump pump was clearly not working-- we saw for ourselves that the hole it was in was full of water, over the top of the pump and beyond.

So. Tank leaked; pump broke. Well, then. Essentially, we worked out a deal, although we won't know for sure the financial details of it until later today or possibly tomorrow. A plumber will have to come in and fix the sump pump and remove the water filtration tank (which is unnecessary anyway, as the house is on city water-- nobody's quite sure why it is there in the first place). Said plumber shall furnish us with a receipt, which we shall cheerfully provide to the bank, who will then give us lots of money. And then we'll settle. Our realtor is positive we'll be able to settle by Friday; we'd be happier with Thursday, since Don needs to be up in Deep Creek for his fraternity's winter retreat Friday night (if he could get out of it, he would, but he's got an important duty to fill). At this point, though, we'll take what we can get. We just want to move. We'll have the holiday off of work to unpack, though, which is quite nice. We both work for defense contractors, so we both get federal holidays off. Quite a nice change from the retail jobs I worked in college!

Our realtor doesn't start working until about 10 AM, so we'll probably find out a little more about who is paying for what and how things are going to work and a timeframe for everything a little later in the day.