This is who I am

Because of all the squabbling with the underwriter, we had to move our closing date out 1 week, we meant we had to move our appointment with the movers, and the military housing inspectors by a week.  We should have been prepared, since nothing else had gone smoothly, that the house would end up closing on the original closing date.  October 31.  Happy Halloween to us!

November 4 I found out that Melissa and I won a Kindle Fire from LOLShirts.  (I still haven’t been able to use it since my WiFi password is still packed!  😆 )  This was such a much needed happy thing with me!

November 7 and 8.  Since I had only been working 4 hours a day I had been spending my time at home getting ready for our move.  I never felt like I was getting anywhere even though I had been filling several boxes and bags with donations and throwing out tons of stuff.  I guess doing it over a long period of time is what made me feel like that because I was so used to seeing other people move out and there be tons of stuff sitting on the curb waiting on trash day.  We never had a bunch of stuff on the curb at one time.

The packers got everything packed in 2 days, and there were only 2 of them.  I could not stand just sitting around and doing nothing while they were there.  I ended up packing almost all of my clothes, shoes, and purses; all of my cross-stitch and quilting fabric; all of my magazines and most of my patterns.  I left everything (except the fabric) open for them to inspect and finish up.

By the time they left there were 271 boxes stacked all around the house and the poor puppies were totally exhausted from being so freaked out for 2 days.

November 8 was Son’s birthday and his girlfriend was in town.  We took them out to dinner.  He and M talked about work and brewing beer while we girls just sat there and grinned at them.  The conversation was so “adult!”  It was very hard dropping him off that night, knowing that in 2 days I was going to be moving to a different state and he wasn’t coming with us 🙁

November 9 the truck arrived.  All of our furniture, that could be, was torn down and loaded on the truck.  M and I slept on a blow up mattress that night.   The next morning I got up and had coffee and food at McDonalds while M was surfing.  I started loading the RAV and waited on him to get home.  He finished loading the things I couldn’t, hugged me and the puppies “goodbye” and at 10 a.m. on Thursday, November 10, the day of the Marine Corps birthday, I drove off of Camp Pendleton and headed to Arizona.  How fitting, since I was born there.

I pulled into the driveway about 9 p.m. and unloaded my suitcase, the puppies’ bag, the air mattress, and a folding chair.   The puppies had a field day running up and down the stairs and sniffing every nook and cranny of the house.  I was a little freaked out to let them in the back because of the pool but they avoided it while they did their business and then it was time to get to bed. The next morning, though, I turned them loose, and they had a really good time checking everything out.

7:00 a.m. on 11/11/11 the truck pulled up to our new home in Arizona and started unloading.  While there is no requirement other than putting things where I ask them to be put (I put signs on all the doors and walls so they would know where to put the furniture and boxes), the guys who unloaded were wonderful.  They centered all the heavy pieces of furniture where I wanted them and put my dining table and bed together before they left.  They were gone a little after noon.

Before I left California I had made the appointment for cable and internet to be turned on and I had just enough time between when the movers left and the cable guy showed up to go grab some lunch.  The cable guy was nice enough to help me unpack one of the TVs.

November 12th I headed out to take advantage of the Veterans’ Day sales and bought a washer, dryer, and refrigerator.  Amazing how frequently we depend on a refrigerator!  I was so tired of eating out.  It took me 3 days of unpacking to find another essential – my coffeepot!  😆

M stayed behind until Monday, November 14, to clean our quarters, and to get in as much surfing as he could.  I was so excited for him to get “home” since he had never seen the house, except for pictures.  I was so nervous for him to get “home” because I was so afraid he wouldn’t like it!  He came in through the front door and the first thing out of his mouth was how nice the house looked.  He hadn’t even made it past the 2nd room!

This has been the best moving experience of our 30 years in the military.  To date I’ve only found one thing broken.  The Ott floor lamp I keep in my stitching room.

I saved my stitching room for last for two reasons.  I had intended on painting it and I didn’t want to be distracted by my stash.  I knew once I started touching it I would slow down in my unpacking.  I want it organized and not have to re-do it.  This past weekend we bought another bookcase from Ikea.  M gutted the closet and moved both large bookcases in there.  We still need to pull the wall supports for the hanger rod down and I’ll paint that white. Once I started putting the furniture in I knew I had made a mistake in wanting to paint the rest of the room.   The existing color is perfect for the furniture – which is birch.  The paint color almost matches DMC 677 (Admit it! You thought about pulling a skein to look, didn’t you 😉 )

So far unpacking that room is going as expected.  I still have my “office supplies,” “papers,” quilt and cross stitch fabric,  WIPs and kitted items to unpack.  The cross stitch fabric will be last since I’m going to change the way I have it sorted.  It used to be by color, but now I’m going to change it by count….maybe.  We’ll see after I have it sorted 😉  I only brought Houses of Hawk Run Hollow with me and I’m getting a little tired of it, plus I’ve almost finished Block 5 and I only stitch using working copies. My copier is unpacked but the cables aren’t.  I keep thinking of all the stuff I have upstairs, but I’m trying to be strong! 😆  I packed all of my “notions” into plastic shoe boxes and those need to be sorted and put in their forever home.  I’m using my sewing/work table as a sorting table so that stuff is sitting around on the floor and waiting until last, but it’s getting there.  I have thought many times, though, that I have too much stuff, and I’m going to be thinning it out.

The living room is still cluttered with picture boxes.  The furniture is set up in there though, as well as our Christmas tree. 

I still have 4 boxes of items for my china cabinet that need to be put away, and I unpack one box a day.  There is packing paper dust on everything so I’m having to clean it before I put it away and that takes a lot of time. My days have set into a rhythm of one china cabinet box, then upstairs to play in my stitching boxes 😉  I try to unpack a minimum of 2 boxes a day, but more often than not I’ve kept going.  It doesn’t sound like much but I’m finding it takes more time to keep up this house than I’m used to.  It’s two times larger than any home I’ve ever lived in.  Plus we’ve been out and about a lot.  We’re living further out than we expected  (San Tan Valley,  instead of Mesa) so shopping trips take more travel time.

In addition to our Ikea trip, we’ve been furniture shopping and are expecting our new kitchen dining set to arrive on Thursday.  M isn’t retired yet and still has some military obligations that took him back to California for 4 days before Thanksgiving and he left again yesterday and returned early this morning.  He goes back around January 21st for the last time and will retire, and return, on January 31 😀

I’ve finally admitted to myself that I’m a bit lonely.  I’ve been to The Attic once since I’ve arrived.   There really hasn’t been much time to go more since there has been so much unpacking and settling in to do.  I’ve been determined to put everything away in a box and not just stack it here and there so it is taking longer than it should.  I haven’t been able to sit and stitch a lot either for the same reason, plus Son and his girlfriend are coming to visit Christmas Eve so I have to have everything unpacked out of the guest room by then.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to post some cross-stitch updates, and make some stitchy plans for next year.

September 30 was supposed to be my last day at work.  The other paralegal had returned to work on September 26.  September 28 I got an email with some available homes.  In that email was a property that had been put up that day and a link to these pictures — the San Tan Property:

M couldn’t get away from work but we both knew, after looking at other pictures of the house, that we needed to see this house in person.  I contacted Realtor to confirm, if I could get out of work, could he get us in to see the house.  I told him to line up some more houses, no matter what, that I was headed that way.  I ended up extending my last day of work to October 4 so I could take another trip to Arizona.

The next day I drove to Arizona and got there around 4 p.m.  I called Realtor before I checked into my hotel and was told that Seller had had so many phone calls about the property that they had raised the price $10,000 but would honor the original price for me since I had driven from California to see it.  We had an appointment to view it for 6 that evening.

The owners were there and the wife gave me a tour.  It was a beautiful home.  They owned 2 other homes in Colorado and New Mexico, and she had just found out that morning that an MRI confirmed she needed knee replacement surgery very soon and she could not be going up and down stairs.

Yep, it was a 2-story home.  🙄  It was so hard for me to keep a straight face while looking at the home.  Other than it being 2-story it was absolutely perfect.  Since I knew there was so much interest in it I didn’t want the owner to know how interested I was for fear a bidding war was going to start.

The next day Realtor took me to see 6 more homes.  One he hesitated showing me because by then he already knew our tastes and he knew this home was exactly what we had been looking for, but it had gone under contract that morning.  He waited until I had walked in to tell me this though.  The home was so gorgeous that I wanted to sit on the stairs and weep when I found out it was unattainable.  But he was smart!  There were other homes almost exactly like it still being built in the area so we went to a couple of the builders’ sites and talked to them.

One home tempted me so much that I almost made an offer.  The only thing that stopped me was that we would have had to put the pool in ourselves and if our history is anything to go by – we would never have done it and I would have been ticked off for the next 30 years.

Finally we headed back to  Realtor’s office and I put in an offer on 2 houses, including the San Tan Property — which we ended up buying.

The process of buying this house was not so much stressful as it was aggravating.  Okay, it pissed me off!  I have learned so much during the process.  It’s really more than I want to get into because I don’t know if my blood pressure can handle reliving it, but it was very painful.  No wonder so many people are having problems buying homes.  On paper, we were perfect; however, dealing with the underwriter was awful.   They ended up, on the last day of our contract, requiring a 2nd appraisal.  It came in $9,000 lower than the first one so we were required to abide by it if we still wanted the house.  All four of us (M and I, our Realtor, the owners, and their Realtor) had to compromise to make this sale happen.

The sellers were already out of the property.  They knew that if the deal fell through that they’d have to go through the same thing with another buyer.  The appraisals weren’t going to change.  So they came down on their price.  Their realtor gave up $1500 of her commission.  Our realtor gave up $1200 of his commission.  We offered $1000 more.  We came out ahead in more ways than one.  We got the house 😀

Oh my!  I had no intentions of there being more than 3 months between posts, but I’ve been so preoccupied with so many things!  I can’t believe how much time has passed though — and how much has happened since then.  Yikes, I think I’ll break the catching up into parts!  😉

August 28th we headed to Arizona to house shop.  We knew Realtor had more than 20 homes waiting for us.  When we contacted him the next morning we were down to 18 (I think).  We were looking for a 4 BR, 3 Car, single story with a pool, and it had to be a regular sale (no short-sale or foreclosures).  We were okay with a 3BR that had a office/den, too.  I was hoping for an eat-in kitchen in addition to a formal dining room.  I had to make sure there was space for my piano and china cabinet I bought in Japan, and a nice sized backyard for the puppies.  It is amazing what got weeded out based on the piano, china cabinet and puppy yard.

Before we started we sat down with Realtor and got all the Arizona ‘rules’ explained to us.  It was a little shocking to us how fast things would move.  We could make an offer in the morning and be signing our contract that evening.  The market moved so much faster here than in California and I was a little very overwhelmed by some of the panic in my brain!  To top it off, Realtor told us that to make ourselves more competitive we would make an offer on multiple properties, at the same time 😮

Then we started looking at houses.  I began to feel like Goldilocks!  Too big, too expensive, too small, too scary (seriously…there was dried blood on the floor of one of the kitchens).  And then — Just right!  There was one home we called the Saddle House because it had some western and English saddles in the decorations.  When we walked in we immediately saw ourselves living there.  We tended to walk in different directions when we first went into a house.  In this particular house we both started calling out to the other with features we had found that were perfect for us.  There wasn’t a formal dining area, but the eat in area of the kitchen was huge and there would be no problem with the china cabinet.  There was a family room and a formal living area so there was no problem with the piano.  The backyard had a wonderful patio, a huge grassy area for the puppies and the pool was already fenced in.  The master was on the opposite side of the other 3 bedrooms.  My first question to Realtor was “what’s wrong with this house?”  His response….”It’s a short-sale that will go into foreclosure in 30 days.”  When I asked him why he even bothered to show it to us he said that there had already been an offer on the house that had gone to the bank.  Unbeknownst to the bank, though, the buyer had backed out.  The bank was still processing all the paperwork and the seller was hoping to get another, exactly the same, offer from someone else before telling the bank and hoping the bank would continue processing and not start over.  Our financial situation was 10x stronger than the previous buyer.  We had a pre-approved loan, we had more money to put down, we were ready to close in less than 30 days.  We made an offer that matched what the house was listed for.  They.Would.Not.Give.Our.Offer.To.The.Bank!!!!  Turned out the listing was for less than the original listing.  They would not communicate with us at all!  They never gave us a chance to change our offer, or anything.  We were just so heartbroken.

All of this occured in 2 days time and we continued to look during that time.  The first day we found some other homes that we were almost equally pleased with.  Naturally none of them left us both happy.  I like one, he didn’t like it.  He loved that one, I didn’t care for it.  He loved that one, I felt it was too expensive, even though I like it too.  I loved that one, he felt it was too expensive.  It was very depressing.

The second day we found another home that we both fell in love with.  Again to Realtor “what’s wrong with it?”  He called Seller and they told us there were some stricter wants from them.  Close in 30 days.  Waive the appraisal.  5 days for inspection (7-10 is normal).   The price was right at the top of our limit.  We contacted our bank and they said there was no way they could do the inspection in 5 days.  There were a lot of other communications problems with our bank, but in hindsight I think we had a new loan person.   So we hunted for a new lender.  By the time we found one (we’re talking hours, not days) we had figured out – by them not getting back to us – that we weren’t going to get the Saddle Property.  We had the offer drawn up on this new property and went back to looking while we waited on a counter or refusal.

We decided to not stick around as long as we first thought and headed back a day and a half earlier.  The whole drive back I couldn’t get excited about the offer.  I loved the house and could definitely see myself living there, but something was off.

Ended up, the appraisal came back way too low for the lender, plus, because it was a “flip” (any home in Arizona being sold less than 3 months after it was purchased is considered a flip) – a 2nd appraisal was required by law, and that was too low as well.  The inspection came back with some interesting information and we used that to get out of the contract, since the Seller didn’t want to make any of the repairs we asked for.

It was very disappointing.  I had to give myself some mental time off from house hunting because since my return I was only working 4 hours a day, the other paralegal was still out on maternity leave, the attorney I was working directly for had just accepted a job with another firm, and there was a huge trial coming in 1 week.  Stressed?  Yeah, a little.

Fortunately, the Sunday night before trial started, our case settled.   I could focus more on the other cases we had that needed transferring or settled so my attorney could get ready for her new job.  Less stress!  I started talking to M about house hunting again.

Then, out of nowhere my attorney got accepted for an intern position in DC.  She had been hoping this would happen, and they accepted her for the position that was available in January, so that stress was relieved some too.  I started talking to Realtor about house hunting again.