Empty House

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns, some for the better and others for the worse. Honestly, I’m glad to have this part simply closed off.

My husband was planning on getting the remainder of our belongings from the old house yesterday, however they were no longer there. The locks were changed too. And here we thought when we were told we had until the eighteenth of August to get everything out that we had, well, until the eighteenth of August to get everything out. Not that we really left anything of value, but we intentionally left the curtains and rods up in the old house to help fend off looters. Needless to say, the looters turned out to be the very bank the house reverted back to.

It wasn’t a total loss, as we were still able to pull up the remaining deck boards and some irises, along with one of the rosemary’s and the little tree, even if the cleaning company took the pot I was going to transplant the tree and the old pond lining I was going to use for the rosemary. Honestly what I’m most upset about was the curtains and rod in the office because I was planning on putting them in the boys’s room, but oh well. Life goes on.

Now, when I was initially called by my husband to say that the house was cleaned out, everything was gone and the locks were changed, I was pissed. And rightfully so as we still had ten days to be out of the house. But then a sudden sense of relief came over me and it hit me; the house was no longer ours to worry about. For my husband, it took a trip to the church to walk the labyrinth and reading a quote from the lady whose memorial funds created the site on a plaque at the entrance, “Remember to forgive… forgiveness is the key.”

Life is full of ups and downs, good times and bad. Why waste your time on what you’ve lost when you can instead focus on what you still have?

Old House

Yesterday on my lunch break I went to the old house with plans to start tagging stuff for a garage sale. A leaky water heater decided otherwise.

The water heater had been slowly leaking for the past year, pretty much since before I fixed it when it needed a new thermostat and element. However, the leak was more like water buildup around the base and easily remedied by a quick toweling every now and then. Seeing a stream of water come out of the garage when I pulled up to the driveway made me assume the worst, but fortunately it looked like it had just started to leak out.

So I moved the stuff aside to get it all out of the water’s path and called my husband to tell him the news. He was not amused. I also noticed that our lawn chairs, some of which we were planning on keeping had been taken as well as the old umbrella. A quick peek over the fence to the neighbors behind us found them in their lawn. While it doesn’t bother me that they had them, it was still bothersome they took them, but oh well. More junk we don’t need. Besides, I had a goal to drain the water heater and needed to locate the hose in the jungle formerly known as our backyard.

As I was pulling and yanking the hose I wanted to use, it became quite obvious it wasn’t coming out without assistance, mainly of the weed and grass removal type, so I abandoned both of the non-kinking hoses in favor of the one I could actually get to. By the time I attached it to the water heater to drain it, I decided I wanted nothing to do with pricing crap to sell. I was far too pissed. Pissed at the fact that the water heater started leaking. Pissed that someone took our stuff, even though it was stuff we’d probably end up selling anyways. Pissed that we were in the situation we are in. I’m ready to move on, and the more I go over there the more I find myself both wishing we never had to move in the first place while at the same time I never want to go back there again.

Auction Day Postponed

Just when plans are in place and everything is going according to plan, something crazy happens. Sometimes crazy can be a good thing.

Yesterday my husband, out of morbid curiosity, decided to call the bank to find out who the new owner of the house was. They informed him that the auction has been postponed until May 20th and not to be surprise if in May the bank decides to postpone it yet again. With this news the stress of trying to move over this and the following two weekends is out, especially since they are all incredibly busy. Still, I want to start getting stuff moved over as soon as humanly possibly, or at the very least make sure we have every room painted before moving in.

We’re still waiting to hear back from the landlord on whether or not the tenants that were supposed to be out yesterday are in fact out. If not, we told him that we’d hold off until May 1st if that worked for him. May as well try and save half a month’s rent if we can, right? However, part of me just wants to start getting everything ready now even though the timing isn’t particularly the greatest because I’m tired of waiting in this limbo known as foreclosure. I’m tired of coming home expecting an eviction notice to be up on the door. I’m tired of the uncertainty.

In the meantime, I’m going to rest a little easier knowing that we’ve got at least another month and a half to get everything out and moved. And that we won’t have to pack all of the garage sale stuff with us.

Auction Day

Today our house goes up for auction at the county courthouse. Honestly, I feel sorry for the poor bastard who actually bids on the house.

With all the rain we’ve had lately, the evidence that we are leaving this house at the right time couldn’t be more apparent. There are so many leaks in the roof it is ridiculous. Just walk into our garage while it is raining and you’ll be hard pressed not to get hit by the Drip Drip Drop of Little April Showers. Not to mention what it is doing under the house where all that rain water, and I’m sure the busted sewer pipe from the kitchen sink is helping in this matter too, has manifested into huge pools of standing water. It is no wonder the house always feels damp and why it has such horrendous mold issues.

I’m pretty sure any part of me that was sentimental about the house left after the busted sewer pipe in the kitchen where, thank God, my husband utilized the magical powers of duct tape to “fix.” It also helps that we’ve started packing away a lot of our stuff turning what once we called home into the empty shell of a house. The exciting part comes when we get to do the final walk through with the landlord either tonight or tomorrow morning, which if it is in the morning I’ll be unable to attend due to the cake order I’m working on. However, I trust my husband’s judgment, so I will only be slightly saddened by not going.

Alas, I must attend to making the fillings and icings for the wedding cake now. I suppose in a way, this will mark the end of an era for us. After all, we moved in on the day Princess Di passed away and we’ll be moving out when her eldest son William gets married. Not that the royal family is anything to get your knickers all in a bunch over. Just another one of life’s silly coincidences.

On a last note, I hope the house doesn’t get bid on and the bank ends up having to keep it in their stockpile for years to come until it has to be condemned for not being kept up. Evil? Yes. But that would make me a little bit happy about the whole thing.

Something's Lacking

I realize my blog posts of late haven’t really focused on homemaking.
Foreclosure will do that, I suppose.

To be perfectly honest I couldn’t tell you the last time I cleaned something other than the shower because it just gets way too moldy and mildewy far quicker than it should. No outside maintenance, no indoor maintenance, no windows washed or floors mopped. Just the bare necessities like dishes, laundry and the occasional vacuuming. So in case you’re wondering where all those helpful new tips I’ve discovered are, I haven’t discovered any since we found out the bank is auctioning off the house. Seriously, what would be the point?

Here in the Northern Hemisphere it is almost Spring and time for Spring cleaning and vegetable and flower garden planting and such and I’ve got nothing for ya’ll. Oh, sure, I can tell you it is time to start harvesting the remainder of your leeks if you still have them in the veggie garden and plant this year’s crop or prep the beds for peas, carrots, lettuces and the such, but it’ll just be a bad reminder that we probably won’t be able to have a garden. Or I can tell you that it is time to have the vents cleaned either professionally or vacuumed out yourself, but why would we do that for the bank that is taking back our house not because we didn’t qualify for a home loan modification but because they were constantly losing our paperwork we were sending them every few weeks? Sorry for the bitterness. I’m obviously grumpy this morning.

So I apologize for not relaying helpful tips and shortcuts and instead droning on about needing to pack and house-searching and every once in a while having a pity-fest. I really can’t wait to move and be done with this chapter and progress on to the next one.

Lack of Cleaning

I have to admit that since we found out the date our house will be on the foreclosure auction block, cleaning hasn’t been a priority. Alas, it should still be done.

While it seems like the logical thing to, at least in my brain, simply not clean anything because we aren’t going to be living here much longer, there are, well, health concerns that need to be dealt with. Like mold and mildew, both of which seem to run rampant in this house if not kept in check. Our backdoor hasn’t been sprayed in a month and it is practically covered right now in black spots converging on one another about to form a cohesive conglomerate colony of mold. The bathroom on the other hand was done at the same time and surprisingly is still mostly devoid of mildew.

Then of course the vacuuming, which I never seem to be on top of anymore. I used to do it every day like I used to do the dishes every day, but I don’t see the point in keeping the floors clean. Except that it makes our socks dirty if we don’t clean them regularly and that is a pain. I don’t even remember the last time I mopped.

Other parts of the house that have gone by the wayside include the toilets, sinks, mirrors and windows. Well, the windows aren’t too much of a stretch as I think I only ever cleaned them once every year or so. Most of them are so old I’m afraid cleaning them will make them fall apart. Actually, a few of the windows, due to their brokenness, will fall apart if a cleaning was attempted on them.

Ugh, I suppose one of these days I will break down and clean something, even though my brain doesn’t see why I should bother. Of course, there will have to be a damn good reason, like having company over or something similar. Hmmm… perhaps I should plan a Good Riddance Party?

Crappy

It’s official. The house goes on the auction block April 15.

Last night, just minutes after getting home, the screen door pushed against the frame like someone was here and the dog went crazy, looked out the big picture window then ran to the front door barking her menacing bark the entire time. I had a feeling who it might be and debated only one thing… whether to open the door and let Lucy greet the guy putting the notice up that the house will be sold at auction. I’m regretting the fact that I restrained her until he was safely back in his car.

This got me thinking that during these hard economic times, even though the job of foreclosure notice deliverer is not a satisfying position, unless, of course, you get off on other people’s misfortune, it is, nonetheless, a job. Crappy, yes, but work all the same. Alas, I’m glad I’m not him. Especially if I had decided to go ahead and open the door while he was taking pictures to prove that he indeed attached the notice to the house and “accidentally” let the dog out!

Bah-Humbug

There are no Christmas decorations up. I even went so far as to unplug the tree we set up already because I’m no long in the Christmas spirit.

After coming home from dropping off my resume and filling out an application for a veterinary receptionist position I was informed about, my partner and I received not one, not two, but three certified letters from the bank to inform us of our default on the mortgage and that we are in foreclosure. My partner then spent over an hour talking to various people who all have no idea what is going on and can’t answer simple questions like where the money we were sending them and they were cashing was actually going if not towards our mortgage. One person actually transferred him to a voicemail box because she was apparently tired of “helping” him. One person was able to tell us that our loan modification was denied back in September which was news to us since we’d been in contact with the person helping us with that up until late October. And yet another person was actually able to tell us where the payments were going and explain quite a few details.

Why is it that you have to jump through so many hoops just to get a straight answer from corporations these days? Are they simply so large the right hand really has no idea what the left hand is doing? A trip to a local branch practically confirmed that. My partner asked if there was somebody who could verify we had all of our documents in order this time around and the customer service person brought out the branch manager to explain that nobody in the branch is knowledgeable in home loan modifications and that the people on the other end of the phone simply were not prepared for the current predicament. She also told us it is, plain and simple, utter chaos right now and that from what she has heard from other homeowners is that going to a Homeowner Center and talking face-to-face with somebody will get you much further than dealing with anybody over the phone, and that the closest one is in Seattle.

With the insane hurdles and the fact that yet again I’m unemployed, I don’t even know if going through the process again will be worth it. But according to the last person my partner talked to on the phone simply keeping in contact and constantly asking, “What else do you need?” will, at the very least, show that we are still interested in finding a way to keep the house… even if right now we are looking into packing up and moving into an apartment and leaving everything we’ve put into this house to make it a home behind.

So I’m seriously considering cancelling Christmas in our house. I’m not in the mood, and I can’t get over the anger, frustration and guilt I have over causing the situation we are currently in. My partner said he is tired of the stress of the uncertain outcome of our situation and simply wants to just close this chapter of our life and move on. As much as I hate to admit it, he’s right about that stress, which has been eating away at me for far too long. But my problem is also the stress of having to move, relocate the chickens, go through all of our stuff to find out what we want to keep and what we have to get rid of, and how in the world am I going to keep what little sanity I have left while living in an apartment again, assuming we can find one that will allow us to have both a cat and a Great Dane. It almost seems appropriate now that our lucky bamboo is dying as our luck is running out. Bah-humbug.