Home Crazy Home

Those of you who have known me for awhile know that I have never really had good luck with housing. In fact, the last truly positive housing experience was college.

Here are a few bullet points from the last 15 years:

• There was the psycho roommate in the house I lived in right out of college. For example, she collected money from my other roommates for a hot air balloon ride for me for my birthday. She then took the trip herself and never paid the other roommates back. This is just one story of many.

• Shawn and I attempt to buy a house in NH when we moved there for law school. The mortgage company needed documentation from a student loan company that no longer existed. We told them as much. While spending all our savings staying in a Residence Inn, and then moving into and renting the house we were attempting to buy, the mortgage company tells us that just because the student loan company no longer existed there was no excuse why the bank couldn't talk to someone from that company. And they tell us that they will need all documentation on letterhead from the nonexistent company.

• After the documentation fiasco, we settle for renting. Our real estate agent tells us she has a great apartment for rent that she actually owns. It is nice, clean and in a great location. We leave NH and go to my parents house in CT for the weekend thinking we have the apartment. The agent calls us on Sunday night to tell us that her husband doesn't want to rent to people with pets. We now have to start from scratch and we have just lost a weekend to look for a new place.

• We end up in a small house (read doublewide) in the middle of the woods in Northwood, NH. A charming town, if you are a bear. Or a skunk. Speaking of skunks, we had sort of a skunk incident while living there. How do I put this? Let's just say people knew we were coming from a mile away for a few months going. The house was really not that bad. Except for the undrinkable orange water, the plethora of fisherman on the lake outside our window, the 45 minute drive to the laundromat and the skunks. But I wasn't feeling too bad about it until my brother visited and said "Mom and Dad haven't seen this have they?" I still laugh when I think about that conversation.

• Then we moved to Concord. This apartment was definitely a step up. It had a washer and dryer in the apartment and drinkable water! And everything was going well until we moved out. In an effort to do the right thing, Shawn steam cleaned the carpets. And then we turned off the utilities because we were moving out. You guessed it. The carpets molded and had to be replaced.

• Our final residence in NH was actually nice. It was in Exeter- a totally cute town. We could walk to the library, the ice cream shop and AJ had a little friend who lived next door. It was all going well until the basement flooded and we lost 1/3 of our belongings.

• Our next move was to AZ. Shawn flew down himself and picked out a great house. The only problem with this house was the actual development it was in. The builders had all gotten together and donated a plot of land for the school to be built. Then they built around the donated land, basically creating an island of land for the school. After we moved in to a house that was a block from the promised school (we thought this would be a prime location for resale), the school system said they needed even more land to build the promised school. The builders said they were out of luck, all the houses had been built around the school land already. So, the school was never built. And they wouldn't even just build a smaller school. The land sits vacant to this day, as far as I know. Just a note for those of you trying to sell your house: It is very hard to sell a house when there is no public school in a 20 minute radius. And if you are buying a house, be sure to see the actual school before you place an offer.

• We finally moved to the place we are now. We are renting again. It is a beautiful house in the best location. But, as our luck would have it, we got a notice in the mail that our landlord is foreclosing on the house we are living in. This means we may have to move again. Luckily, a law was just passed here in AZ that states if you sign a 2 year lease (which we did), and an investor buys the house, they have to honor the lease. The worse case scenario is that we will have to move out this summer after the house is auctioned off. The best case scenario is we get to stay here for as long as we need to.

I know there are far worse problems in the world. But, it would be nice to live somewhere without the constant fear that the rug is going to be pulled out from under us yet again.

Oh well. I am sure it will all work out in the end. Now, where did I put those moving boxes?