Three years ago, we moved to Eagle Point, into a house owned by Shannon’s parents. It had been inhabited by renters for eight years, and was in extreme disrepair. They went away, we moved in and spent six months tearing out the damaged and broken. We replaced part of the cement slab the house sat on. We re-enclosed the south end of the house.
That’s pretty much all that happened. After two more years without further construction, the parents are impatient. Reasonably. I’d be actually pissy. We have bare stud walls, a bathroom and closet that are torn out and now used as usntructured storage space (read that as “we pile shit there”), and the kitchen/diningroom/laundry room/bathroom all have bare concrete for floors. Ugly. Dolores is coming south on Monday, with a trio of handy homeless people she knows (they drink with her when she binges) to set things right. Shannon is aghast. She can’t believe that they are going to fix the house against her obviously better judgement, that she’ll just barely get a say in color choices of paint and so forth.
She spoke with her father last night, to set things right. Her father told her that this house was, basically, their retirement fund. He hinted that, in 18 months when he retires, if we are not able to get a loan to buy it, they will sell it to someone else.
Livid. The only word to describe Shannon, although Betrayed might be in there, too. She expects that her folks will ask some ridiculous amount for ten acres near the river. I expect that they will ask for fair market value. We’re probably talking about the same thing.
Right now I don’t see how we can get from our current fiscal state to one that permits being awarded a loan for hundreds of thousands of dollars. My expectation is that we will spend the next year or so scrambling to clean up debt and save a down payment, then admit it was too big for us and have to move…or that Shannon will have a fight with her folks, trying to get them to carry the loan or some such.
Two dogs, five cats, twenty birds, hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars of landscaping left behind…I am not looking forward to this. I will say, though, that it will likely be good for us to rearrange our financial priorities.
Crossposted from Epinepherine & Sophistry