Life's Little Challenges

June was a tough month.  Have I told you about our renters?  Well, they decided that they couldn’t keep up with the rent so they moved out rather suddenly.  They left behind them a pig sty.  When we bought the property we took a tour of the house, but they did a pretty good job of covering up a lot of flaws (like the pet odor smell).  We knew the property was old and poorly maintained but it was still daunting to face the work ahead.

After filling two stake-body truckloads with trash, we ordered a dumpster and proceeded to top it off with trash from the inside and outside of this house.   We’ve repainted and replaced the carpet, not to mention numerous other repairs and odor removal activities.  

Meanwhile, we briefly entertained the idea of moving into the rental ourselves since it was suddenly vacant, and putting our current home on the market, all in a month’s time with our youngest’s graduation in the mix.  We asked our realtor to come for a visit and give us an idea of what we needed to do with our current home.  She suggested a stager who would tell us to take down all of our family photos and generally de-personalize our home ~ all good advice that I’m willing to follow AFTER my baby flies the coop.  I had myself a little breakdown and told Charlie that I was not up for the challenge.  I hated to let him down and possibly miss an uptick in the home-sales market but I had not prepared myself to jump into all of this so suddenly.  He was fine with that decision.  As it turned out, we had our hands full getting our daughter through graduation festivities and preparing for the move to college, renovating the rental, holding down our regular home-building job, and beginning land development on the new lot!!!  (No grass growing under our feet!!)  

I had been looking forward to a slightly lazier summer writing my blog and enjoying my last days with my daughter.  But it’s all good.   The house is rented to better tenants and looks a thousand percent better.  It will bring us a much higher rent than we had been getting, not to mention paying customers!  I’m managing to squeeze in plenty of quality time with Princess and it’s so exciting to see the new road go in and the pond getting dredged.