Mar
24
What is this “Well-Organized” Word of Which Ye Speak?
March 24, 2007 |
Yesterday was sort of a wasted day on the flip front, although I did get lots of work done at home, and knocked out the rest of my to-do list for my week off, as far as nagging chores.
One major downside to living out in the country is that the closest Lowe’s is about 20 minutes away, and the nearest Home Depot about half an hour away. I still haven’t adjusted to the fact that a round-trip eats up about an hour, as I’m used to living in Austin and zipping up the street to grab something (and, you know, zipping back when I need something else, and zipping back again when something doesn’t quite fit, etc.).
I’m just really bad about not making comprehensive lists, and shopping for whatever current project I’m working on, instead of drawing up a big honking list and shopping for the next half dozen projects. Yesterday was a prime example of that, as Lowe’s didn’t stock the slate tile I wanted, or the beadboard panels in the right size, and I didn’t bother to measure the square footage for the ceramic floor tile, so I’m scratching my head, wondering if I should just guesstimate, blah blah blah.
I ended up just buying a bunch of mortar for the patio stone, getting that out of the way as far as lugging 50 lb. sacks of mortar around, and spent most of the day working here at home, digging out the old landscape timbers used for building raised beds in front. I’d been putting the project off, waiting until I’d ordered the stone for the Main St. house.
I may actually break down and pay Home Depot to deliver a ton of stuff, to try to minimize some of the aforementioned wasted time. Or, you know, shackle myself down with leg irons and just come up with a list of what I need, for everything, and buy it all in one fell swoop. I’m obviously going to miss some things here and there, so I’m sure there’ll still be plenty of extra trips, but I need to be better about maximizing what time I do have to work on the house. I keep telling myself there’s no crushing deadline, and there’s isn’t, to some extent, but that’s no excuse for wasting time, if it can be avoided.
On the brighter side of things, utilities are turned on, roofing estimates are lined up, and I’m calling on Monday to get the gas hooked up, and then will set up estimates for replacing the furnace. I did break down and file and organize all of the documents for the Main St. property, as well as setting up an Excel spreadsheet to track all expenses and deadlines and other pertinent information.
I wasn’t sure what our personal tax return would look like this year, with the rental property for half the year throw into the mix, but we ended up getting a whopping return of $49. Big time. We still haven’t decided how to spend our windfall.
This is pretty embarassing, but we’re actually getting a pretty fat check back from Countrywide, for our property tax payment on our current home. Working with our mortgage lender for that loan was a complete and utter nightmare, as closing was delayed twice and he was all sorts of squirrely about everything, and although we told him to set it up as an escrow account, it didn’t appear at closing that he’d done that. We just wanted to be done with it, signed everything, and mentally prepared ourselves to get a bill for the property tax. Sure enough, a bill appeared, wegritted our teeth and paid it in full.
Except, umm, it actually was escrowed, so we paid the property tax, Countrywide paid the property tax, and the county appraisal district refunded one of the payments back to Countrywide. Who then just sat on it and left it in our account. So I finally managed to wade through their nine circles of customer service hell and got someone to admit that we had an overage in our account (basically the entire property tax payment) and they agreed to send us a check for it. So it’s sort of like free money, except, umm, it was ours to begin with. Let’s just focus on the getting an unexpected large check part, on not on the other embarassing details surrounding it, mmkay?
