Just Throw Money at It - It'll Go Away

So the buyers of my house and I are still "negotiating" over inspection issues. If we all get through this unscathed it would be a true miracle. Apparently the ball is in my attorney's court right now. Still waiting to see how it all plays out.

In the meantime we picked out wood and colors and carpets for the new house. Oh yeah, and got the estimate! Yikes! I made the mistake of letting my 4 year old pick out the color for his room. He was adamant that it be red. Not a nice brick red or burgundy mind you, no, this had to be bright fire engine, blood red. Luckily the baby is not old enough yet to know what he wants so I chose a nice denim blue for his room. With all the "cosmetic" improvements we want to make on the house, I am going to have to take out a second mortgage to pay for it. That which doesn't kill us makes us poorer I say.

Our garage sale is scheduled for this Saturday. Unfortunately, this Saturday is supposed to hold thunderstorms. And I convinced 3 other families to get in on this with me. They should have known better. We have no rain date scheduled either. Oops. Hoepfully, the rain will hold off until later in the day. I am going to be selling a lot of Magician's baby things but I don't know, the thought of haggling over things that were so precious to him just disgusts me. I don't know how I am going to be able to sell those things. I am pretty sure at this point that my family is complete - but still... The maternity clothes on the other hand I have absolutely no problem getting rid of. Go figure.

Well, I'm not really in the mood to be witty today so I guess I will end this right here.

Oh The Stress!

I don't think we are going to ever actually move into the new house because I think the stress of it all is going to cause me a nervous breakdown before we ever get there. My new home will be the institution they commit me to when I lose it!

First of all, my buyers... I told them they can send over people to do estimates as long as they give me some sort of advance notice. I'm sorry, calling me at work at 11:30 and telling me you have someone that can be there at 1:00 does NOT constitute advance notice in my book! This is the third time they did that. This time I WILL be there because they gave us the chimney estimate and it my response is ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?!? So now today we will talk mold. But I will be the one asking the questions today. I am going to tell my attorney to tell them that we came down so much in our asking price that the chimney repair should be absorbed by that. I am dying to see how much the mold guy is going to tell us we need to spend.

Now my sellers.. I wrote about the setback thing before. Well they responded that they had the PERFECT solution. They were going to purchase an addendum to the title insurance that would cover the property that violates the line. When I pressed as to what this meant I found out that it meant that should anyone ever make me cut off that foot of the house, the expense incurred by doing so would be covered by the insurance. Um, for some reason this doesn't provide me with a heck of a lot of comfort. FIX THE PROBLEM! I then asked - when/if I try to sell the house some day, won't I have the same problem? Yep. My attorney said I can ask them to give me a credit for when I sell and have to cover the same thing - well, then won't my buyers ask for the same thing? It is a never ending cycle.

And finally, my attorney's office. I wrote about the suspect/suspect thing that was forwarded to the buyers. Today that same assistant told the buyer to send his requests to me directly - or cc me in his requests. Well, how uncomfortable am I now telling him that I don't want to cover the cost of the chimney! Isn't that why I hired an attorney? I have an idea! I'll just direct him to my blog. Then he can see how I really feel.

Ugh, I just want this ride to stop! I want to get off.

Incompetence Abounds

First of all, the weekend was gorgeous and I did get quite a bit of outside time with the boys. It was really nice to back away from this whole move thing and focus on the really important things. However, one of the best parts of the weekend was meeting with our contractor to plan out what we are going to do in the new house. I am pretty jazzed about his idea for expanding my master bathroom. Originally we were going to have my cousin-in-law GC the project. Well, he was going to blow through the wall to expand the bathroom out away from the room. Oops, the wall that he was going to blow through is the wall to the stairway. That would have been one heck of step into the tub!! This contractor seemed to know what he was talking about.

We asked him to stop by our existing house to give an estimate on some of the things that our buyer wanted to be fixed. The first thing he saw was the electric wire - according to him only the INSULATION was frayed, not the wire itself. A conduit over the wire will fix the problem. Great. He looked at the chimney and started to laugh. Where the idiot inspector said there were bricks missing was actually and INSET in the design of the chimney. What a coincidence that the exact same brick was missing on all sides of the chimney. Finally he went into the attic and said it was dryer than the Sahara in there with no evidence of moisture or mold of any kind. And he said that ventilation was more than adequate. What a relief. So I sent our response this morning to our attorney who forwarded to the buyer.

Now here is the comical part. Our buyer responded at one part that the inspection report (yes, the same report that called my dog a "home security device") said that "suspect mold was present in the attic" and that he would have it tested. I responded that that was fine with me. I then responded separately to my attorney's assistant only that what I read said "suspect mold was present in the attic" - the same words, clearly a different meaning. The woman at the attorney's office actually forwarded that comment to the buyer, and all the realtors! Hello! That was not meant to be forwarded. It seems mightly hostile, don't ya think? Anyway, I will be happy when all that is settled.

Oh yeah, and the other incompetence - I ordered 2 oriental rugs, pretty expensive at that. Last week, I am pulling into the driveway and would you believe that UPS LEFT this very expensive rug in the middle of my driveway when no one was home??? They didn't give me a delivery date or anything. Just dumped it. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DRIVEWAY! What if it was stolen? What if it rained? What if it snowed? What if I ran over it with the car? What the heck were you thinking!! Incompetence.

Setback with the Setback

So I think I mentioned yesterday that we were in the middle of moving hell. We got cc'd yesterday on a letter from my attorney to the seller's attorney that there was a "setback." Apparently, the house we are buying violates the setback line in terms of how close it is to our neighbors property by 1 foot in 2 places. I just got off the phone with my attorney asking what that meant and basically what he told me is that there is a chance that someone from the town can come over and make up chop a foot off the house!! He didn't seem to think this was a big deal, but I don't know, I'm kinda thinking we might actually NEED that foot to keep the house intact, no? Hopefully, they have gotten a variance from the town, or the house is grandfathered, or some other sort of "get out of chopping off the house free" card. We are supposed to close in a mere 5 weeks.

The flip side of the deal is that we are still waiting for the inspection report from our house. I want to see what the buyer is going to ask from us. Since part of the negotiation was a firm statmeent from him that he was NOT going to ask for anything during the process (in fact, he was not going to get an inspection at all, but was told that he could not get a mortgage without it), I am practicing my David Spade imitation - "no, marco pol-no, ready set no" etc. Still, the guy that inspected the house, who incidentally is the exact same guy that inpected the house when we bought it 7 years ago did make some pretty big observations, none of which I believe is accurate, BTW. He claimed that there was mold in the attic for example because there is no ventilation up there. Well, I am very allergic to mold and spent 2 hours up there going through all our belongings and had no problems whatsoever. Must have been the THREE vents up there that he said didn't exist. We'll see how that goes. Oh yeah, and did I mention the not quite legal because we didn't get the permit because when we went to apply for it the town wouldn't accept our drawings and wanted us to get architechtural drawings that there was no way we were going to do deck that we built? I don't know what the setback line is for my area but I'm hoping that it won't be a problem. I guess we'll see soon enough.

Ok, now I am going to go home for lunch and pack a box or so. I love that I work 4 miles from home. I am taking advantage of that as much as I can for the next 5 weeks. Then I will live about 9 miles from work. Oh, the hardship.

Welcome to my life

Well, I finally decided to go ahead and start a blog. I won't pretend to have any idea what I want to talk about but it just seemed like a fun thing to do. You might wonder about the title of my blog. Me too frankly. Let's just say I have a 4 year old with a very active imagination and every so often he informs me that he is now "SuperGerky" and we are not to call him by any other name. During those times I am no longer "Mommy" but become "Number One Friend". At least I am number 1. I think I would be a little miffed if I was Number 837 friend. His little brother becomes "Sponge of Jail" but Sponge of Jail is usually a bad guy in this scenario and I just don't feel comfortable making my 16 month old a bad guy who throws everyone in jail. Magician is the name my husband calls him and it sort of stuck. "Gish" for short. So there you have it. SuperGerky and The Magician.

Our lives right now are a bit chaotic as we are in the midst of buying a house and selling a house and moving and all the fun stuff that comes along with that, but I'm sure I will get into all of that with future entries. Now I need to get back to work.