Applications Submitted, Waiting Game

After a flurry of activity this weekend in the hours after we put the kids to bed-- filling out forms and such... get your minds out of the gutter!-- we finally finished the two applications for Maryland Historical Trust last night.  Abby did a TON of work, labeling things, going back and forth matching up numbers from one form to another, taking and choosing the right pictures for submission.  Then today she drove out to Crownsville, which is a suburb of Annapolis, about 45 minutes from here, to drop the stuff of in person.  Now we wait.

We already received confirmation that the packets (two of them-- one for the permission to do stuff, and the other for the tax credits) have been stamped as "received" by MHT, meaning we satisfied today's deadline to be considered in next Tuesday's Board Meeting.  We had one little oops: we forgot to pay the fee.  No worries... I ran to the post office in the late afternoon, bought a postal money order (because I don't keep a checkbook at work) and sent it in the mail.  Hopefully they'll get it tomorrow.  (Only ten bucks, although the application to receive the tax credit at the end actually costs 3% of the tax credit itself.  Don't understand why they don't just lower the tax credit by 3%... there's your convoluted taxation system for you!)

So now we wait.  Renee from taxation and Amy from easements, both of whom I met with and showed around the Bungalow a few months ago, are going to pore over our applications and let us know if we are missing anything or need to modify/clarify anything.  Then, next Tuesday the Historical Board meets, and hopefully they like our application enough that we get passed.  I don't know if this is an all-or-nothing proposition; if we have one thing they don't like, will they send it all back?  I seriously hope not, or that'd mean we'd have to go through this whole process again and wait again just to start doing simple stuff like demolition.  Fingers are crossed!  In the meantime, we're going to have to busy ourselves with other things (like finishing fixing up our current basement to get back out on the market) and ignore that we are nervous about the whole thing.  We really had no direction as to what to include or exclude, how much or little detail to put into explanations, and whether our pictures were good.  The directions were crazy specific, as in we needed not only to take multiple pictures but we had to submit them with certain specific labeling as well as with a DVD with all of the pictures loaded onto it.  (We spent an hour and a half at Target in Falls Church yesterday making sure it all worked out... I've already come up with a couple things that they could dislike about it... crap!)  But at this point there's no turning back.  Believe me, you'll hear when we hear how this thing turns out.

Patience.  

Argh!