Tag Archives: new house

Update. Holy Hell. Where To Start?

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Since I can’t get in touch with Contractor #2, I have reached out to Contractor #3. He has given us a reasonable bid on the little things that still need to be done in the new house. I think he feels sorry for us because of what happened last Wednesday night. Let me tell you the story:

It was around 11:45 pm and I was thinking about getting settled in my lift chair for the night. Alice was sleeping in Dad’s chair as she does most nights after Dad goes to bed. I just happened to look up and notice she was staring at the wall. She decided to jump down, and as soon as her front paws hit the floor, the ceiling just above the chair fell in! Yes, you read that right. The ceiling FELL IN, and all I could do was scream. There was dust from the old insulation everywhere. I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out of there! Old, decaying wood pieces and ceiling paint all over the place. My cats are all fine. They skidaddled out of there so fast, you’d have never known they were even there! I’m just thankful that Dad had already gone to bed.

Dad didn’t sleep a wink that night. I had nowhere else to sleep but my chair. I wore a mask to keep from breathing in any ick while I slept. I never saw Jack or Alice until the next day. BobCat slept in my lap. Every time he woke up, I woke up. He was always looking at the wide open HOLE in our ceiling. There was a small rat or a big mouse that kept running back and forth on the wall edge of the hole. BobCat and I watched him several times during the night. I kept the TV and my lamp on, thinking it would keep the critter movement at a minimum. I sure didn’t want any rat-mice falling through the hole!

The next morning, Thursday, I texted Contractor #3 and sent him a photo. I asked him if he could help us. He said he’d be there that day, and he was here in an hour. He brought his crew, and they hauled off all the debris. They even vacuumed! Before they left, they covered the hole with plywood. Bless his heart, he didn’t charge us a dime!

Here’s what it looked like after it caved in. The wall has been cracking and shifting for quite some time, so it was just a matter of time before this happened. Dad would be in the hospital or worse if he had been sitting there.

Here’s the after photo:

Don’t mind Dad. He’s bent over, putting all of his “stuff” back into the disarray it was before. I swear, all he could worry about was his “stuff,” and I told him that his “stuff” should be the least of his worries.

Contractor #3 is coming this Thursday or Friday to work on our new house. It’s good to be able to count on someone to help us when we need help.

As soon as the little things in the new house are finished, we’ll know how much we have to spend on kitchen cabinets, sink, and countertop. I know it won’t be a complete kitchen right away, and that’s ok because I have been through hell in this old house, so I know I can survive without a completed kitchen!

Until next time,

Update or Yes, I’m Still Alive But Not Well!

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Holy cow! I haven’t posted here since February!! That was when our well pump went out and had to be replaced. It got done, thank goodness. I will try to update you all the best I can.

Firstly, Dad is doing well, although feeling a little sickly today. He’s had Home Health nurses and physical therapists come to the house all this time, and I’m glad. I need some kind of support while taking care of him. Having extra eyes on him really helps me know that we are doing ok. It also helps when the nurse or therapist tells Dad the same thing I’ve been trying to tell him, but he won’t listen to me. He listens to them!

In February, I started to get this ‘extra’ pain in my left leg. Thinking it was because I had been doing some lifting and moving boxes around, I thought I had just worked my muscles that I forgot I had. The pain went away, but then it came back again. It started coming and staying longer and hurting worse…so I was worried. Just about a week ago, I was massaging my leg and found a mass behind my knee. My first thought: BLOOD CLOT. It didn’t present like a blood clot exactly, so I thought I had to be wrong. Well, I made an appointment to see my Nurse Practitioner. I just knew she would send me to the ER, and I can’t do that. Not with Dad. He can’t sit in a waiting room for hours and hours, and I can’t leave him home alone. So, I worried about that a lot. To my relief, it is not a blood clot. It’s a LIPOMA. Mina, my NP, said that many people have lipomas and don’t even know it, or they know, but it’s not causing concern. It’s a genetic thing; my Dad has had a couple of them. I also have at least 2 more that I’ve had for most of my life. A lipoma is just a fatty deposit that looks like chicken fat – her words. It’s a noncancerous fatty growth that develops just below the skin. The problem with a lipoma is when it interferes with nerves and muscles. That’s when it causes pain. I asked Mina how sure she was that this mass is not a blood clot, and she said, “I am 99.9% positive!” She wants me to have an ultrasound next week to see how deep this little bastard is. Mina said I was doing everything right: Compression garments, blue ice packs, elevation, and rest. She gave me some lidocaine patches to try, too.

Our new house is coming along. Slower than I’d like, but it takes time. When the guys you’ve hired have other jobs going, too, we have to wait our turn. Contractor #3 installed the pressure tank for the well in the laundry room. Now, to get Contractor #2 to come finish up a bunch of little things, so we know how much money we have for kitchen cabinets!! Hopefully, Contractor #2 can get those installed for us, too. Then, I think…fingers crossed…we can think about moving! 😬

Life will be so much easier in the new house. I will be able to move through the house in my wheelchair more freely, and stand only when necessary. Yes, it’s that bad. I will have to find help, either through my insurance or some other way.

Anyway, that’s about what’s been going on. Just trying to get through each day. I look forward to bedtime every night, and even though I get around 7 or 8 hours of sleep, it feels like it’s just not enough. 😴

Take care, my friends. I hope life is treating you well. Until next time,

The Outhouse and Update

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Funny, not funny… More like embarrassing, disgusting, depressing, and irritating!

Several months ago, our toilet decided it was going to spring a teeny-tiny, itty-bitty, slooow water leak. Contractor #1 tried to fix it, thought he had fixed it, in fact. It was not fixed. We were going to have Contractor #1 look at it again, but we never saw him after that. That was in May, I believe.

In June, we were hopeful that Contractor #1 would be coming to work on the house and that we would ask him to look at the toilet leak again. We didn’t know at the time that he had no intention of coming back, so we just waited and put up with the water leak. It was very slow, after all. Then the freakin’ toilet decided it wasn’t going to flush anymore. I turned off the water to the toilet at this point. We used a pitcher of water to flush the damn toilet after that.

Dad fell and had a heat stroke in July. Up until then, I expected Dad to find another contractor to finish the house. It’s his money so it’s his responsibility, right? He should be making the decisions and hiring people because I know nothing about building a house and hiring people. I don’t know what’s a fair price to pay for this or for that. But now, it was up to me. Dad was in the hospital and didn’t come home until the beginning of August. By then, I had made arrangements to get the car fixed: alignment, new tires, and a/c. It was in serious bad shape! With the help of Other Daughter, I even found Contractor #2, who has finished up the house nicely! (Update at the end of this post.) I decided that, as big a pain in the huge royal ass it is, we can suffer with the toilet having to be flushed with a pitcher of water, because why spend the money on a new toilet or whatever would need to be done when we would be in the new house soon? That would be money better spent on the new house!

So, here we are, mid-November. We are still flushing with a pitcher of water. The bathroom always stinks like an outhouse. It’s like having an inside outhouse! I hate it! I hate it when someone comes over! Even close friends and family. I light candles (good candles) when I think someone is coming. When we move to the new house, it’s going to be weird having a flushable toilet! There are many things we’ll have to get used to. That might make an interesting post later on!

Anyway, the house is nearly ready for move-in. The HVAC is the last big thing left to do. The HVAC guy is always busy, but he said we are on his schedule for next week. Fingers crossed. Hmm… Maybe kitchen cabinets are actually the last big thing we’ll have to do. IF IF IF we have any money left over, that is. Even if we can’t get all the cabinets we want, we’ll make the kitchen usable. I can deal with it, being that it is a much better situation than this old dump of a house we are in now. We also need to go pick out a stove and a stove hood. I have some new furniture that needs to be put together, too. My new medicine cabinet needs to be hung in the bathroom. There are a few little things to be done that may or may not wait until we move in.

Of course, there’s still the flooring and trim that have to be done later. If we had done it after painting the interior, as most people do, it would have taken at least $6,000 for vinyl planking, plus labor! That would have taken a lot out of our funds, and we definitely wouldn’t be as far along as we are now. Nothing wrong with plywood floors for now. 

When the day comes that we will be moving into the new house, we can finally say goodbye to the inside outhouse! I can’t wait! (It gets old after a while!)

It’s a busy time of the year, friends. Pay attention and wear your seatbelt!

Until next time,

Shut In and Shut Out

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When my sister leaves, I’m on my own. That’s not a bad thing necessarily because I’ve always been on my own. I’ve always had to do things on my own. The problem is that I can’t expect Dad to go with me every time I need to go somewhere, and I don’t feel good about leaving him at home, alone.

Now that Walmart is offering “home delivery” in my area (out in the middle of nowhere), I don’t even have to do “curbside” orders anymore. That really helps because it will save money on gas, wear and tear on the car will be minimal, and we don’t have to leave the house.

There are other places I will need to go, such as the Dollar Tree, the local grocery store, clinic for appointments, vet’s office, and perhaps to the hairdresser’s for a much-needed haircut. I have no desire to go anywhere to socialize, so I guess I’m good.

I think we are basically what they refer to as shut-ins. I’m disabled, Dad is elderly, and we rarely leave the house. It’s depressing. I try not to fixate on the issue because it just makes things worse. When we do go out, we’ll have to do one thing at a time. No more doing all errands in one trip to save gas. It’s too much for Dad. On Wednesday, we went out, and it really sucked the life out of him. We went to the Dollar Tree where he insisted he’d walk, then the grocery store for just a handful of items. Again, he insisted he would walk. We then stopped at the pharmacy and the liquor store, both of which had drive-thrus. On to have lunch at one of our favorite places, Vaccaro’s Pizza and Pasta. The next day, Dad was still exhausted. It wasn’t until yesterday that he felt more himself.

So, shut-ins we are. I got to thinking about it, and we are basically shut out, as well. We don’t see relatives who are close enough to visit. We aren’t invited to birthday parties, even though we probably wouldn’t go. An invite would be nice, nonetheless. It would show that they are at least thinking of us. We have both lost touch with friends. Friends who have jobs or take care of their grandkids. Friends who have lives, unlike ours. Ever since I became disabled and Dad became elderly…I don’t even know when that happened…we have drifted away. Anyway, we are shut out of many things.

Things are going to change for us soon. I mean, we may still be shut in and shut out, but we will be moving to the new house. Move-in day is still up in the air, but I can see the end of the tunnel now. My sister will come back to stay, unless she changes her mind. I think I’ve driven her a bit crazy with my bitchiness, but that’s another post.

Until next time,

Into September…

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Here we are. It’s September already. The last 2 months have been a blur. From Dad’s fall, to family drama, to Dad’s recovery, to car repairs, water problems, to well, today.

Dad is doing much better. Having physical therapy helped him more than anything else, in my opinion. After the first PT visit, he started getting better faster! I think once he was shown that he could do more, he started doing more. The more he did, the better he felt, and the more independent he became. He’s walking to the bathroom with his cane, and we have ventured out a few times. My sister being here has helped tremendously, but when she leaves in 2 weeks, Dad and I will be on our own. I won’t have any help or support. God forbid if I ask for help! So, I will be doing things on my own.

My “other daughter” suggested a contractor to help get the new house done. I think I called him Guy #3 in a previous post. He got materials on Monday and started working on Tuesday. He spent 4 days working on getting the electrical outlets and switches installed and the breaker box all figured out. (Guy #1 didn’t label properly!) This coming week Guy #3 is going to install the ceiling fans and lights, and recessed lighting. When the electrical stuff is finished, he’s going to move on to hooking up toilets and a vanity, which I have yet to get. Oh, the decisions I will have to make! Anyway, “other daughter” has said that she really respects Guy #3’s work ethic and that he’s very fair. I need to get a hold of Guy #1 and ask him to bring over the HVAC units we have already paid for. I can’t wait to get attitude from him for asking and/or hiring someone else. You can imagine what I’ll tell him, I’m sure. My old Granny used to say, “Shit or get off the pot!”

I started this post this morning and stepped away for a bit. It’s 5:00pm, and I’m just now getting back to it. Here’s just a little indication of how quickly things can change. Read on…

After the lunch dishes were done and I was headed back to my chair, I noticed a never-used pop-up screen on the TV, and I told Dad to push “exit,” and I thought he had because the pop-up went away. But it popped up again. I got next to Dad’s chair and reached down for the remote in his hand, and he had a pretty good grip on it. When I looked at his face, something seemed off. His eyes were open but glassy, and he was leaning to the left. I thought he was just dozing, and maybe he was, but something told me to check more closely. I kept saying, “Dad. Dad. Dad.” He wasn’t responding. About that time, my sister jumped up to help. We fussed with him for what must’ve been at least 15 minutes, trying to wake him up. He finally started to respond, but his speech was slurred. We were frantically rubbing his chest, patting his cheeks, moving his arms around, etc., anything to get him to snap out of it. He finally did, but boy, did it scare the crap out of my sister and me! He did that to me once several months ago, but it didn’t take that long to wake him. I swear, my sister and I thought we were losing him. Dad is fine now, but that’s how quickly things can change.

I think part of the problem is that he’s not sleeping well. The hospital bed is not comfortable. He bitches about it all the time. Last weekend, I asked my son to come get it this weekend, but he has yet to show up. My sister leaves in 2 weeks, and I will need her to help me get his room set up so he can sleep in there in a real bed!

I will say goodbye for now until next time,