Housing Horrors and Staying Put

As most of you know, we had a whirl-wind couple of weeks as soon as we arrived back in Wisconsin for the summer.  Our financial advisor told us we should look for a new house to better suit our interested and our needs, and he gave us the name of a good realtor on the Thursday after we were back in Wisconsin.  On Friday we contact that realtor, and she immediately started to send us listings of homes.  On Saturday, she took us to a private showing on a house in the neighborhood of our dreams.  On Sunday, we made and offer, and on Monday, the offer was accepted.  All was good... until the inspection report came back with failures in several areas.  Long story, short:  after $2400 worth of expenses, be backed out of the offer.

Our next step was to look at brand new homes, but we soon discovered that for prices almost beyond our means, those houses did not come with tiled bathrooms, granite countertops, six-panel solid oak doors, a huge kitchen, heated bathroom floors, Kohler fixtures, or triple-paned Pella windows.  We would have had to invest $20 - $30,000 just to bring those houses up to the standards we currently own.

Since the first-floor laundry was a huge consideration for moving, our next query was to learn how much putting a laundry addition on to the back of the house and enclosing our porch into a four-season room would cost.  The answer: way too much!  One contractor told us not to put that kind of money into this house in this neighborhood.  He suggested that we take one of our three bedrooms and convert one into a laundry room.  That idea did not appeal to us since we did not want to leave our daughters with a two-bedroom house to try to sell someday.

However, I did have another thought.  Traditionally, a first-floor laundry room is located next to the kitchen and near the garage, and we happened to have a den that fit that description perfectly.  Yes, we had to move the TV into the living room, but we are adjusting to that scenario well.  Also, the plumbing for the washer and the duct for the dryer both are located right below where we want to locate the units on the first floor.  Getting the laundry installed into that room will take both time and effort, but in the end this may be the perfect solution for our dilemma.

Since we decided to stay where we are, we have to face other problems and repairs in this house.  The first thing that had to go were the dangerously large and brittle trees in the back yard.  We had an art least 120 foot cottonwood that dominated the back yard.  While it has provided good shade all of these years, it also is old, brittle, and subject to killing us or our neighbors if it happened to fall in a storm.  We also had a very leaning cottonwood at the back of the property and a smaller ash tree on the property line that we wanted to take down.  That process started on Thursday of this past week.

This huge cottonwood dominates the back yard.

A worker in a boom truck cuts off the upper
branches on the smaller ash tree.

The cottonwood before...

during...

more during...

and after they finished "topping" the tree on
Friday.  They will return to remove the trunks
and the debris on Monday.

Lots of debris needs to be removed from the neighbor's yard and from our yard.

The trees did not come down as we expected.  First, they are taking more time than the owner of the tree service anticipated, and secondly, they are in our neighbor's yard as well as in our yard.  We are going to owe the neighbor some restitution for the damage to his clothesline and his garden.  In the end, though, we will be glad to have them all gone.