Signing a lease

We signed a 10-month least on the rental home today. We affectionately call it the pot-shack. You should see it and smell it!

We also started moving some things in tonight. Ryan isn’t happy, Lauren doesn’t really care. Mark and have tons of mixed emotions about everything.

Home Inspection and Termite Inspection

July 29 – Home Inspection and Termite Inspection
Let me just start by saying this has been one of the most challenging days of my life. Lots and lots of tears were shed today. These were tears of frustration and stress. When I get frustrated and things are out of my control, I tend to cry…especially when it’s just too much.

At 11:00 am my phone rings. It’s the realtor. They found termites in the garage. Are you kidding me??? She assures me the buyer still wants the house. We just need to have the problem treated. I call the termite control people and they set up a time on Tuesday August 3rd to come take care of the problem. Fantastic! What’s this gonna cost me. Either way though, sale or no sale, this HAS to be fixed. Termites! YIKES!!!!

12:40 my phone rings again. This time it’s the school district. They buyer registered his kids for school yesterday and unless I can provide proof of residency, my son will not be allowed to attended school. That’s ok, we have land and are in the process of building. I can bring the papers, contracts etc… This wasn’t good enough. We have to physically be living IN the district. Even though we are building, that’s just not good enough. ARE YOU KIDDING ME????!!!!!! Good grief! I’m frantic now. What the hell am I going to do?

There was this little brown house a few blocks over from where the house we are selling is. It’s 985 square feet, 2 bedroom, one bath. One car garage, and we can take Pheebs. It’s going to have to do. I call the guy. It’s still available. It’s going to be a long six-months.

I get a call later from the realtor. The home inspection has a bunch of little stuff that the buyer will probably nickel & dime us on. FANTASTIC! Just what I needed to hear. Good news though, the radon test came back fine. Holy cow! Finally good news.

Radon Test

Two years ago when we bought the house we had a radon test done and everything came back fine. The buyers decided they wanted to pay for another test so here we go again. It’s a 48 hour test and we can open any windows, move anything out of the house (can’t leave the doors open for an extended period of time), so we wait…. I figure it will come back positive and there will be another $1000 down the drain!

Another day of moving

Today Grandma Cindy came to watch Lauren while we moved more boxes into the temporary house. We also move the swing set out to the new property. Making progress.

We start to Move-it Move-it

Today we started moving boxes into the basement of the temporary house. These are things that can be stored for a while.

We found the perfect temporary home

Gina has the perfect house for our family. It even has a basement and garage for storage. It was still a work in progress, but that’s ok. It wasn’t in Rochester and I would need to drive Ryan back and forth to school every day, but it was a place we could live in and be content with as our house was being built. We’d take it.

Frustration is setting in

No one is willing to give us a six-month lease. We called about a duplex in our neighborhood but the guy wanted a 12 month lease, $2700 security deposit and $1350/month for rent. Seriously????? The security deposit turned me off. That would have meant $4000 before we could even live there. Security deposit and one month rent.

Next, I found a place on Craigslist. It looked very nice and the rent was reasonable, I guess. As reasonable as rent can be. We made an appointment and looked at it. Once again, he wanted a 12 month lease. We were noticing a pattern. We asked about the possibility of a 10 month lease. At that point this guy and his realtor really started to be jerks. They wanted us to get in a bidding war with others over the rent. No thank you!

Earlier, my Dad’s cousin had offered a rental house that they have, but it wouldn’t be ready until the end of August. I told her I would keep the offer in mind but really wanted to try to find something in Rochester for the school bus route. Well, the time had come to take her up on the offer.

Holy Sh*t

Now we are in Holy Sh*t mode. We cannot find a rental in Rochester. We found one advertised in the paper. It was a duplex. Well, it was advertised as one anyway. It was more of an apartment. How could a family of four and a 9 ½ yr old pug move to a tiny apartment. It just wouldn’t work. We’ll keep looking

Run 4 Marion

Today was the first annual Run for Marion, in memory of Mark’s Dad. This day was filled with emotions…excitement, sadness, fear…. Sad because Mark’s Dad is no longer with us. Excitement because our house sold! Fear because we had no idea where we were moving to. We needed to spend the time finding a place to rent, but the reality was we belonged right where we were…at the 5K run in memory of Marion. So, we decided to quit worrying and be excited for the sale, and take the day to remember Marion.

We have an offer

Tonight at 4:57 my phone rang. It was the realtor. We had an offer. This offer was a take it or leave it offer, as the buyer would go for another house if we didn’t like his offer. That scared me when she told me that but it ended up being a very reasonable offer. So we took it. The only issue is he needs to close on or before August 10th. We leave for Florida on August 7th. YIKES!!!! That gives us TWO WEEKENDS to get out of the house. Holy Cow. Lots of praying!!!!!!!!

A little background

I was born with this sincere interest in homes. Even before I realized I had this obsession, it was there. I remember as a child going to garage sales with my mom. We would go to subdivision sales in Bloomington and Normal. She tried to hit the “newer” sections. I was always in awe of these homes. I wasn’t one that really enjoyed going to garage sales to buy things, but I did enjoy gawking at the homes and dreaming about what I would be living in when I was an adult. Never in a million years though would I have thought that I would move as much as I have in my adult life.

My husband and I are “cheap”. Not cheap in the traditional sense though. We both like very nice things. We just don’t like to pay a lot for them. Did someone say clearance rack? On top of that, we are both very picky when it comes to style, especially of a home.

In February 1998, we bought our first home. Interest rates were a record lows of about 7.5%. In today’s world, that’s high! We bought a 1069 sq ft ranch. It had a full basement that was ready to finish. This home was the builder’s home for the subdivision and had all of the extras – ceramic tile, nicer cabinets, nicer fireplace. It also had cosmetic issues. The carpet needed replaced. Some drywall needed fixing. All things we felt we could fix to make the house our home. Because of these issues we were able to buy the house at a reasonable price. Two years later, I decided that I was ready for another project. I mentioned to an acquaintance that I would like to sell the house and that’s all it took. We made a nice profit on our first house and that’s where the cycle began.

The next house we bought was everything I pictured myself living in. It was a 2100 square feet two story, three bedrooms, two ½ bathrooms, living room, family room, dining room and kitchen. It again needed cosmetic changes. The house was 20 yrs old, but the furnace, siding, roof, a/c were all relatively new. The trim, doors and cabinets needed some updating. I mentioned before that my husband is cheap. He decided that it would be cheaper for him to make the kitchen cabinets than it would to buy new. So, he did. He bought the tools and made a brand new kitchen. It was beautiful. The work was higher quality that was we could have bought elsewhere.

Four years later, we sold this one; again to an acquaintance. This time the circumstances were a little different and I was truly sad to leave this house. We could have decided not to sell, but the profit was too much to pass up.

In our search for yet another home, we found the house that we liked to refer as “a diamond in the rough.” This one was two or three years old. This house was also owned by a builder. He had rented it out. The problem with this house was limited cabinet space and carpets that needed replaced. It was just under 2000 sq ft with a full unfinished basement. We purchased this house with every intention of flipping it. And we did just that. We put in all hardwood floors (except for the kitchen and bath. We kept the ceramic tile in those rooms). We took out the hollow core white six-panel doors and replaced them with solid oak six-panel doors and Mark made oak fluted trim and rosettes to go around the doors. It was BEAUTIFUL!

Our son, Ryan, was five years old when we sold this house. We were ready to find our forever home. He was going to be starting school and we couldn’t keep moving with a child in school.

We found what we thought would be the perfect forever home for us. It had a Springfield address, but was in the Athens school district. It was in a “Country Style” subdivision. 2100 sq ft ranch, 3 bed, 2 bath, walkout basement on 1 acre. There was only one problem. We needed to sell our house first. The housing market wasn’t in the best shape and a lot of foreclosures were happening. We didn’t want to purchase a place and have two house payments, even though the bank said we could afford it. HA! I do like to eat and go shopping!

As it turns out, that home was not meant to be. It sold ONE WEEK before we got a contract on ours to sell. We were bummed. We kept looking though. Through all of our looking we never really found the house with the beaming light. We ended up settling on a brand new house in Rochester. This one was a foreclosure on a builder. SWEET! We could get a bargain and flip it!!!! Oh no here we go again. It was a 2400 square foot ranch with 4 bedrooms 3 ½ bathrooms. The basement was 2600 square feet. There was a 200 square foot storm shelter, which made the square footage a little more in the basement.

At this point, I’m getting worn out when it comes to the moving. Even though this house didn’t have the beam of light, I really wanted it to be the one. I wanted it to grow on us. It didn’t though. As a matter of fact within about 30 days of moving in, I started counting down the days until we could put it up for sale. We’d need to be there two years to avoid capital gains taxes.

Mark made a beautiful built in entertainment unit for the great room. We upgraded cabinetry in the master bathroom and new sink tops and also upgraded the ½ bath on the main floor. We landscaped and got the yard looking nice.

We knew that in order to get what we really wanted we’d need to build a place. We decided to try find some land, buy it, and then just hold on to it until we sold our house. We would wait to put our house on the market until we had a contract on the land. We decided that we’d look for a place that had more room for a great yard and that wasn’t in a subdivision. We wanted our space and privacy. We found a two-acres in the Rochester school district. The land was totally wooded. At first we decided it looked like too much of a project, then after much thought and looking we decided it was perfect for us.

We put in an offer on the land, it was accepted and on June 1, 2010 the house we bought just two years ago went on the market. On July 16, just six weeks later, we had a contract on the house. It was sold! And this is where the fun begins.