Just a short update. Tomorrow I'll respond privately to the sweet people who sent me PMs of support today....

We've been cheated out of the house.

To make a long, ugly story short.... I've had a bad feeling about this from the beginning. Not the house... The situation. After delay after delay.... the latest delay was because, as we just found out, we'd chosen (without knowing it) a govt loan, because we'd opted for "no money down", though we could have done the down payment. No one told us that this was the reason for all the inspections and delays. Once I found that out, we marched back to our realtor's office and signed a new contract, for slightly more money, with the seller paying a little more towards closing than he would have before. But, in the lapse between the 2 contracts (which would have lasted about 6 seconds) the seller was able to bump us off and take a higher bid from someone else. So, after 2 months of having this house under contract, he managed to wear us down and slip in the back door to sell it out from under us.

As you can imagine.... I am devastated. Please forgive my lack of freakishly frequent involvement here for the time being.