House on Hold...

Quick blog today to get the numbers in...

I mean, to update you all on how the final details with the house are going. 

I'm waiting to hear back from the HOA on a few things in the front yard. They wanted us to remove a few plants and a rock border. The rocks weren't ours but we let our neighbors know and they took them out. We didn't want to tell the HOA that they weren't ours because we didn't want them to go after our neighbors for unauthorized beautification. But I don't know which plants exactly they want pulled out so I'm on hold to finish there. 

Also waiting on the landscaper to get back to me on what exactly he planted everywhere. I'm not making a giant fuss about the fact that it doesn't match the plans he originally gave us, because there just wasn't the room to plant what he had laid in there. Which I thought all along that he had a plan for a bigger yard. Like he added about a foot of width to his blueprint. Which should, again, make me kind of mad, but it doesn't because I think the yard looks good and that's really what I was after. But I'd still like to know what he planted. 

Amazing how slow people are to respond once you've paid them in full.

We are waiting on the back porch. The company that builds the screens is based out of Florida and hurricane Ian wiped them out. So our October date got pushed to December. Which is a huge bummer. We would have had a few weeks of really lovely weather to enjoy it if it had gone in on the original date. But, again, looking at long run stuff and missing a few weeks of warm isn't going to mean much in 20 years. 

Finally sort of got the cabinet people to get back to me and got a tentative start date. But he keeps telling me that he's going to get back to me with a contract and hasn't so I'm not actually sure. But that might be good because...

We are putting a hold on everything else. Everything we have done so far has taken longer and been more expensive than we planned. And when you add that to a horrible year for the market we've decide to let our reserves start to rebuild a little instead of draining them more. If things start to turn around again we can add things back on the list to add to the house. And if we don't for awhile, that's okay as well. We are settled in enough to be comfortable, it's just a little unfinished. 

I'm viewing it as our contribution to stopping inflation. 

It helps to try and put a positive spin on it instead of viewing it as "Well...there goes early retirement."

We had been thinking that Brent could possibly retire at 55 but this latest downturn has pushed everything out a couple of years at least. It's not the worst thing that has ever happened, but it's giving me a little bit of post panic/buyers remorse. 

I mean, this house is so much better than the townhouse. It really is. The neighborhood is quieter. There isn't a parking lot in front of my house. It's all on one floor. We have our own space. But...there is part of me that feel like if I had known how much everything was going to slow down we might have stayed put. Held on to that money. It's silly really. One I can't change what we did, and two we got out of the townhouse and got it sold pretty quickly so the market turn really didn't cause us too much grief. 

But I still am a little stressed about it all. It's what kept us in the townhouse for as long as we stayed. It was just such a good deal. You can put up with a lot of stuff you aren't super happy about if you can tell yourself you're saving money. Now, I would have a really hard time going back to it, but if we had never left...

But that's just normal stress stuff, right? We always imagine that "if only" moment. But you can't prove an "if only" would be better. It's unknowable. And I am sure once things settle back out financially (fingers crossed it's a quicker blip in the economy than some are predicting) I will forget all about these days of regret. 

So that's where we are. Settled ish to stay. 

And it really is so much better than the townhouse.