New Beginnings.

I am now, at the age of 64, on par with the guy who lives with his mom in the basement. I really wish that I had kept a better record on how I got here, but I will try to reconstruct events in a truthful way that will probably seem to some like a missing chapter of Big Fish.

Here goes…

We lost my Dad the first week of January, and toward the last of the month we found a home in Florida that we both liked, so desperately in need of a vacation, off we go to take a look. That house had a pending offer before we got out of Georgia. We were new to dissapointment, and we were only trying to get an idea of what was out there anyway, so with a song in our heart and a positive attitude, we continued along to the Promised Land of sand and sunshine.

There is a couple of movies/tv shows that come to mind for some reason… Jurassic Park, where one of the charactors is up to their elbows in shit, and an old episode of Star Trek, where Spock is admiring a beautiful flower that just shoots toxic needles at him completely out of nowhere.

We spent our first night in Venice, and the next morning drove by a couple of homes I had been following on Zillow. We found a wonderful place that served awesome seafood and decided that we weren’t going to get very far without a real estate agent. So, in addition to Wayne and my wife Sheila, I would like to introduce our new real estate agent, S.

S has been wonderful through this whole house hunting process and the very first house she took us to see, we both fell in love with. We looked at a few others but we ended up putting an offer in on that first house… We got it.

My oldest grandson wanted me to take him fishing a couple of years ago, and after around thirty minutes or so, he caught a huge bass and a monster of a catfish. Beginner’s luck my friends…

We did everything we needed to do that week and actually got what may have been the lowest rate possible, 2.32%. We headed back home with the knowlege that we would be living in Florida in a month.

This is where everything went sideways…

In the crazy Florida real estate market, and completely unknown to us, there is a selling price and an actual value price. This house that we had a contract on appraised for way less that what they wanted, so we went back into negotiation with the sellers per contract and the guy got mad and tore up the contract.

I’m not sure that this has anything to do with it but the guy was Canadian. Canadians don’t negotiate worth a shit.

We made another trip to Florida right after that to bid on virtually a better version of the very same house and we did not get this one. We realized at this point that we could not continue to travel back and forth and stay in hotels every time we wanted to bid on a home. We were basically taking one expensive vacation right after another. Our solution was to rent and by doing that, we would be there, and be able to see new homes quickly as they were coming on the market. We found an apartment but it was a lot more expensive than listed, a lot smaller than the pictures on line and we just said ok, take our money and we will move in tomorrow. They did take our money but we needed to pass a background check before we can give you the keys. We were happy as clams. Next day they tell us that they can’t get in touch with the Leitchfield police department to make sure we don’t have a warrant and we are like “You don’t know how to make a phone call or is there just nobody taking phone calls in Leitchfield?” We are a day and a half into this fiasco, with all of our stuff in the car because we checked out of our hotel room, fully expecting to drop everything off in our new apartment… did I mention that we spent part of the day shopping for that new apartment?

A nagging feeling had been with me all day. I was wondering if all these roadblocks were because our Creator was saying no.

We pulled into a little strip mall, looked at each other and Sheila was thinking the same thing. One last time, Sheila called their office and once again… we don’t know how to call Leitchfield.

In A Christmas Story there is the scene where Ralphie is beaten and totally devastated by the reality that he’s not going to get the one thing he wants the most. And the neighborhood bully pushed him a little too far at exactly the wrong time….

Sheila told that woman over the phone that we were going back to Andyland, and that we were both gun owners with carry permits and they better have our money from the security deposit and downpayment ready when we got there to pick it up, they said ok, Sheila said good, and before we got there we get a call back saying that we don’t even have to come get the money… they gonna just send us a check and pretend all this never happened.

I don’t know if they thought we were coming in with Red Riders or what, but even though they never figured out how to call Leitchfield Kentucky, they were very good at calling Sheila’s phone.

This was a second low point in this process but not the last. We kept looking on line for homes, and decided to just start bidding on homes from home. S would do the leg work, facetime the houses, and we would bid against dozens of others who were doing the same thing. We quickly discovered that appraised value had no meaning when bidding against people paying with cash. If we were serious about moving to Florida we were going to need cash. We put our beloved cabin on the market on a Friday, and on Tuesday we had a contract. A short time after that we bid on a beautiful home in Punta Gorda and won! Interest rates were beginning to climb but we were still able to lock in at 2.76 and we were so happy. Everything is falling into place. On the morning we were closing on our cabin, we took our check to the bank and headed to lunch to celebrate being able to put a nice downpayment on our new home. S calls us just as the food is coming out with the news that the sellers want out of the contract. Personal reasons.

We went from being in our beautiful home in less than a month to homeless, all over a catfish dinner with onion rings.

Lots of near misses after that. Bad houses, over priced houses, and I was getting worried we were missing out on low interest rates. I could see the window closing on us.

Sometimes the best way to see things from a spiritual perspective is to look backwards. I believe with all my heart that everything happens for a reason. I also acknowledge that believing that doesn’t remove much of the stress of the unknown.

For some reason I will never attribute to luck, a new area populated on Zillow that I had never seen before. How had I not noticed this wonderful place in my hundreds of searches? I found a beautiful home there and saved it. Good thing that I did because it never came up again, and I couldn’t remember the name! We bid on that house but didn’t win it, but we did tell S to add this area in our search because the more we researched the more we both really loved the area.

When I originally wrote the above paragraph I used the area’s name five times and that seemed a little excessive so I rewrote it and left the name out completely….

ROTONDA WEST…

We tried to consider a house or two in other locations but I had this place in my gut, and then the our home came on the market. We closed on our forever home on July 2, 2021 and still have not seen it, and probably won’t until September, but that’s ok. Life is good. God is better.