Homeowner's Inauguration

While it was a joke, I did mentioned it that afternoon, "Perhaps we should consider building the ark?"
We should have.

I thought mom was a little crazy for wanting to go to Kohl's in all that rain when she pulled the car out of the driveway to let me out for work. I followed behind her down our residential shortcut to 13 mile, pausing periodically to let the oncoming car go through the flooded streets first. It was still raining big fat drops at soaking speeds. I did my two quick right hand turns into Beaumont's employee entrance and found more puddles waiting for me. I had no idea how bad it really was.

This is the vantage point from the basement ceiling!

While I was at work on my first night off orientation and blissfully unaware of the magnitude that was the second world flood, my fiance unexpectedly went sailing on Ocean Woodward and swimming in Lake Princeton. His Mustang drowned at the corner of our street and forced him and Tybee to abandon the car and walk the block home. Well really, Rick waded and Tybee swam. He had onlookers on Woodward calling out to him, "Hey! Can your dog swim?"  We discovered that our new house sits at the lowest point of our street and he was welcomed home to our new indoor pool in our basement. Our brand new washer and dryer that we were so excited about getting--the washer was tipped on it's side, floating, water lines still attached and the water level was halfway up the door of the dryer. Neither had even seen a load of laundry yet.

Overwhelmed, Rick stood at our front porch wondering how he was going to get back to my parents' house with his car stalled out at the end of our street and a lake in our front yard. Rick said, "It was like out of the darkness, I saw Ryan at the end of our street wading through the water with a big beer can in each hand held up over the water surface!" It was a magical sight, I'm sure!

They took pictures and videos of the disaster in our basement. Facebook was "flooded" (ha, get it?) with similar pictures documenting the "Epic Flood of 2014". There were nurses that were 4 and 5 hours late arriving for work and nurses that were stranded at the hospital unable to get to their cars. When I got home, I learned that my dad and Rick pushed the mustang from Woodward to our driveway, Jenny was ripping up carpet, my mom was stranded at Kohl's, and my personal favorite: my little niece and nephew rode home in a kayak from I-75. My dog was so traumatized that he spent half of the day vomiting in mom's kitchen from all the stress. Mind you, this is the dog that doesn't like to walk on wet grass and he was forced to go swimming in the streets.

my mom laid out all my pictures to dry

It's a mess. Rick and I have been homeowners for barely 3 weeks and now we get to learn very quickly where our homeowners insurance's rubber actually meets the road. I can't help but think if our washer and dryer were still on back-order, we wouldn't have gotten it delivered last week. If we didn't go to the storage locker and finish emptying it out on Sunday, my high school yearbooks and memory book from my grandmother would still be intact. And my collectibles from American Girl wouldn't be ruined. While it's a big mess, it certainly could be much worse. I think about those with finished basements that are tearing up carpeting, throwing out furniture and replacing TV's and children's toys. I am thankful that what we lost seems minimum in comparison and all we may be facing is a concrete scrub down and painting. Our furnace and hot water heater still seem to be working even (we're keeping our fingers crossed!). We thank God for our families that rushed in to help with the aftermath. My dad running from one house to the next, my aunt and uncle, and even Rick's parents somehow found a way from Howell to help him make sense of our basement while I slept for work tonight. Thank you.

Our First Home

So obvious a lot has happened in the last three months. THREE months! I sure let myself go! Like I said, we've been busy!

So we walked away from that home I was so happy to write about in my last post. To make a long story short, the inspection didn't go as well as we hoped. Our inspector kept reassuring us, "Remember, anything can be fix." But for Rick and I, that advice was attached to dollar signs. Dollar signs we didn't have when you factored in the bottom line of the house. Between the 13 year old roof, the 34 year old furnace, non-updated kitchen, one cracked window, no air vents, no A/C unit, having to snake the pipes, a jimmy-rigged toilet seat, PLUS an extremely concerning 2+ inch foundation wall bowing that would require 11 support beams for resale value, Rick and I ultimately felt it was best to walk away. Yes, they say location is everything. But for us newbie homebuyers, we just felt all we were getting for our top dollar was a big bag of issues.

So that was a crappy week, after months of trying to win in real estate, we decided to walked away from our first accepted offer. To add to it, I had a crappy week at my new job. So Sunday morning when we walked into our Young Families Sunday School class and was asked how our week went, it was already pretty evident on our faces. A friend of ours from the class happens to be a real estate agent and as we were telling him this story, he pulled out his phone to show us a house he just relisted the night before after the original buyer backed out. Before he could even pull the listing up, I knew what house he was talking about. Rick and I had seen it on an MLS website that night before and we quickly gave up on it because it was at the very top of our budget. Tom encouraged us to at least go and see it that afternoon because he knew it was going to generate a lot of interest and knowing the sellers, he was sure they would much rather work with a couple like us from the church then the finicky buyer they just dealt with. Speak of the devil, just an hour later Tom got a message from that buyer saying she wanted back in. So we got our real estate agent to meet us that afternoon and like Tom's wife said we would, we loved the house. We put a bid in but I wasn't holding my breath. I was convinced we weren't going to win this house. That's what 5 out-bidded offers will do to your confidence.

Funny thing happened the next day. I received a text from our real estate agent that the buyers were accepting our offer. I couldn't believe it. I immediatly started crying. Then I called Rick who was so lovingly confused by my tears, I had to clarify they were tears of happiness. I spent the whole day crying. The day before I wasn't sure if this was the house for us but this day I was sure. Like Tom said, we weren't the highest offer but the sellers wanted to work from within the church. In the end, our connections won us our house!

Since our first accepted offer fizzled so quickly I was very guarded about this deal. In fact, I was purposefully silent about it on social media for fear it would happen all over again. So only on closing day was I confident enough that this was happening to post it on Facebook just before we walked into the real estate office. After eight long weeks of countless signed documents, several emails, and one grueling mortgage loan application later we sat down and signed about 30 different documents full of jargon and language we will never understand but all basically said we were in debt for the rest of our lives. Then our realtor Phil slid two copies of a key across the table to Rick and I. THAT was a surreal moment. We wasted no time moving in. Mom and I went to the storage locker and brought out all my "kitchen stuff" and I spent our first full day as homeowners learning how to use my dishwasher, organizing my cupboards, and cleaning my hardwood floors. The following week, we got all the "big stuff" moved in. I had furniture in every nook and cranny of mom and dad's house not to mention the storage locker. Remember the U-Hal we had jam-packed for my move back up north? I still have some furniture at Rusty and Tracy's house too! Giddy I think was the best way to describe what I was feeling as I carefully followed behind Ron's pick-up making sure my couch and mattress didn't fall out of his truck bed. Mom called this, "a happy move."

I have loved every moment of "homemaking" from washing all of the storage locker smell out of my bed linen to picking out drapes and hanging curtain rods and grocery shopping and even picking out paint colors! It was like Christmas day unpacking my boxes and rediscovering all of my things. I think the best part is knowing that all this "stuff" is going into a home I'm building with Rick. When we got done with the closing, Rick said, "This is more of a commitment then our wedding, I'm legally and finically bonded to you!" And neither one of us batted an eye before signing on the dotted line of our first home.