Gotta Keep Up

If I said things settled down after moving into our new apartment I would be lying.  We finally got around to taking our vacation, a stay-cation.  Derek and Cassie and Dallas came to town, so we were able to spend most of our vacation visiting with them.  It was great.  Until Cassie and I were riding down the road on the way to lunch with the family and a speeding vehicle t-boned my car.  After a couple bruises to Cassie's shoulder, and some Payton poop in the back seat, my car finally came to a stop.  A couple days later my car was deemed totaled.  Thankfully everyone was ok.  We did some quick shopping and purchased a 2005 Buick Rendezvous.

Life still didn't settle down.  Friday morning I received a call from my supervisor offering me a promotion to branch manager, and instructing me to start that Monday.  Sunday night, I hit the road and headed to Knoxville.  Why not move for the third time in 6 months? Hopefully this week we will be able to find a new home and get moved in this weekend. 

On the Move Again

 Things never seem to settle down around here.  The new year brought us both raises at work, Dollywood season passes, and finally a new rental home.  In April we found a 2000 sq ft house for rent  in a better part of town.  It was four bedroom, one bathroom with a decent size kitchen, dining room and living room with a beautiful fire place.  It had a large back yard for Payton to play in, and best of all a basement!  As you could probably imagine, single wide trailers are not very fun places to wait out tornado warnings.  We signed our lease agreement and moved in at the end of the month.  We used the two downstairs bedrooms as our master and guest rooms, and we used the upstairs bedrooms for a sewing room and the "man cave."  

     Now, as perfect as the house was, it didn't go without any flaws.  The bathroom left much to be desired.  Certainly, the bathroom being so small that the door only had a two inch clearance of the toilet when you opened it did create its own challenges.  And having to run an extension cord from the spare bedroom because the bathroom was without any electrical outlets was also a bummer.  But the thing we found most awkward of all was the window in the shower.  There was no special glass to blur the view or provide privacy.  It was definitely on our list of priorities to remedy.  But after hauling furniture and boxes all day in the hot, humid weather, we both desperately needed a shower that night.  Having no current solution, we decided to chance it.  Hopefully the neighbors weren't night owls.  It certainly would not have been a very pretty sight for them to see.

     All was grand after our move.  We liked our neighbors, we were enjoying the new house, and we even bought a new dining room set.  It certainly came as a surprise when the landlord called us up a month later and informed us that they had decided to sell the house and we had thirty days to move out.  The house search was back on.  About two weeks later we signed a contract for a three bedroom, two bathroom apartment on the opposite end of town.  Thankfully, we still had room for the new dining room set!  As it stands, we are averaging one move every six months.  Being as we are now in a 14 month lease, hopefully this stay lasts a little longer.

     Along with the move across town came a change of wards.  We are now in the Rotherwood ward and are loving it!  This has been our favorite ward yet.  I am currently serving in the nursery, and Will just got set apart last sunday as the assistant boy scouts leader.  His first camp out with the boys is this Friday.  I'm pretty sure he is more excited about it than I am.  It will be the second time we spend the night apart since we got married.

There's No Place Like Home

Well we certainly are not the best at keeping up with this blog.  Things have been pretty hectic lately for us though.  As for a quick catch up on the lives of William and Amber Reed:

The house hunt is on hold for the time being.  The house we were trying to buy didn't work out.  The seller was getting very impatient, and when our bank didn't have an answer within a certain time period, the seller decided to go ahead and take up her backup offer.  Six tries later, she finally sold the house to someone.  The residents next door to the house are not pleased with their new neighbors.  I told them if they run the people off, Will and I will happily move in.

After that house, we found an even better house for an even better deal!  We found a foreclosure listed at $40,000...Less than half its appraised value!  It was 1500 sq ft upstairs (3 bd, 2 bath, kitchen, living room, dining room, and office).  The mostly finished basement was another 1500 sq ft needing flooring and painting done.  There was also an unfinished bathroom downstairs needing only a toilet and a sink.  The dining room had French doors that opened onto a large, beautiful covered porch.  This house was intended to sell in a silent auction, and we had about 12 hours from the time we looked at the house to put a bid in if we were interested.  So we did.  And our bid was accepted!  After much discussion on the location of the home (45-50 minutes away from my job) we decided as much as we loved the home we needed to walk away.  So we did.  We decided to wait till February to look anymore, but after recent discussion of a possibly soon promotion, we decided maybe it isn't the right time for us to get tied down to a specific location yet. 

As for our current living arrangement, we are anxiously looking for the day we can move somewhere else.  We've been stolen from, we've had someone attempt to enter our home one morning while I was home alone.  The neighbors are in and out of jail, the police helicopter makes frequent visits hovering over our neighbors.  The neighbor's trash is constantly in our yard, plenty of domestic disputes at all hours of the night next door, and oh....lets not forget every few months the neighbors set all their mattresses out in the yard to be thrown away, because they can't seem to get rid of the bed bugs they are infested with.  And heaven forbid we have a strong wind...our home starts rocking back and forth like it's going to lift off at any minute and head to Oz.  There's no place like home...there's no place like home...

Weekend Getaway

Will and I left town for the weekend!  Will's parents invited us to join them on their gatlinburg trip.  We are staying in a very nice three bedroom, two bathroom suite at the water park's resort.  


Schedule for this morning:


Guys: golfing 
Girls: shopping


It's great to get away every once in a while.  And after waiting anxiously for an answer on our mortgage loan, we could use a weekend to de-stress a little.

Waiting For Answers

Around Tuesday I got a call from our loan officer at the bank.    He said they never received my employment history for the past two years.  I reminded him that it was the first thing we discussed when we applied for the loan and that he already made copies of the supporting documents.  I had to give him all of the information again, but he was able to locate the documents.  


Wednesday is when we were originally expecting to have our answer so Will called to check up on how things were going.  Daniel, our loan officer at the bank, said the underwriters received all the updates and he suspected they would finish sometime on Thursday. 


Thursday we waited patiently till 4'o'clock,  When we still hadn't heard anything we called Daniel again. He didn't answer.


Friday we did get a call from Daniel.  He said our application was still with the underwriters.  He said now they were waiting on a manager to approve of my second income, and they needed in writing an explanation for my job changes over the past two years.  He said they actually were counting part of my bonuses at work in my income! (Along with my hourly pay, I am paid bonuses based off of our monthly loan volume and our total delinquency).  This gave me plenty of income by myself for the loan.  


The good news: Daniel said he thinks we pretty well have this one in the bag.  He is sure we are getting approved, because there are only four underwriters for seventeen loan officers.  So the underwriters don't have time to waste on applications that aren't going to make it. 


We are hoping we will get our answer Monday.  We can't think of any more hold ups we could possibly have.  But I tell you one thing for sure, I'm ready to start packing boxes!

House Update

We recently got an update from the bank.  My employment verification has been received.  They were still waiting for the certificate of completion for the personal finance counseling I had to do, and they were waiting for the appraisal value to be transferred to the right department.  As soon as they received those two things our application will go to the underwriters.  It is estimated that we should have an answer sometime mid to late next week.

Introducing the Beverly Hillbillies

My work takes me all sorts of places.  Some days it is just around town and others it's in the boondocks of a town twenty miles away.  Sometimes the roads are fine, other times a road is to be desired.  And the most exciting part is you never really know for sure if mapquest is taking you in the right direction.  You do know one thing though, never rely entirely on a GPS.  A GPS doesn't do you much good when it can't pick up any signal.


I was driving down one road and things were going fine.  I hadn't had any navigational trouble and the roads weren't bad at all.  It wasn't long before the road I was on began to deteriorate fairly quickly.  Within a mile of turning on the road it had turned into a very narrow loose gravel road.  Shortly after the road turned to gravel I noticed an ambulance and a pick up truck speeding up behind me.  I pulled off onto the narrow shoulder of the road to let them pass.  It wasn't much use though, because they couldn't travel the road much faster than I could.  After tailing the ambulance for a couple more miles it finally came to a stop in the middle of a bend in the road.  I figured the house it was going to must be on the side of the hill to the right.  I stopped a polite distance back to wait patiently till I could pass.  That's when a jeep showed up with another emergency person.  


I watched as they loaded a very elderly lady into the back of the ambulance.  There was quite a crowd of people there.  Many of them (men and women alike) sporting mullets.  To my surprise, the ambulance just sat there.  I was wondering how it was going to get turned around and where I was going to position my car so it could get by me.  But they didn't go anywhere.  They didn't even close up the back doors.  I sat there awkwardly not knowing if I should try to pass by, turn around, or just sit there and wait.  How long could they possibly take anyway? 


It wasn't long before I realized the customers I was on my way to visit were standing at the back of the ambulance talking with the emergency staff.  I suddenly didn't know what to do.  Should I approach them and deliver my demand that they come pay their overdue bill?  Or do I try to get by unnoticed and stick the letter on their mailbox?  I didn't want to seem insensitive but their accounts were only getting further and further behind. Letting the accounts reach the point of no return wouldn't help them deal with whatever they may have going on at the moment.  I decided to call my manager to get her opinion.  But of course, I had no cell phone reception.  It looked as though it was my decision to make.  One of the emergency guys walked up to my car and said there may be enough room to squeeze by the ambulance...I considered for a split second handing him the letter and asking him to deliver it for me.  But there was no way I could get turned around to flee the scene.  So I hung my head as much as possible and still be able to navigate successfully around the ambulance.  


To my surprise, there was no house where the ambulance had parked.  But it was clear to see the woman had been transported from her home (where ever that was) to the ambulance by horse and buggy.  I had to creep behind one man headed down the hill on his buggy until he pulled off.  The houses along the road looked mostly abandoned with random windows boarded over, doors hanging open, and furniture laying carelessly around the properties. I finally found the mailbox of the sought after customers.  There was neither door nor flag on the mailbox.  the numbers were faded, peeling, and barely visible.  I decided not to try and make my way up the dirt, rutted driveway to the shack that couldn't be seen from the road.  I parked in the middle of the road (because there was no shoulder to pull off on) and found a place to secure the letter in sight.  More cops had shown up by the time I got back up the hill to where the ambulance still sat.  What exactly happened to the woman, we may never know.  We have yet to hear from the customers. Looks like another trip to the hills may be in my near future.  I wonder what I'll encounter next time....