Two House Payments!

Once we found our house in the country, we had a lot to do...we had two house payments and two sets of utility payments and neither of us had a job!  My husband retired from the Air Force after 22 years, so he was drawing his retirement pay and our plan was to try and fix up both houses, the country house to live in and the Dallas house to sell.  We didn't know how long it would take to get the country house in shape and we did all this while spending 3 or 4 days at one house and driving 165 miles or so back to the Dallas house and working on it too.  Let me tell you...living in Dallas county you have a lot of choices, you have competition between plumbers, electricians, utilities...any type of vendor and you can get them on the phone...in the country, not so much.

We had a lot of issues even getting anyone to call us back when we were trying to get things done, we wanted everything done in a timely manor, it didn't happen.  We decided to try and do some things on our own to save money.  We bought a lot of paint, things to patch the walls, some things to try and repair a few small plumbing issues.  When we couldn't get a plumber, my very kind surrogate son drove out to help us with plumbing issues...he did a lot of work for us, he found more issues than we thought we had, he installed turn off valves under the sinks, replaced the spigots on the washing machine hookup, re plumbed the kitchen sink and installed the sink once we got the new countertops, reseated one of the toilets because it moved...it was not bolted down...and more.  I was patching and painting while he and my husband were running pipes and no telling what else.  We wanted the painting and repairs done before we had flooring put in...but that didn't turn out to be a problem.  We picked out flooring and the place in town could not get to us for a couple of months and it was going to take a long time to install what we wanted.  We changed our minds about that...we changed our mind or settled for a lot of things.

While we were at the country house...something bad happened at our Dallas house.  The water heater went out, well it really did more than that...it was in the attic and we had come back to the house and we were sitting there and I kept hearing a drip, drip, drip in the front hallway.  I turned on the light in the hall...water was dripping out of the light fixture onto a now wet rug.  Water was also coming through a vent and the front bathroom floor was wet.  If someone hadn't left the toilet lid up, it probably would have been worse.  My husband went into action...turning off valves, getting up in the attic, dragging hoses around, draining the water heater...and it was almost 10:00 at night on a Sunday.  I started looking for a 24 hour plumber...Bingo!  In Dallas you can do that.  They asked if it was an emergency (they charge more for that) I told them everything we had done and that it could wait until the morning (saved a couple hundred for that)...soonest appointment was something like 10:00am.  So now, because they had to replace the water heater in an attic...it cost us over $700.00!  But, we were trying to fix the house up to sell and it was a selling point...a brand new water heater that was better than the builders grade that was installed.  We asked them to fix the shower valve while they were there, but they didn't have the part needed.  My son had installed one before, so I just ordered it on-line to install ourselves...since they had to come back and fix things to pass inspection, they did end up installing it for us.

The water heater wasn't the only thing that went out at the Dallas house, we had to replace the complete HVAC system too.  We had problems with both installations.  All this was taking time away from fixing the country house and costing us money we didn't want to spend on the old house.  While my husband was in Afghanistan I had painted most of the house while he was gone, so we thought it was pretty close to ready for sale.  But we wanted to get all of our "stuff" out of the Dallas house so that when people looked at it they would see the house...not our furniture and other "stuff".  All of these trips were spent working on one house or the other, packing up the old house, and trying to find things for the country house. We did not realize what we would have to go through...it didn't go smoothly.