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This site was named EastBayRag for a number of reasons:

• One of my nicknames is Rag
• Rag is another name for newspaper
• SFRag was already taken as a URL
• We intended to move to the East Bay

Well, it looks like we are finally going to be moving to the East Bay. We have sold our house in the City and have had an offer accepted on a house on the East Bay. To protect the innocent, I've changed the names slightly (but only slightly). We are selling our house to two gentlemen “friends” Well Hung and Two Stroke. We are buying the house from Mr & Mrs Hairy Mary.

It's interesting going through this process in a different country as it's totally different from the UK. The house buying process in the US is much simpler and much quicker than the UK. Basically, each transaction is separate and you don't really get into chains. Also, solicitors aren't involved as it's a pretty standard contract, so once you've made an offer and it's accepted, you're pretty much done barring anything coming up in any of the inspection reports.

What this does mean is that it's almost impossible to organize a move on the same day - i.e. to have the people complete on your house on the same day that you complete on the one you're moving to. What's more, the county we are moving to has made it illegal to do same day title transfers so we wouldn't be able to do this anyway. Apparently the reason for this is so that chains don't fall through and you're guaranteed to sell your house on the intended day. So, we are trying to time it so that we complete on the sale of our house four days before we complete the purchase of the next one. We've put a rent back clause into the contract of the sale of our house so that we can rent it back (at an extortionate amount I might add) for up to four weeks. All going well, we would exercise four days of this and everything will happen as planned.

So what can go wrong? Well, I guess worst case is if Well Hung and Two Stroke fall through for some reason like not being able to get financing. We have a backup offer on the house, but if that fell through as well, we would end up with two houses and two mortgages as we would still be obligated to purchase the one we are buying. The other scenario is that something goes wrong for us and we can't complete with the Hairy Mary's then we would be without a home. The thought of living with Karen, William and two cats in a cardboard box under the freeway doesn't appeal to me very much.

Still, they say that moving is one of the most stressful things ..... hmmm, now to do this week's vote.