Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is our “hanging out with Katie” day.  Since she got in late last night and since she has to fly out of Austin around noon tomorrow we really only get today to see her.  We had originally thought that we would go to the zoo today but with such a small window to visit we decided that it would make more sense to just stay at the house.  No one was really all that motivated this morning to get up and get moving anyway.  It took hours just to get everyone up and out the door to go get some breakfast!

It was really lunch time when Dominica, Kate, Liesl and I went out to Waffle House for our late breakfast.  Katie had been looking forward to getting to go to Waffle House.  It’s a treat for people visiting us from the Waffle House free north.

After lunch we hung out at the house for the afternoon.  Jen and Watson came over to meet Katie and survey the office construction.  The walls are up now and you can get a pretty good feel for how it is going to be when it is done.  It is certainly going to be a tight office but with good design we will get good use out of the space.  Getting the extra “closet” area as a server room will go a long way towards making additional space in the rest of the house.  Now all of those servers that have been all over the place will have a nice, neat place to go.  If the space ever gets finished.

For dinner this evening we went to La Cima.  This weekend they are doing the Valentine’s dinners so we have the special Valentine’s menu, which is awesome, as we are always complaining that we eat at the club too often for the menu so anytime that there is a special menu we want to go to get more variety.

Dinner was awesome and everyone had a really nice time.  It was a good idea to come out tonight and we definitely appreciated having the menu variety.  It was a great meal.

Today was yet another crazy long day at the office.  Very busy and it started quite early too.  I was up and working at five forty five this morning and went into the office around seven thirty.

The day was pretty long too.  It was already completely dark out when I finally managed to get out of the office and drive up to Carrollton.  Much later than I had hoped.

Katie was in Austin today.  She spent the morning biking around the hill country then, in the afternoon, headed north towards the DFW.

Katie and I both pulled up to the house in Carrollton at the same time which was a pretty huge coincidence.  That meant that we had been driving next to each other for about ten miles or so.

It was pretty late so we all just spent the evening hanging out in the living room and catching up.  It is really hard to believe that we have not seen Katie since December, 2009 when she was helping us to get packed up and out of the house in Peekskill.  It is amazing how time flies.  You can really tell when you are getting older than you can go a year or two without seeing someone in person and it feels like you just saw them recently.

Katie is stuck camping out on the air mattress in the nursery (which I am currently using as my office) because the new garage office, where we had intended for her to be staying, is far from being ready for habitation.

It’s actually warming up a little today.  Still on the chilly side but winter is waning here in Texas and we are anticipating no more extremely cold days as we look forward to spring weather.  Originally Katie was going to arrive in Dallas today but she is now going to Austin today and coming up to see us here in the DFW tomorrow evening.

I was in the office today.  It was a pretty busy day.  We did as much cleaning as we could with our free time.  There was more work done on the house today.  We are just barely starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It is amazing how cold and snowy Texas is once we move here.  We’ve always heard of Texas being so warm and it is not at all.  It’s only barely warmer than New York!  We woke up to snow again this morning.  No need to go to work for me.

It was not nearly as cold today as it was last week when we got the major storm but still, quite cold.  Even with the bad weather we ended up with our electricians, contractor and Souder all coming up to the house at different points of the day.

Work was not too busy today, which was nice because I got to see Liesl some.  This has been a very busy week and we have gotten very little time to spend with each other.

We got word from our real estate agent that the seller of the house that we are attempting to buy had offered us less than half of the amount necessary to fix the foundation. That is not going to fly.  So we turned that down.  We really were not even expecting that much but we are pretty positive that we are not going to get anything additional.  Like I said yesterday, we’ve mostly lost interest in the house and are more than happy to just walk away at this point.  We just want it all to be over so that we can move on and focus on life again.  There has been too much going on.

No real house work today, mostly just a discussion about what will be done tomorrow when our contractor returns and gets into the groove full swing, again.  Now we will hopefully see physical progress at a good clip.  Electrical work is depressing as you can’t see anything and it costs a fortune and takes a really long time.

We just hung out as a family this evening.  Originally Katie was coming to visit us tomorrow but there has been a slight change of plans and she is now coming up Friday evening instead.  That is probably best as it gives us more time to clean which is going to be hard enough with the house being such a disaster.

Right now all of the boxes have just been shoved into Liesl’s play room so it is just full.  The bar is covered in construction stuff.  The nursery is used for storage.  My huge desk system is just leaning against the bar right now.  There is no room for anything.  Until that garage turns into my office, we are a total mess.

It is looking like tomorrow is going to be another cold day.  Likely I will be home tomorrow too.

So today is our panic inspection on the new house day.  The first inspector, the general house inspector, arrived at eight in the morning and began the inspection.  We were expecting our realtor this morning as well but she never arrived.  Shortly after the inspections started Dominica was off to the doctor’s for her appointment.  It worked out really well that she had an appointment on the same morning as the inspections so that I was already going to be home to watch Liesl during that time.

After not too long, the second inspector arrived, this is the foundation inspector.  It is a very busy morning.

The first inspection done was the foundation and it was bad news, very bad news.  The foundation is in really bad shape and needs tons of work.  A major percentage of the house value in work needs to be done which basically means that the house is no longer in the picture for us.

It is possible that the seller (Fannie Mae) will come back and pay for the foundation repairs, but that is just about a zero chance.  So we are considering that we have now lost the house as we are definitely not paying for this level of repair to be done.  The cost is just ridiculous considering the condition of the house otherwise and how hard it is to sell a house on this market.

The regular house inspection wasn’t shining either but not too much that we didn’t know.  Lots of termite damage but no signs of current issues.  Lots of work to be done, though.  Some plumbing issues.  Lots of little stuff.  Nothing really awful or unexpected.  But it doesn’t really matter in light of the foundation situation.

Now we know why the selling brokers have been playing games and trying to block us doing an inspection.  They admitted, later, to knowing that the foundation was bad – which makes it even more clear that they were attempting to keep us from finding out.  We had hoped that the foundation had already been fixed and the inspector said that it was already fixed, however it was fixed improperly so that wasn’t going to cut it.  So, since the bank knew that as well and was trying to keep us from finding out the truth, we are considering that to be pretty deceitful on their part.

So we are pretty much ready to just walk away and be done with it.  We are sick of dealing with these brokers and if this is how they are going to be dealing with us we would just as soon not buy from them anyway.  I’d hate to see them getting any commissions off of this, that’s for sure.

After the inspections I went into the office for the rest of the day.  After work I swung into the real estate agent’s office to sign some paperwork.  The office managers there feel that the selling bank is playing games and does not have the interest of the sellers in mind and wanted me to hang in there and attempt to keep the negotiation going.  Argh.  I really just want this to be over at this point.  This is not fun and we are rapidly wishing that we could just be done with the whole fiasco.  What a waste of time and effort this has been.

It took an hour of paperwork at the real estate office before we were done.  They had a phone conversation with the seller’s agent too, while I was there, and I could hear the agent making snide remarks about me on the phone.  They were clearly pissed off that we had managed to get inspections done and made no attempt whatsoever to hide that fact.  Extremely unprofessional at best.

It was decently late when I finally got home.  We know that tomorrow the weather is supposed to be very cold and there will be snow and ice so I will be working from home tomorrow.  We don’t expect any continuing house work either.  Hopefully some additional work will happen on Thursday before Katie arrives from New York.

Originally we had been hoping that Katie would be staying in the new office slash guest bedroom but it is far from being done and there is no way that she will be able to use it now.  So now we have to figure out how to fit her into the nursery instead.