Holly’s Happenings

And before you ask, no, the house hasn’t sold! We have a good friend that lives just around the corner from here and his girlfriend has been pestering him to get the remodeling done on his house so that he can sell it. But the fact is, he doesn’t want to sell it! The current real estate market is in bad shape and with the amount of work that needs to be done on the house, he’d have to invest about $25,000 in it right now to even get a decent amount out of the house. On top of that, he bought this house more than 10 years ago as his “retirement” house.

It’s a cute little house that sits on a little more than 5 acres of land. The house itself has a little more than 1,500 square foot of living area, basically the same amount of room we have here. But right now, it’s in complete disarray! Our friend has been working on it, little by little, for about 5 years now. The walls are currently nothing more than drywall and the floors are nothing more than sub floor. He’s gone over all of the wiring and plumbing in the house and is currently finishing up the wiring and insulation in the attic. Once he gets that done it will be a matter of getting all of his clutter out of the house, then he’ll start working on all of the finishing work.

Right now he has a brand new kitchen and bathroom, complete with some really sweet looking Hansgrohe faucets, sitting in boxes in the dining room. So we told him that we’d come down and help him get both rooms installed and get the painting done, in lieu of a deposit. The house will still need more work done after we move in, so part of the rent will be “taken out in trade”, in other words he’ll provide the materials and we’ll do the work.

The best part about this house is that it gets us out of the horrific school district we’re currently living in! We’ve lived in this school district for the past 5 school years and it’s literally been a nightmare! Rather than putting the focus on important things like making sure the kids get a good education, they’d rather put the focus on a ridiculous uniform dress code and whether or not the kids are wearing a shirt to school that has a logo on it or whether or not they have a frigging belt on. But it gets even better! Depending on who you are in the eyes of the school administration staff, you can actually get away with wearing what you want to because the uniform dress code is NEVER administered across the board. One child can get into trouble for wearing something and another child who is wearing the same thing or something worse will get away with it. And the school is so poorly underscoring that it’s currently rated in Academic Emergency. But hey, at least the students all look the same, that’s what’s important, isn’t it?

We got some news yesterday, news that we really didn’t want to hear. Our landlord has decided that he’s going to put up a for sale sign on the house. He’s not going to deal with a Realtor right now, he’s just going to try to sell it himself and see what happens, then go from there.

While we have been talking about wanting to move for a while now, I just don’t know if it’s something we can do right away, especially with not knowing what’s going on with my hubby job wise. Yes, we could check out some mortgage quotes online, but we’re honestly just not in a position to buy something right now. And renting something else, with four dogs, well, that’s NOT going to happen! We got lucky finding this house when we did! So I don’t know what we’re going to do right now! I guess the only thing we can do is start looking around. maybe we could find a way to buy this house, but I’m not going to hold my breath on that one!

We’re just two weeks away from the date we take the kids out to spend four weeks with their sister. I know it’s going to be very strange around here with the kids gone, it’s the first time in their lives that we’ve been apart for more than a week or so. But I think that the break from each other is going to do us all some good, or at least I hope it does!

Anyway, if things go well over the next few weeks, my husband and I have decided that we’re going to take a little get away of our own while the kids are gone. Nothing expensive or glamorous, just something fun that will let us get away for a few days! If we can swing it financially, we’d like to go somewhere that’s a few hours away by plane.

I was sitting here talking to him about it when our daughter came out. The minute she heard something about us wanting to go somewhere that would require us to fly I swear she almostt had a cow! She started going on and on about how she didn’t want to be out at her sisters and get the news that something had happened to us, but that in case it did we really needed to make sure we had good term life insurance so that she’d at least be financially set and could afford this and that and this and that….LOL!

She’s a fruitcake, but I love her! She just worries about things that most kids her age don’t worry about! I know it’s because of the fact that we haven’t gone away from the kids, but she really needs to just chill out! So anyway, cross your fingers and think good thoughts, we’d really love to be able to do something like this! It’s just a matter of being able to afford it AND being able to find someone that could some and stay with the dogs or someone that lived close enough that they could actually stop over every few hours to let them out and make sure they had food and water!