Where do you start when your life takes a turn for the worse? That is really a relative term isn't it? "A turn for the worse". Where do you start in explaining how we got to this point in our lives?
I would assume that you start at the beginning. It is January, 2014, and this story starts,,,well,,,way back in 2008. We were living in Alabama, both working and the ends still were not meeting. This was about the time that the housing market started to take a nose dive. Our mortgage was sold, I don't remember how many times but with every sale the payments went up and up. To most people fifty dollars a whack may not seem like much but when you are already hurting, it makes a huge dent in your finances.
The only thought was to refinance, side the house, and sell it. We did that and thought all was going to be well. Then comes along a family problem way up north in Illinois. Something that could not be dealt with from a distance. we moved. Bought a house that needed work.
Needed work is an understatement, the more we uncovered the more there was to fix. It needed a lot of work just to live in it comfortably. We soon went through all of our cash and still were not done. It was liveable but the floors were a mess. The elderly man that lived there died and his relatives were in another state. When a neighbor smelled a gas leak, the gas company came and took the meter and fixed the leak. No one shut off the water! Winter came and long story short, the water heater froze. Spring! Warm weather! You guessed it! The water heater spewed water all over the floors ruining them. Rather than fix the problem correctly, the relatives of the deceased covered it up with really thick pad and carpet.
Along comes Tim and Kim, we paid cash for this house therefore did not get an inspection. Lesson learned number one! well it took us about six months of living in two bedrooms and a bathroom in the back of the house before we had a working kitchen. Once that was finished we took on the task of replacing the awful carpet in the living room.
Ok, first you need to know where we came from before I tell you any more about this little house. We moved out of 1475 square feet into 1105 square feet. We had to put a lot of things in the attic and in the garage to fit in this little house. So we were slowly getting back to normal, or so we thought.
On the day that I decided to pull up the carpet in the living room, I thought that I had saved enough money to replace not only the carpet but any bad sub floor as well. Then I pulled the carpet! Wow, what a surprise! It was the thickest shag carpet that I ever saw! As well as the thickest pad! They replaced the sub floor with 5/8's particle board, not OSB or even tongue and groove sub floor. This was the first particle board that was ever invented. Small grain cheap as hell! Whoever did it didn't even put the joints on the floor joists. so when you stepped on it, the floor dipped dangerously. Then I noticed the difference in floor level from one end of the room to the other. There was at least a four inch drop from one corner to the other.
This only means one of two things. Either some of the floor joists were bad or the whole house has sunk on one end. The crawl pace was too tight for me to get under there so I had no way of knowing. i assumed the worst and proceeded to price out the supplies to fix the problem. Well I soon ran into a snag as you might expect in a story such as this one. It seems that all of the windows in the house were fairly new replacement windows. Albeit the cheapest one on the market at the time. Oh they were triple pane and tilted in for cleaning but the catches on either side that held them open at various heights were really cheap and all were broken. You had to prop them open with cut off broom handles.
This seemed like a small problem right? Wrong! All the windows in the house were replaced after the house dropped four to six inches! This didn't matter as far as the ones in the rest of the house were concerned, I mean I didn't care that I had to prop them open with broom handles. But the ones in the living room were a different story. if I bought the necessary supplies, and jacked the house up, there was a really good chance the windows would not open again without the use of a fork lift or other large lifting device. The front door was sticking as well so jacking the house up would probably fix that but then the windows would need to be re-hung.
Remember when I said that I thought I had the money to finish the house? Well now we were in a mess of magnificent proportions and there was no way that we now had the money to finish. Because of the flood from the water heater, there wasn't a level floor in the house. the living room, kitchen and dinning room were on sub floors. At this time we were living on one income, that of a truck driver who had to take a job at a much lower rate than I was worth because that was all there was in the area. So we placed folded paper and little blocks of wood under the furniture, put down some large rugs and forgot about fixing the floors for the time being.
The floors never got fixed! we lived that way from February 2009 up until we sold the house in December of 2013. What followed this initial chapter of our lives in HELL can only be described as just that! Hell!!!!
Stick around and you will learn how we got out of there with very little of our personal possessions and what was left of our souls. This is going to be the new classic story of escape from the hell of poverty in the state Obama came from. It isn't for the faint of heart because as I write this, we are still trying to get our lives back together. We are out of Hell but the effects are still being felt. I don't have a clue where we will end up next but we are trying to rebuild our lives one week at a time from a campground way down south.
God give me strength!
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