About two years ago we decided it was time to move. It was shortly after the boy who lives next door punched my daughter in the stomach and scratched her arm while “playing” outside and then lied when confronted about it. Since that time, we have been looking at houses and wishing. A lot happened in those two short years. I changed careers, my Dad had a heart attack and my husband’s company was bought out, leaving us with a lot of uncertainty about the future. But at the beginning of this summer, when I watched the same neighbor kid who assaulted my daughter start hanging out in our backyard directly under her bedroom window, I had to pull the trigger.
We put our house on the market with a neighbor/friend who is a superstar in the real estate market and has a ton of knowledge and skill. She and her husband work together which has been great for me and my little ball of anxiety husband because they can both show us houses and help get ours sold with all of our crazy schedules. Plus, her husband is really crafty like mine, so they can talk about any building projects that might need to take place in a new home. I am pretty sure they may want to kill us by the end of this house hunt though because my husband keeps trying to look in cities I don’t want to move to and I keep asking questions about what illegal activities might be going on in the houses we see. My husband tends to be a little more cost conscious than me so he keeps looking at houses that are within our budget and I keep asking where the hell he got this budget, because that’s my department of the marriage. Meanwhile my parents are in the background making sure the house we move into has enough room for one of them to move into, while they have two houses of their own. So you can see how working with us might be a little difficult. At the end of this adventure, we’re really going to owe them a big gift basket of sweets, booze and possibly hand guns.
Needless to say, our house sold in record time and we have yet to find our next house. The good news is, my parents have two houses, so we can always stay at the lake as long as we need to, but moving twice is not really ideal. We are set to close on the sale of our house in a few weeks which is exciting, but that also starts the time table of when we need to move out. We also found out that our homeowner’s association has a lien on our house for a dispute that was cleared up over 10 years ago. When we moved into this house twelve years ago my husband went to an HOA meeting and introduced himself to a woman named Judy Kosar who was on the board. He gave her his name and address to update the records of the association. She apparently never passed along this information and for two years we did not receive HOA bills. The next bill we got was from a collection agency for the HOA that had an extra $500 in collection fees tacked on. I argued with the president of our HOA, Bob Salloum and paid the ridiculous bill to the collection law firm of Schlottman & Wagner and heard nothing again. I asked to audit the books of our HOA the following year and was denied access by both the president and the J.P. Carroll Co. who handle the management and administration of the HOA. It is now 2023, and we still have a lien on our house that the title company has to clear up and the HOA has never answered a single question I have had or allowed me to access any records. My husband had to stop me from walking over to Judy’s house last week with a hammer to tear down the back wall of her house that has been without siding on it for several years. So thanks for doing a great job Northfield Hills Homeowner’s Association and affiliates. I hope to never have to deal with another corrupt HOA again.
We had cameras in our house while it was on the market for showings and had been watching all of the families tour our home. It was nice to see who came in and what they had to say about the house. We also got to watch our next door neighbor, the father of the kid who punched my daughter, walk through our house and take cell phone photos of our personal items like family photos and and my daughter’s bedroom. What a creep. His good friend also toured the house and their teenage kids sat on our bed with their shoes on playing video games on their phones. When their realtor put in an offer with a note that the buyers were friends with both of our neighbors, I took them off the list of potential buyers before I even saw that their offer was lower than than any of the others. We also declined a really nice couple that loved our house just because I could not bear to subject them to our neighbors. We ended up taking the highest offer from a couple who I think is going to fit right based on their communications thus far. Fingers crossed that we get through the closing with no more hiccups.
I’m not sure how many houses we have looked at so far, and I’m not sure how many more we have to go, but I know our house is out there waiting. My mom always says that God’s timing is perfect, and I believe that to be true. My husband and I deal with anxiety differently, and his coping skills are certainly better than mine, but the fact that most of our house is already boxed and ready to move is a little unsettling. He has a moving company lined up, and our basement looks like a U-Haul store, while I am picking up our normal supplies of toilet paper and bubbly water at Costco. He hasn’t murdered me yet but I suspect he may do so and bury me in the backyard before moving day. Then again, that would mean he would have to move all of this stuff by himself along with the new cat tree I bought yesterday. Like I said, we cope differently.
**I wrote this while listening to old vinyl on my new record player that my family bought me for my birthday. It was actually a gift for my kid that she talked the family in to buying me, but I’m not complaining. The kid is clever, like her mom.**
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