Karen Chatters » home life

The end of summer with some geeks

Karen — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:00:49 +0000

This weekend was SO beautiful. The temperature has dropped to the “lovely” stage and someone sucked the humidity out with a straw. I know there will be more nastiness to come, as happens in the south, but I am LOVING these days (even 10 degrees lower would be ideal for my pregnant-furnace of a body).

We took Courtney to her first ever nerds and geeks parade, also known as DragonCon. It was quite entertaining for the adults, I have to wonder what Courtney thought of it. I can say that she hasn’t been exposed to much any science fiction so it had to be a little odd for her. Or not. But Courtney did get into it and seemed to find it all quite fascinating. Of course, the fountain she played in before the parade and all the babies she saw during the event were equally as fascinating to her and we probably could have just gone to the park or something. Then we wouldn’t have seen things like this:

Our pool went from bath tub water icky warm to frigid in the matter of 2 weeks or so. Courtney still can’t get enough pool but she definitely prefers not to get her face wet. I mean, she will, but there’s a lot of eye rubbing and hair swiping when she comes up.

Update: Our closing didn’t happen. Or isn’t happening. I don’t know what the deal is. Maybe Thursday or Friday? WTF people.

Today we close on our current home, it won’t be ours anymore as of 1:00 today. It’s kind of sad. We’re super excited for our new place and can’t wait to get it fixed up and start the next chapter. Despite the rodents and the damn driveway, this house has been good to us and this is where we have started our family. I’ll be sad when we leave. The incredibly fabulous news is that the buyer has offered us the opportunity to rent back a little bit longer, which is SUCH a HUGE relief. We were looking at potentially having a few weeks of living in my SIL’s basement with a toddler and a newborn. We were even talking about after living in the basement for a week or two, living in their lake house for another week or two (we hadn’t actually discussed this with them) so we could have a roof over our heads. When the buyer was here the other day and said we could stay longer, it took everything I had not to burst out into tears of relief on the spot. Literally. I’m sure all the young, single guy needed was some hysterically pregnant and blubbering lady in his soon to be kitchen to make him change his mind. Of course, in celebration of renting our own house, the dog barfed on the carpet, twice. At 7am of different days. Maybe I shouldn’t even be talking about this, I hate to jinx us. Fingers crossed!

Ramblings

Karen — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:21:38 +0000

This week has been long and tiring and busy and full of laughter and maybe even some tears and I am SO glad to be home.

The first day of preschool went really well. Granted, I never left the building but she was on her own for a while in the classroom. OK, not really on her own as much as with her teacher and her classmates but still, no me. She did a great job but we all know that next week is a totally different week, a totally different day. She looked so big in her class, I actually think she’s the oldest one there, but in so many ways she seemed like such a big girl. She may not have cried but I did.

We’re trying to tackle the items on our fix it list for the guy who’s buying our house. Somehow the 7th has snuck up on us and we hadn’t really done much from our list. The buyer is coming by this morning, or this afternoon, to make sure we’ve done what we said we would, I think we just made it. It will be really weird living here next week not as homeowners but as renters.

I feel like I should be packing and organizing and getting us ready to move, somewhere in a month. It feels so overwhelming. I have managed to sell a couple of things on Craigslist and I’m desperately trying to offload a broken TV, which a lot of people are interested in. I’m just not sure any one’s actually going to come and pick up the behemoth. I did manage to go through the Tupperware cabinet and pitched all the bottoms with no tops and tops with no bottoms… I’m thinking that’s not going to be enough to get us packed and moved. I did go and get a zillion paint samples and while fun and I’m VERY excited, that also won’t get us moved.

I’m going in this morning for my 32 week appointment, about a week late. I’m anxious to see how I’m measuring, if I’m still big. I feel like I’m still big. Huge. I guess we’ll see what the medical professional has to say.

Learning to fly – or jump from Karen Chatters on Vimeo.

There’s no place like home, I hope

Karen — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:25:35 +0000

It’s been a long week, on several levels. There’s been the not sleeping and the inches of rain while on vacation and the barking dogs at 5:15 in the morning and that whole “homelessness” bit. It’s been 9 or 10 days since we put the offer in on our potential next home with no word and then we found ourselves in a closed bid, bidding war which is hugely stressful. I’ve been researching short-term rental apartments and storage places and can you fit a pack and play in a refrigerator box down by the river.

And then yesterday, finally, we got word on the house. We got it!! Not only did we get it but we got it with our initial bid, the one from last week. Not the one where we had to outbid ourselves and maybe some other potential buyers and we stressed and we hemmed and hawed and tried to figure out how much we were comfortable spending and then stressing some more.

I got the call yesterday, the Realtor said we’d won the lottery. He wasn’t kidding. Because the house is a foreclosure and it’s owned my Freddie Mac, there are all kinds of incentives for the buyers. So the bank actually countered our offer with a better deal for us!! No wonder the banks are in such trouble…

The deal isn’t done. We still need to do the inspection, hopefully tomorrow, and see what happens from that. We’re expecting there to be issues, the house has been vacant for a while and we don’t really know anything about who did what and when. But worse case scenario, we put in a new AC or hot water heater and we’ll be good to go. We hope.

The timing is still terrible. We could close as late as 10/15, I’m due to have a baby on 10/18, and we have to be out of our current home by 10/7. Nothing like cutting it close. And then, there’s still a few weeks of work that would need to be done before we move in. So, we could find ourselves with nowhere to live for a few days. Or maybe with you? Or you? Or you over there?

The waiting game

Karen — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:06:38 +0000

I kind of feel like Dooce except I’m short, I’m not blond, I only have one dog, Verizon isn’t paying me any money to write anything and I’m not living in Utah and don’t think I know many, if any, Mormons. But just like Dooce, I’m having house drama.

As I mentioned we found a house. And then we spent a day going back and forth about mortgages and the best way to pay for said house and how not to lose our shirts and what should we offer and why weren’t we rich. We also met with a contractor at the house (hmmm, I haven’t heard from the contractor….) to see what they thought the cost of renovations would run and if the house had good bones. By the time we did all that, got our crap together and the realtor drew up the offer, 48 hours had passed and it was Tuesday afternoon. As the realtor went to hit the “submit” button, he checked the website one more time to ensure he had everything he needed and saw that they had dropped the price AGAIN but they also had multiple offers on the home. So what did we want to do? Awesome, so now we’re in a competing situation with others but who knows who the others are and how many others there are and what those others have offered. We went ahead and cleaned up our offer to make it as attractive and easy as possible for the bank and submitted it.

And now we wait.

All we know is that our offer was received on time. And we keep waiting. It can take from 1-5 days to hear back from the seller. And we’re waiting as patiently as we (I) can.

And in the meantime, things are moving forward on our house. The buyer came by and did the inspection yesterday and we’re waiting on their punch list. And September 7th, the closing date, looms ever closer. And we still have no where to live. We’ve pretty much decided that we’re probably going to have to rent for a while. A month or 3. Not awesome but not the end of the world. A corporate rental (aka furnished) would be ideal but could also be really costly when you factor in rent and storage of all our earthly possessions.

So who knows what’s going to happen. I can tell you one thing for sure, I’m going to have this baby at some point in the next 2 months and it will need a roof over its head. As will Courtney and Hunter and Paul and I. I’ll head out with the realtor tomorrow morning just to keep looking and exploring our options since we just don’t know what’s going to happen. And then I’m going to go on vacation and I’m going to leave it to the man of the house to keep looking and packing and nesting (which we haven’t really talked about yet, hi honey (sheepishly waving from the kitchen) but there’s for sure a honey-do list) so when I get back, life is less daunting.

Wish us luck, I think we’re going to need it!

What a roller coaster

Karen — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:00:52 +0000

This weekend has just been crazy, emotionally. We verbally finalized the deal with our pending buyers and then signed off on it on Friday. At that point I kind of lost my mind and began to really panic that we’d have no home. OK, I know we’re going to have somewhere to live when we have to vacate our home but knowing and knowing are two totally different things.

We went house shopping on Saturday for a few hours and that’s when I really started to panic. We saw crap. Some real shit, honestly. Not one home that we thought had ANY possibility. I was so high strung that a silly conversation with a friend put me in tears. And Saturday night I slept terribly. I couldn’t fall asleep, I couldn’t stay asleep, I was up before 7 on Sunday morning. It was just a bad night. We headed out again on Sunday but only had a few houses to look at and I was LESS than hopeful. Paul told me I needed not to stress out, easy for him to say. He’s not an overly emotional, 7 month pregnant woman who’s trying to nest without a home.

And wouldn’t you know, on Sunday we saw a house that has promise. I’m so reluctant to even talk about it, nothing is done. We haven’t even submitted the offer yet, we will this morning, but it all seems too good to be true. Our biggest fear is that we aren’t the only people out there that are going to make an offer and we’re going to lose it. This house has all of the things that are important to us, most importantly a good school, a yard for the kids and it’s even on a cul-de-sac. The neighborhood is really nice, it’s a pretty little area and Paul’s commute won’t get all jacked up. If we get it, I’ll tell you all about it but I’m afraid that even posting about it will jinx us and we’re going to be SOL on this house.

There are so many unknowns. Today will be a big day, lots of questions answered and hopefully some good information comes our way. Keep your fingers crossed, send us some good vibes, even pray if that’s your thing, we’re going to need it.