Two more days

And the bulk of the move will be finished. On Tuesday we move the furniture, with the exception of the pool table. While we may be able to move it ourselves (others have done it, I know), we have opted to have professionals do it for us. It will be the very last thing to move, though.

Today, after the Texans game, I’ll be headed to the new place to clean up a bit. We’ve moved all the boxes over, and the kitchen is unpacked and my studio is mostly unpacked. Once we get furniture in, I can finish unpacking the clothes that go in the dresser (the kids do their own moving stuff like packing & unpacking), and making some changes to the house to make it more livable for us – like removing the towel bars in both bathrooms to make room for bookcases. While the house is large, storage is at a premium, particularly in the bathrooms, so we’re having to make some changes there.

But, the bathrooms DO have clean towels, and have been cleaned (and will be cleaned again before we move in, probably tomorrow). In fact, about the only thing missing at this point is furniture. I was determined that since my vacation officially begins tomorrow, I didn’t want to spend the entire time packing, moving, and unpacking. I think we’ve done a decent job of having things unpacked that could be unpacked, so we won’t be living with a mountain of boxes for several weeks – which would drive me nuts, and cause me to spend my entire vacation unpacking, at least until everything was sufficiently put away. My closet is slowly filling up with clothes – I take a few every time I go over there, leaving only enough here to get me through till Tuesday. I’ll be so glad when this move is over!

What I’m really looking forward to is some studio time, even though it will now be in my bedroom. And Thanksgiving! I can’t believe it’s less than two weeks away. And of course, I’m really looking forward to spending time with my husband and kids while I’m off. I am so excited about the next eight weeks or so, I can hardly contain myself – the holidays in a new house, new decorating opportunities, and just the excitement of the holidays themselves practically give me a contact high! LOL I don’t know why I’m so excited for the holidays this year – maybe it the relief of four years of stress, or maybe just the idea of being with my family, but this holiday season will be fantastic, I know it.

 

I know I’ve been bad

At Posting. And I’m sorry about that. I’m hoping that things will slow down a little in the very near future and I will have more time for blogging and other things I love doing. Please bear with me … the move, work, and stress has just about made me crazy. But I think things will be better soon.

Sadly, our dog Frasier passed away suddenly on Friday. He was such a huge part of our lives, and we miss him terribly. He was totally awesome, and even though he wouldn’t ever really hurt anyone, he was very serious about his “watch dog” duties, prowling around the house making sure it was secure, barking at anyone (or any cat) that passed by outside, and sleeping in the hallway where he could keep an eye on both kids, me and C. I’m not sure how a dog keeps an eye on anyone when sleeping, but he did. Since he was only six years old, and had never really been sick with anything other than an ear infection, and wasn’t sick when he passed on, we were in shock when he died. He went from being happy, seemingly healthy and loving to being gone in less than 15 minutes.

We have rented a house in the same neighborhood where we currently live. It’s great. T can still go to school where he’s been going, and we’re still pretty close to my office. It’s not the same layout as our current house, but it’s still very nice – in fact, there are some things I like about it better than our current place. For example, the kitchen, breakfast and den are all open to one another. But it is three bedrooms instead of four, and it doesn’t have a true gameroom. We will be using the formal dining & living rooms as a gameroom, which is fine with me, and C will have an office instead of me having a dedicated studio. Instead of that, the master bedroom will double as a bedroom and a studio. Since it’s pretty much ginormous, I’m ok with that.

There’s a lot of work to get the house ready to live in, because it wasn’t cleaned before we got the keys over the weekend, and we already had a service incident (a toilet tank broke upstairs, causing water to come through the ceiling into the office; fortunately we hadn’t move anything in there at that point), so we probably won’t move for a couple weeks yet. We’re fine with that, because we still have tons to do in the current house, but that means we’ll be split between two houses for a couple of weeks – some stuff here, some there.

Once the new place is cleaned up and we have everything situated, I’ll try to remember to post some pics. Maybe around Christmas … 2013 …

 

 

Boxes, boxes everywhere!

We have been packing for the last week, and I am pleased to report that nearly all the packing is completed. We still have a few things in the master bedroom to pack, some dishes and glasses in the kitchen, and some knick knacks, but for the most part, we are in pretty good shape. And that’s a good thing, considering we’ll start moving in just over a week from today. We have a plan …

We figure we’ll get the keys on either Monday or Tuesday next week – Monday would be better, but some people are funny about giving them to you early. Once we do have them, though, we’ll start moving boxes and small furniture items to the new house and unpacking as we can. We would like to have all the boxes moved and mostly unpacked by the 15th, when we will be moving the furniture. We hope that by the time we move the big pieces of furniture, we will only have to put clothing in dresser drawers and unload the last bit of kitchen/bathroom stuff and voila! Unpacking finished in a couple of hours.

Well, that’s the plan anyway …

 

 

The End, or a New Beginning?

I’ve mentioned here before the struggles we’ve had trying to hold on to our house. It’s been a horrible experience, which I have not documented here for the sake of a little privacy, but suffice it to say that no matter how hard we tried, we were not able to work things out with Bank of America. After years of trying to come to an amicable agreement, we have decided that our health and sanity is more important than trying to hold on to this house. And so, with mixed emotions, we have decided to let go of the house and move on.

I know that there are few folks who will take responsibility for losing their home to foreclosure, but the brunt of this problem rests squarely on my shoulders. It wasn’t that I willfully or even accidentally missed any payments that caused my problems. I didn’t suddenly lose my job and face a loss of income. And I didn’t have some massive medical issue that made me miss a payment. No, none of these things occurred. My problems with this house started with a payment that my mortgage company at the time, Countrywide, claimed had been returned to them for non-sufficient funds. It took them four months to decide that the payment had been returned for NSF before they let me know about it. That’s when they decided to add exorbitant fees to the account, going back to the first day of the month for the “returned payment”. Of course, upon receiving their letter, I immediately called my bank to find out of the check had ever been presented – after all, the money was still in my account, and I couldn’t locate an NSF fee from my own bank. My bank insisted that the check had never been presented for payment, and thus, never returned for non-sufficient funds.

I called Countrywide to try to make the payment, and to discuss the fact that my bank said the payment had never been presented. I also hoped to get them to admit the mistake and reverse the fees. To the contrary, they told me that not only would they not accept the payment, as it was now a “partial payment,” thanks to all the fees they had added to my account, they would not reverse or even reduce the fees, and they in their turn insisted that the original payment had been returned. I asked to speak to a supervisor, thinking someone at a higher level would help, but never could get past the first line of customer service. I hung up and made a trip to my own bank.

At my bank, I again checked to be sure that the original payment in question had not been presented for payment. It had not, they assured me. I asked the bank manager to write a letter stating this, and he did. I sent it to Countrywide, asking them to again reconsider their position, reverse the fees and accept the payment. Weeks went by before I got a response – no way, it said, in effect. By now, one payment was returned to me, one was the original payment in question that they claimed had been returned by my bank, and another payment had been refused as the account was “seriously past due.” I called again, and was told that they could “redo the loan” and fix all the issues. I agreed, thinking that at least everything would be caught up again. I was told that during the period in which they were reworking the loan, not to make any payments. That was not a problem, since they wouldn’t even accept a payment, so I waited. And waited. And waited some more. I’d call every so often to find out what was going on, and would be told it was in progress. Seven months later, I saw a man outside my home taking pictures. I went out and asked him what he was doing, and he said it was in relation to the loan by Countrywide. I thanked him and went back inside.

Three months after that, I finally had the new paperwork in hand. A total of ten months had gone by since they started the process to “rework” my loan. During that time, Bank of America announced plans to purchase Countrywide, so I was concerned that might throw a kink into the works, but I was assured it would not. I signed the paperwork, returned it, and waited for my new payment information. I got that about two weeks later, and I thought, “Good, it’s done. I can get on with life again.” But I believe it was this mis-step – allowing Countrywide to “rework” the loan – that has caused all of the problems I have since experienced. On a fairly regular basis, I would get letters from BofA that would state I owed them a dollar amount that was in the thousands of dollars, and a demand for payment of that amount. The first time, I called and the customer service rep told me that it was a mistake and to ignore it. That was fine until a few months later when I received another letter, and the amount had increased due to late fees, and advising me they wouldn’t be taking anymore “partial payments.” I managed to scrape together the money, thanks to a bonus at work, and paid it. The CSR I spoke to assured me the account was caught up. At the end of 2009, I received another letter claiming I was behind on payments, even though I had bank records to back up my assertion that I was not. In the second quarter of 2010, we made a very large payment to catch the house up, and I received monthly assurances that all was well, until the end of 2010 when we received yet another letter claiming we were once again several thousand dollars behind. It was then that I decided I was done.

In the midst of all of that, I received two letters on two separate occasions from my Homeowners Association that said the dues had not been paid and they would foreclose on the house. Those dues should have been paid by BofA, but they never were, despite the fact that when I requested an account statement shortly after the last letter from them, my escrow account had almost $8,000 in it (my taxes and insurance did not total $5000).

I’m done. I think we have done everything we could reasonably do to hold on to the house, including attempting a loan modification, for which we were told we did not qualify. We considered filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy but eventually decided against it. While it might help in the short term, at the end, we would still be with Bank of America, and the shenanigans would begin again as soon as the bankruptcy plan was completed.

So, while this is the end of one era – of realizing the dream of owning a home – it’s the beginning of another. Understand, this isn’t a decision that was easy to make, and we don’t take walking away lightly. We have fought to keep this place for the last three and a half years. But enough is enough. My sanity is worth more to me than this house, as much as I love it.

We’ve found another home in the same neighborhood. Our address will change, but our lives will remain much the same, only with less stress. We were lucky enough to find someone willing to rent to us despite the bad credit, and for that I will be forever grateful. She’ll be getting Christmas presents from me for a long time to come. I’m sad to leave my home, but excited for a new beginning. I have loved this house since the moment I stepped into the model home, and I have spent many happy occasions here. I will miss it. But it’s time to look forward to making memories in a new home. I cannot wait.

 

Weekend Adventures … or something like that

This weekend, I had big plans. Clean the bedroom, get to the closet, maybe get that cleaned up, and start the studio. Why, oh why do I insist on setting myself up for this sort of failure??

First off, I haven’t cleaned our bedroom – REALLY cleaned it – in months. Like, I’m talking before the holidays. In 2009. OK, maybe not that far back, but outside of picking things up off the floors, dusting and running the vacuum, I haven’t really cleaned the bedroom in a really long time. I can hear Chris saying to himself, “What else is there to cleaning a room?!” That’s because men have a different standard of clean than women do. Am I right here or what?

So I spent most of Saturday cleaning the bedroom, doing laundry and throwing things out. I’m sad to say that I didn’t get all of the room cleaned. But I did manage to get something like ten loads of laundry done. Why is it that men will wash it, dry it and refuse to put up a load of laundry? Do they think it’s going to take itself out of the basket and hang itself up or crawl into the dresser drawer? *sigh* At any rate, I still have more laundry to get done as well. But at least most of what I’ve washed already is put away – the last two loads didn’t get hung up because I am out of hangers so I need to make a quick stop at Walmart to pick up more. I’m not sure what happens to my hangers (or my flatware in the kitchen) because every couple of years, I need to buy more.

On the bright side, I have several bags of clothing ready to be donated, several bags of trash to throw out, and a bunch of books to be sent … somewhere. Most of them are old school books of mine, so they may be best thrown away, but I hate to throw away books. I also don’t want to move these books so I am determined to find something else to do with them.

All this makes it sound like my room was a toxic waste dump, but in reality it wasn’t. I just have this really bad habit of storing everything that doesn’t have a home in my room. I really need to stop doing that – maybe make it a policy that at the end of a season I get rid of clothing I didn’t wear or that I no longer like. Set some time limits for keeping stuff I never use. Spend more time throwing stuff out that I don’t need!

Hmmm … I guess the question is, how does the child of two packrats DO this?!? I’m thinking I might need to hire someone to come in and help me declutter …

 

So …

I didn’t exactly think about the fact that yesterday was Valentine’s Day when I was making plans to hit the closet. Since my husband picked me up from work with flowers, chocolates and a balloon in tow, the closet flew right out of my head and nothing got done, except for the stop at Office Depot to pick up a few supplies. I have a standing Tuesday appointment after work tonight, so my plan is to start the closet tomorrow. Just thought I’d let ya’ll know what’s going on.

I have considering starting with my studio, since my standing Tuesday appointment is there, and I can get some packing done as I wait for things to happen. Maybe work in there as time permits tonight and hit the closet hard tomorrow?

 

Packing for The Move

I am not an amateur when it comes to moving. I’ve had lots of practice at it over the last ten years, but if moving were an Olympic sport, I doubt I would bring home the gold medal for the USA. There’s a certain art to moving, one I’ve not fully mastered, even after so many moves. I think it’s my lack of organizational skills that drag me down, so I’ve been scouring the internet for tips on how to organize and pack, purge and prepare for moving. Yes, we are moving. No, we don’t particularly want to move. And no, we don’t have a target move date just yet. We do, however, have a 2600 square foot house full of items that will need to be either purged, stored or taken to a much smaller location (we don’t have a place nailed down yet where we’re moving, but we are definitely looking to downsize). I’ll be documenting our progress here on the blog as we prepare to move, and hopefully I’ll be able to share some tips for those who are just as organizationally challenged as I am.

All of the websites I’ve found recommend packing things you don’t use often, but don’t want to get rid of – things like books, china, crystal, pictures and trinkets. I have a lot of stuff that falls into this category, so I think it will be easy enough to start doing this tonight after work. We already have boxes and packing tape (we thought we would be moving this time last year and bought those things, but the move didn’t materialize) so I think we’re fairly well set for that to start with at least. On the way home tonight, we’ll stop for some colored markers, maybe some colored paper, and printer ink (I’m out).

My plan for tonight is to start in my closet – it NEEDS to be cleaned out anyway, and there’s a lot of things that can just be either thrown out or donated. I spotted a Kodak digital camera box on the top shelf last night … the camera was tossed out at least two years ago when it stopped working but the box and packaging survives! Yeah, it’s time for that to be gone. I still have boxes in that closet that weren’t unpacked when I moved in four years ago. I am betting most of that can hit the bricks as well. And there are MANY clothes on both mine and Chris’s side that can be donated to others who can and will get some use out of them. Alternative, we could have a yard sale prior to the move – I will see what we have and make a decision soon about that.

I have no illusions. I don’t think I’ll finish the closet tonight; it’s not in good shape right now, so I’m fairly certain it’s going to take more than a couple of hours to get it done. But it’s a start, and it will rehabilitate a problem area in my home. Win/win in my opinion!

 Because we don’t want to be tripping over boxes and crap – and because we don’t have a move date at this time – we’ll be renting a small storage space where we’ll store all the non-essential items until we’re ready to move. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal to most people, but to me it’s progress. And right now, I need to see progress.