I'm back...finally

It's hard to believe I haven't posted on this blog for three months. Three months! But even my primary blog (family blog) has really suffered the past few months.

We've been in the midst of trying to sell our house, and man, has it been a nightmare. I should have posted my entries about it here, since it is mostly a financial decision, but I posted it to my family blog and now I regret it. I got some unnecessary comments (your house will never sell! Never! The market sucks!) and finally just took the posts down.

So, here is a summary of what we have done so far, and a look at our financial downfalls.

1. We spent more than we needed to fixing up the house, and a lot of that money went to fixes that then needed to be fixed.

We asked our realtor to recommend someone to help us fix a lot of little things around the house, and she recommended a three-man handyman team to us. Sensing we didn't want to spend a lot of money, she recommended guys who worked for cheap.

Big, big mistake.

I rarely pick the lowest bid when I have someone bid on a home improvement project because I find that people who bid too low tend to do shoddy work. It just goes with the territory -- if you're working for bottom dollar, you don't work as hard. So, I tell the person I pick that they weren't the lowest bid but they emphasized quality and that's what I am paying for.

Well, I went with what the realtor recommended this time and it slapped us in the face. The three guys were lazy, charged me by the hour (and worked slowly) and I had to go along behind them and fix things they did wrongly or poorly -- setting up a dishwasher incorrectly, painting house trim sloppily (still need to fix this), not cleaning up after themselves (they dumped red paint in my backyard the day before my open house -- impossible to get out and looked like a bloodbath in my backyard). The final straw was when they asked for their last checks and when I went to check their work, only half had been done and what had been done was sloppy. So, I canceled their checks ($60 charge), had an estimate done on what their work was worth and paid only that. I then had to pay someone else to fix the dishwasher, and because they had smoked cigarettes in the house (yes! cigarettes!) I had to repaint the living and dining room and most of the ceiling in the area where they worked, pay to have the carpets professionally cleaned again ($130 loss) and I had to clean filters and scrub floors to get the smell out. The money was one thing -- the mental anguish and extra work another. This lesson learned -- pay for the guys who do good work.

2. Poor planning.
We seem to be buying stuff and then rebuying and then rebuying again...for example, we had the carpets cleaned twice ($340 total) and now we are replacing the carpets because they are just too worn, so we take a $340 loss. If we had planned ahead and thought things through, we would have done this from the start. After all, I've lived there five years and am fully aware of the poor condition of the carpets.

I painted the kitchen cupboards -- a huge project that took two weeks -- and I couldn't figure out why it was taking so long or why the paint kept peeling off. Turns out I was supposed to use oil-based paint instead of acrylic, something that neither my realtor nor any of the handymen mentioned, and now the cupboards will, at some point, need to be resanded and repainted. Again.

We elected not to fix the cement slab that makes up the front porch but it looks so cracked that we went out and bought bamboo mats to cover it. The mats were $100 and we didn't realize the Tucson sun would make quick work of them, so they are already warping and crumbling after only 6 weeks. We will probably have to throw them away and resurface the concrete anyway. Resurfacing will cost around $350 (if we can do it ourselves), but the extra $100 means we will spend $450.

3. Financial consequences
All in all our credit card bill has gone up around $8500 since we decided to put the house on the market, plus the cash we've paid for fixes. Now we are in a place where we either have to do some major renovating and move back in, or reduce the price of the house severely and sell it for cheap. Since we can still rent out the guesthouse and that will pay for a home equity loan, I am planning to move back in, but it kills me because when we put the house up for sale again (we plan to relocate in the next year or so) we will have to do it all over again. It isn't possible to live in a house with kids and not need to paint and fix everything before putting the house up for sale, and right now my house at least is clean, painted and mostly empty. Our lease here is up in August, however, and we can't keep paying rent and a mortgage indefinitely. I am resigned to it and a small part of me thinks it will be nice to have a clean, mostly-repaired and freshly painted house to live in again.

We learned a lot of hard lessons throughout this whole process, but I also learned to be more grateful for my home. I've looked at a lot of other houses in the same price range and I realize, now, that I really have a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood. We have family nearby and never need to worry about someone breaking in or trespassing on our property because we know all our neighbors. The rental we are in now was broken into a few nights ago while we were sleeping -- I heard the intruder and the person fled, thankfully, without confrontation (and nothing was missing). I am not the sort to be intimidated by this sort of thing (I don't have any illusions of safety in the first place and I know that random theft and violence happen) but I realized that we are more protected in our other house because of its location. I also am grateful for the air conditioning that we installed four years ago -- we have swamp cooling in this house, and boy, it's hot right now. Swamp coolers drop the temperature about 20 degrees, so in Tucson, when it's 110 degrees outside like it is now, the temp inside only drops to around 90 degrees or so. I had forgotten what life was like sweating under a fan all night, and I am anxious to sell and then move elsewhere, or to go back to my lovely air conditioned home.

If and when I do, I want to walk around and enjoy my grassy back yard (grass!), my fully functioning showers (one shower here does not work and the other is so small we can't bend over but must crouch down to pick anything up), and the comfort of knowing exactly where everything is. I plan to replace floors, add shelving in the kitchen, resurface the hall bath and add a kitchenette to the guest house before we move back in, all as part of the home equity loan. I guess one more silver lining came out of this -- we have been so frugal the past five years we haven't wanted to put a lot of money into upgrading our house (we've mostly done sweat equity, landscaping and fixing things that were really, really broken) and this is sort of forcing us to do this. You can see the free fall on my net worth to the right though -- it isn't cheap, and we are giving up our financial goals in order to do it.

The good news is that all this work means our house will be worth more and hopefully will fetch a better price when we do sell. I'm keeping my fingers crossed the investment will work out.