"Our long national nightmare is over." - Gerald Ford
Toward the end of May I came to the conclusion (with the not-so-subtle encouragement of park management) that the leaky, falling-apart sieve of a mobile home that had been, well, home for almost nine years had gone well past its useful lifespan (35 years) and needed to be totally gutted and rebuilt, or needed to be gone. I thought long and hard about trying to fix it up for oh, about 30 seconds, and decided that idea was a total non-starter. Time to find a new place to hang my hat.
That is, if I ever wore one. Might have to buy a new hat too.
Looked at what it would cost for a new unit. $125,000. Uh, no. I had that kind of money once, but not at this time in my life, and didn't want a mortgage payment on top of space rent.
Lo and behold, there was an empty unit that had been foreclosed on two years earlier, right across the street, listed at $44,500. That's more like it! An escrow officer friend from church put me in touch with her realtor friend, and we made a nice lowball offer to the bank holding the note. They countered, I accepted. $42K. Game on!
Since none of this was instantaneous, it left me with a 10-day window to close escrow before July 1. Oh dear. Now I had to wrangle the cooperation of my own bank, first to close out two accounts (which by some lame fedearl regulation or whatnot takes three days), have them overnight the checks to me (why couldn't they just wire it to my checking account? I dunno), and then beg the accounts guy at my local branch to make the funds available the next day so I could wire the whole shebang to the escrow company. It closed late afternoon on June 30.
The nice thing about moving a grand total of 50 feet is that you don't have to pack much, other than books, CDs, knicknacks, and the like. Just pile stuff on a dolly and wheel it across the street. By the end of the first day we had the beds, dresser, bookcases, and living room chairs (the couch stayed) moved. The rest of the weekend brought the kitchen contents. I ended up hand washing every single dish, pot, pan, piece of silverware, etc.
Bought all new appliances (we inherited a dryer left behind from the old owners - runs great), desk, nightstands, and shed.
Oh my god, the shed. Metal shed, 6' x 8'. How much trouble could it be to put it together? Shouldn't take more than a few hours for me and the teenager, right?
Took the better part of two days (not to mention a few chunks of skin from the two of us). Used more than 200 screws, nuts, bolts, washers - each (actually double the washers). It stands slightly crooked, just enough to offend my OCD-ness, but nowhere near enough to justify trying to straighten out.
The rest of July was spent slowly going through each room of the old house and going through what was left. Closets. Toy boxes. Hope chest. And where the hell did all these dirty clothes come from???
Saturday was demolition day. I can't tell you what a surreal experience it was seeing this huge backhoe (with a "thumb" attachment) tear massive chunks out of the place I called home longer than anywhere else I can remember. I can't tell you because I haven't yet processed how I feel about it. My new house is way nicer (if much smaller), and will eventually feel like home, once I get all the boxes of books out of the middle of my living room. I may burst into tears at some point in the future for no apparent reason, but we'll just have to see. It feels like I have a mild case of post traumatic stress disorder. The past 2 1/2 months have certainly not been easy, but they are in the past.
The future is ours to make.
