Now that I have the condo, the next step is lining up all of the home improvement projects and supplies. First thing on the list is the selection of a color scheme to make sure that I don’t purchase anything that will look out of place when I’m done. After some web browsing, I ended up on behr.com, which had some nice tools for picking out colors and putting together a color scheme. Here’s the colors from one of my current favorites. Starting at top left and going clockwise, the colors pictured are

• Sled
• Raging Sea
• Billowy Clouds
• Laurel Mist

For all of you that have been wondering what the new condo looks like, here are some photos that I took of the place on Friday night. You can either click on the photo or click here to see all of the photos tagged with “condo” in Flickr.

On a side note, I finally set up Flickr awhile back and liked it a lot since you can link up your yahoo account and it’s mostly free. Anyway, they give you the ability to upload images, tag them, and set up a logical permanent url path. The other thing is that with it’s popularity, you can probably find a nice upload program if you don’t want to just use the web form. I used FlickrExport, which allows you to export directly from iPhoto.

You can read “Seven Questions with Michael Cronan, designer and creator of the name TiVo and the mascot” over at PVRblog. For any people who worked at Kintana (not to be confused with kintama), his firm also came up with the swirly hurricane logo.

Last night I signed all the paperwork necessary for the title and loan, this morning I dropped off a check at the title company for the remaining balance of the escrow account, and by noon today, the loan was funded. I am now officially a homeowner.

If I haven’t talked to you recently, you might think that I would have finished with escrow by now and have my condo in Los Altos all purchased. Well, this process has been slightly more trouble than I had imagined. For awhile, I was worrying about getting a document from Mercury stating that I had worked there for 5 years since I’d only been working at my new job for a week or so. Once that was done, the mortgage broker that I was going through found out that because a certain HOA doc was missing (guidelines for arbitration), the Fannie Mae guidelines state that it is “unwarrantable”. This meant that the lender wouldn’t come through with the loan, and it was already Wednesday afternoon before the Monday that I was supposed to close escrow. The loan broker was scrambling to find me some rates that didn’t completely suck, and I took the advice of my real estate agent and Leslie and talked to someone at Bank of America to try and get a new loan. At this point, I am one day past the original closing date, and it is looking like I’m going to be able to sign docs for the BofA loan today. I’m crossing my fingers that nothing else crazy happens, but hopefully, in a few hours, I will be a homeowner.