Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Since yesterday was the SuperBowl there was no work done on the house.  That was pretty frustrating because the house is such a crazy mess.  We would love to start working hard on cleaning it up and getting it all ready for real use but we are stuck just living in it while it is a horrible mess.  Ugh.  That’s no fun.  We want to clean the carpets and put all the little things away but we really can’t get into the garage or attic to do anything like that.  So the mess might as well just remain as long as possible as any cleanup that we do today will be wiped away tomorrow.  It is really hard to live in a super dirty house for weeks at a stretch.

The electricians were back today.  Today is the big push.  We are almost there on the electrical.  Hard to believe as this has been going on for quite some time.  Almost all of the big stuff will be done today and soon everything in the house will work.  It will be a while before their drywall guy comes to do the final cleanup, so until then we have many holes in all of our walls.

While I was home at lunch today, our real estate agent called to tell us that the selling brokers on the house that we have been trying to buy, suddenly decided that we had to have the house inspected either today or tomorrow.  They had explicitly told us that we were forbidden to go into the house to do the inspections until we had a signed contract from them which they failed to deliver, even today!  Now we are pissed, suspicious and in a panic to find inspectors who can be here first thing in the morning.

I went into the office today and came home at lunch to help out at the house.

Very good progress today.  Very little to report.  They will be back tomorrow and that should, in theory, be just about the end of that portion of the work.

This morning, quite early, Dominica, Liesl and I got up and headed out to do some much needed grocery shopping so that we are prepared to get through the week.  We have been holding off as long as we could and Dominica, being as pregnant as she is, doesn’t want to go out shopping alone as she could faint.  So we did a family outing for groceries.

We first went to Aldi’s and got the bulk of what we needed.  Fortunately we have several different grocery stores right around the corner from us so going to multiple ones is really easy.  Aldi’s has the best prices and the German food but the selection is really limited and I don’t like their cereals. Fortunately Dominica does because they are super cheap.

Then we went to Kroger to wrap up the rest of our shopping.  That took a while but we got a ton of stuff.

On the way out to the car we were in a mass of people in the parking lot.  The place was packed.  We ended up in a group of people behind an old man driving a car who, apparently, decided that there were too many people walking in the parking aisle in front of him so suddenly put his car into reverse and started backing up – into a crowd of people in the cross walk!

Dominica started yelling, as she had the shopping cart with Liesl in it, and people started jumping out of the way.  Knowing that Dominica couldn’t get Liesl and the cart away if he kept going I went up to the back of the car and hit the trunk to get the driver to stop – hoping he would realize that he was up against a group of people.  We were not the only people behind him and people all over in front of him were waving and yelling for him to stop.

Instead of stopping he decided to put the accelerator to the floor and the car lurched back at me.  Everyone started screaming… Dominica in the unbelievable piercing scream that she is famous for.  How the driver didn’t hear it, I will never know.  I started to go up onto the car to keep him from sucking me under the tires and I beat on the trunk so hard that I probably dented it and am now concerned that I have broken my thumb.

Once he finally got the car to stop moving, the driver put it in neutral, not park, and at least one person there, who had just jumped away in time to not be run over, commented that even when the car stopped the engine was still revving like crazy (no, it was not a Toyota, this was driver error) I went up to yell at him about driving backwards without looking in a crowded crosswalk – he still had no idea that there were people here!  When he opened his door his loose dog jumped out into the busy parking lot and I had to go save it for him before something bad happened to his dog.  This guy clearly had no idea where he was or what he was doing.  Talk about a danger.  He could easily have killed five people or more!

Dominica was quite shaken for some time.  A few minutes after it was over I realized the incredible pain that my right thumb was in.  It felt like a break and was swelling quickly.  Apparently the joint on the knuckle had slammed into the metal of the trunk very, very hard.  I’m in some serious pain.  This is not good as I have a writing assignment due today that I absolutely have to be working on.

We got home and I put my hand on ice.  It was in some serious pain all day.

I spent much of the day in the office working on my writing.  I am also working for “the office” today as we are supporting high volatility emerging markets trading for Egypt with all of the uproar that is going on over there.

I nursed my thumb all day going between ice and heat.  The ice hurt horribly and the heat felt great but, in theory, you aren’t supposed to heat a break.  It didn’t take long before the thumb started turning purple and black.  Ugh.  I can move it though.  So it can only be so bad, I guess.

I got my article done today and we spent a bit of the evening watching Good Luck Charlie. We are really liking that show.

What a long day it was.