So...I hate making self-indulgent non-MC related posts, but I get a bunch of e-mails asking if I quit minecraft. NOPE! I'm just going through some life stuff...so if you wanna see about that, read this post, otherwise CARRY ON!

So, I'm living in a temporary apartment between selling my house and moving to CA...it is a free basement apartment that my wife's co-worker has...and while I'm appreciative, it's a shithole. We have no tv or internet, so I can't feasibly play MC right now. Here's a video:

In addition to that, the closing of our house was a circus, read this summary of it I sent my parents on Friday Evening:

So, yesterday, we had 2 goals...clean the house, then move into this apartment. We hadn't seen the apartment yet. Well, I am on my way home from work when my headset buzzes on the scooter...it's our realtor and she's saying the buyer's realtors want to do a walk through right now...even though we have about 36 hours to close. She said "they're supposed to give me notice and they didn't, so you're fully in your rights to turn them away." But I'm trying to be nice, so fine...I rush home and take rygel out, tie him up, then try to talk to them a bit...there is the buyer's agent and the 2 buyers there, and they are immediately very hostile to me.

The closing contract specifies the following EXACT items:
"Shampoo the carpet" (done by stanley steamer the week before)
"Clean moss of steps on patio (powerwash)" (We rented one and did it)
"All holes from pictures will be fixed and painted" (Pay attention to this one, we did it)
"Exterior fence needs to be stabilized" (Responsibility of the HOA, completed)

Then, the "Agreed Repairs Addendum":
1) "Replace rotten wood on the exterior of the patio doors at the bottom" (from what we can tell, it was the frame around the doggy door, which we removed, but we conceded $100 for repairs on this. Done.)
2) "Add screw to loose wall socket cover in bedroom on left" (done)
3) "Rear of house requires power washing" (did it when we did the patio)
4) "Caulking on right side of stairwell going up to second level requires some new caulking" (no it doesn't, we said we wouldn't do it, they agreed.)

So...I come in, and they are standing there with crossed arms, being like "so are you going to have this professionally cleaned?" and I'm like "umm...we had the carpets professionally shampooed...but that's all the contract said to do." So they say "Well it needs to be cleaned...we have tenants coming in at 4:30 tomorrow." And I basically told them to go fish. They made snide comments about how much stuff we had left (air mattresses, sleeping bags, and clothes on the bottom floor, basically nothing) and then went up to the top floor, where that huge armoire is, and we had planned on leaving it...which they asked about, and I said that, and they said "ok, I guess we own an armoire now." Fine. They leave, I'm a little miffed, but I go to clean.

Jenn gets home from work, we load the car...go to this apartment...it's interesting. It was SUPPOSED to be an apartment once it was cleaned and drywall was put up...it will work for us but the spiders had basically taken over, it was filthy, and there's about 20% of drywall missing from all over. Plumbing and electrical is exposed, it's a mess, but it's livable for 6 weeks for no rent, and I'll repair some of it as payment for our time. He hasn't worked on it for a year, and has his tools there, so I think that will be decent payment. So the apartment has 2 doors, one exterior, one behind an interior door. The interior door uses the main key to the house, which the tenants upstairs (a 2nd year in Jenn's program...the actual homeowner is a former ER resident that graduated long ago) have a copy of. There is no key to the actual apartment, so you leave the interior door unlocked, and use the exterior door that is controlled by the main key to get in. Well, we unpack everything into the apartment...Jenn swings the door shut and it locks...this is the door with no key. Our stuff is locked inside this apartment...all our clothes, toiletries, sleeping bags, mattress....etc. Long story short, after trying to break in for a long time we got a locksmith to open it, but it was a multiple-hours mess that greatly delayed our night. I went to the house and cleaned there, Jenn went to the apartment to clean out spiders and pick up the broken glass and such.

So we go back to the house and finish packing it all up, sweep, vacuum, scrub the bathrooms, check that everything is painted, pick up the animals, say goodbye, and get back to the apartment. It was chaos...we didn't get back to the apt until 1AM, didn't get to sleep until 2. The air mattress died, so we slept in sleeping bags on the floor.

Enter today. I take rygel from the apartment to the vet to get his stitches out, he's fine. Go back to the apartment, drop him off, go to work...suddenly get a call from our realtor. The buyers have decided, due to the armoire and "improper painting" and "overflowing trash" they are going to bill us $1000 out of our escrow (started at $500, got up to 1000 by the time this was done). So we're freaking out...first, they have every chance to tell me to remove it yesterday, and even then, where are they getting a $500 fee to remove it. Second...we painted everything. So I leave work (with Jeremy) to go to the house...what they mean by paint is how when you patch and paint something, it's a slightly different texture from the existing paint that's been worn for years. Total horse-shit. Also...the trash was just a box sitting next to the trash cans, that's how the trash works there, there isn't even dumpsters. Every week people leave a giant pile of trash out front to be picked up. It was in no way excessive.

So Jeremy and I are there, and at this point Jenn is freaking out, I'm pissed, we're both exhausted, our realtor is telling us she went over and the lady is full of shit.

So, Jeremy and I plan on tearing out the armoire and then finishing painting if we need to...we stopped by the apartment and grabbed the rollers we kept, and went back to the house. The realtor for the buyers is sitting in her car, just silent. So Jeremy and I dismantle the armoire (aka rip it to shreds fast) and take it out and pile it in the car, hanging out the windows. Then I go around and try to touch up paint, but to be honest there's nothing to touch up. It's slightly lighter, maybe some of the primer is showing through...but it's clearly painted. So their realtor comes in, and I don't want to delve very much into it but there was a confrontation. Some highlights:

Her: "You didn't paint the whole walls?"
Me: "The contract says just patch and paint the holes. We did that."
Her: "But it doesn't look good, you can see where it was, you should have painted the whole wall."
Me: "Then you should have specified in the contract to paint all the walls."
Her: "We are going to have to have our tenants live in a hotel until Monday so we can have a professional painter come in...you should pay my clients a few hundred dollars."
Me: "THIS (points at walls) is enough to make them not move in? If you polled 100 people and asked if these were patched and painted, 100 would agree."
Her: "Well...we can't close like this."
Me: "If you're accusing us of not completing our part of the contract...then talk to our lawyer."

Voices were raised, we were diplomatic but clearly both aggressively posturing. It was not civil. Our realtor AND Jeremy agreed that even the worst of it still counted as "patching and painting the holes." According to our realtor...they were basically trying to extort about $1000 from us. Quite frankly, I dared her to take us to court. An hour later, they agreed to close with no additional escrow...it was absolute bull shit, they were trying to extort a thousand bucks from the young naive homeowners.

Then Jeremy and I left, dumped everything off in a dumpster, and I bought the whole office lunch for letting he and I be out for 2.5 hours.

It has been a very very stressful few days, hell, few weeks. I wanted to put this story in writing because I'm too tired to recount it again... Andy is coming this weekend so we'll be even more busy, plus we're dog-sitting for our friend's dog...plus the tenants above us are dog-sitting for a puppy as well. Welcome to chaos.

Tags: Surf's Life
This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2012 at 4:44 pm by  surfrock66 and is filed under News.
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