I meant to post this days ago, but it seems like the days are getting away from me. This process has been really involved every emotion you can think of and unfortunately this week there was a lot of sadness, angst, stress and anger.
I won’t go into all the details, but we decided to put one of our feral cats down after he started becoming increasingly aggressive. It’s something that has been a problem for a while now and all the activity and strangers in and out of our house were causing a real problem for him. It was a very hard decision because he was a good cat when no one else was around and it makes me feel guilty and selfish that our decision to do this project contributed to his behavior.
Mike buried him near the barn and I had a little talk with him that night when I got home from work (Read: I bawled my eyes out while no one else was there to watch). I then spent the rest of my night burning off my sadness and anxious energy by hauling boxes into the garage. I went to get myself a beer and the fridge as a reward, but it wasn’t cold. The fridge was busted. At 10pm I was off to the Maverick to buy ice so we can save our food. Fortunately, it was pretty slimmed down because we are expecting to be without power for a (hopefully short) period of time next week between when they turn off utilities to dig and when they get temporary utilities in place. We replaced the motherboard in the fridge about a year ago– lesson here is that I am never buying LG appliances again. A dryer, fridge and crappy dishwasher later.
We were hoping to have this fridge in the garage so we weren’t stuck with a tiny trailer fridge the whole time, but we’ll have to figure out something else. I literally cannot spend brain energy on this right now if I am going to keep functioning and get us moved out of the house on time.
This all happened on Wednesday. I had no idea that Thursday would get worse. We were back and forth with the loan company about the construction loan and the insurance that was needed and who talked to who and blah blah blah. We NEED to close by the end of the week because heavy machinery will be at my house Monday at 8am to dig a giant hole. If we don’t close and they dig, we’re spending money that we don’t actually have. That’s a problem! No one was actually willing to commit that we would close Friday so that was pretty stressful.
Then, I got a call about 3pm Thursday that they miscalculated the loan amount. They forgot to adjust the payoff amount on our HELOC to the correct number from our last meeting. We had to choose whether or not to fix it and delay closing or bring $4,500 to closing. We decided to find the money (I just added a money tree to the plans!) and continue with the closing Friday since the ramifications could be even more costly if we don’t close.
Early on in this process I was reading some posts on reddit that talked about keeping as much of your cash liquid as possible going into a home renovation and I’m really thankful for that right now. I changed the way I managed our money in the last 6 months knowing that this project was coming and it really saved me this week, even if it doesn’t make it sting any less.
I watch all those shows on HGTV and think that home renovations seem really stressful and they must just be editing it for added drama. Nope, it’s really just that stressful and the project hasn’t actually started.
I hope Boggle has found a spot in the sun to warm his giant belly.
