Believe me.. I'll be glad when this is all over with!
But back to last weekend.
To bring you up to speed, we decided to spend the weekend in the Williamsport area to give us a leg up on finding a house to rent. The internet is all finThe.. well.. and good but we figured that spending the night, combing through the local paper and then having Sunday to check out whatever we find would probably be the most responsible thing to do.
So we found two properties listed in the paper so I called. The first one answered and he said that he was going to have a kind of open house on Sunday after 12:30 and I had to leave a voice mail for the second. I stressed that we were only in town until Sunday afternoon and if at all possible, would like to see the house before we left. I went on the whole spiel about living 3.5 hours away .. blah blah blah.
The hotel had a free continental breakfast thing going on and so Sunday morning Tim was trying to use his mental man skills to wake me up early. I was NOT going to be woken early .. I used my mental woman skills to subvert his. He tried making noises.. turning on lights.. putting his face two inches from mine and staring at me but nope.. wasn't going to happen. There's nothing I hate more then waking up early.
I was up in plenty of time to get the free breakfast .. which basically consisted of eggs from a carton.. Jimmy Dean sausage links.. make-your-own waffles.. and cereal from this weird container. No bacon though. How the hell do you have breakfast without bacon.
I'm a really, really picky eater so the only thing I can say about that breakfast is that they had good toast.
My cell rang when we got back to the room and it was about the house that I had left a message for the night before. The woman was all "hun" this and "hun" that and told me that we could see the property after 1pm because her and her husband were going to church.
So we felt very optimistic.
We had to check out of the hotel by 11 and so we figured we'd drive by the houses prior to our appointments just to get the feel of the neighborhood and where they were at.. what was surrounding them and what they looked like.
The first house was.. well.. I want to say "ghetto" but not sure if that would be a compliment or not. We didn't even get out of the car and look in the windows.
Disappointed, we drove to the second house and I literally wanted to cry. I remember saying, "... the power of words" and Tim was like, ".. I didn't say anything." and I was like, ".. No, I meant that they worded the ad like they were renting something beyond spectacular."
They didn't lie about the size of the house.. it was huge. We got out and walked around.. looking in the windows. They were obviously painting it and cleaning it but there's only so much you can do with "bad". The little alley way was covered with pigeon shit and feather.. there was no fence so there was full view of the back of the houses on the street that ran perpendicular and all their lovely piles of trash. Most not in trash bags.
The street itself looked like run down and anyone who knows me well knows that I have this thing about blinds and curtains. I don't understand how people can NOT keep their blinds straight or knot their curtains. I moved once when the people who moved in across the street from me doing that.
To me, moving into that house would be a step back and I may only make baby steps going forward but at least it's in the right direction. Plus, neighborhood don't usually frighten me.. this one kinda did.
Tim had a different point of view. We could stick it out for a year, he said. It's not THAT bad, he said. He said some other things that made me thing that he was doing his best to put a round peg into a square hole and I had to tell him that, look.. I don't think this is going to work. I'm not moving to someplace like THIS. And it was kind of like he thought that I was saying I was too good to live in a place like that and that wasn't it at all and if I wasn't in the middle of driving in an area that I wasn't familiar with, I would have punched his bald head. He should know me by now. If it was just me and him then that would be a whole different thing but I wasn't comfortable bringing the kids into that area.
We went in search of the Sunday edition of the newspaper thinking that there may be more ads. We stopped at this little deli and when we walked it, it looked exactly like ours did.. except everything was behind the counters. The behind the counter said he didn't sell the paper and I forget who mentioned our deli first but it was brought up and the guy was like, ".. you want to buy this one? It's only 125gs and you get the apartments upstairs!"
Apparently this guy opened this place 7 months ago.. ONLY had 2 problems that he took care of (read into that what you will) but now he want out. Honestly, I would have considered renting it from him if he didn't seem so damn desperate.
We wound up finding a paper but there was nothing new in it .. and with a bladder that was stretched from here to Arizona, we found a McDonald's and lamented on what our next move was.
Fortunately, I had my iPod on me and with the free WiFi at Mickey Dee's I was able to pull up an email attachment that a realtor had sent me during the week. It was a list of properties that were for rent and even though it was kind of old, we found ones in our price range. We also checked Craigslist and called a few that were a little further out from where we were originally looking.
There was hope.
Well, there's always hope but sometimes it's more obvious then not.
Since the two houses from the realtor's list was in the general vicinity of the pigeon shit house we had an appointment to see, we went to look at them. Both were in neighborhoods that looked a hell of a whole lot better then the one's we saw from the paper and both had fireplaces.
Yes, there was hope.
Tim being Tim said to screw the pigeon shit house all together but I couldn't do that. I made an appointment and I was going to keep it.
So I call the woman and she said she was sending her husband over to meet us. We got there first and parked a little ways down from the house. While we were waiting, we happened to see a cat sitting on a front porch. To entertain himself, Tim was psst psst psst to it and the damn thing got off the porch and came over to the car.. stretching his paws up to the window's edge.
We were laughing hard and then the damn cat jumped into the car. Literally. Jumped right into the damn car.
Now, I could make a witty, sarcastic comment about Tim's ability to attract dirty, back alley pussy but I'm going to refrain.
Anyway.. there were these two guys in their early 20's that were walking by and Tim asked them if they owned the cat. One dude said that it was just the neighborhood cat named Smokey .. will refrain from a witty, sarcastic comment again .. and that he's always siding up to people.
I happened to ask the guys if they lived in the neighborhood. They said they did and that it really wasn't as bad as it looked. They've been living there for about 3 years.. each had young children.. and that basically people did their thing and were into whatever they were into but it didn't spill out into the street or anything like that.
For some reason, that made me feel better and that maybe I would be able to deal with this. I can deal with a lot for 650.00 a month.
The husband shows up and we go into the house.
Let me just say this... the house was not without it's charm. Unfortunately, the owners didn't do anything to improve ANYTHING from when the house was first built .. probably around 1920 .. the previous tenets had been college kids and they trashed the place. Instead of properly fixing the holes in the wall, the owners tried to hide them.. and honestly believe that a coat of paint will hide a lot of sins. There had been a leak in the roof and you could still smell the wet lathe.
But the most RIDICULOUS thing was the kitchen. I wish I had taken pictures of it. It was seriously that bad.
It was big. Big enough for a washer and dryer but apparently, not big enough for a sink. Yep.. there was no sink in the kitchen.
The sink was located in what I guess they would call a mud room. Why the hell they didn't just put the sink where the washer and dryer was is beyond me. Beyond Tim too.. and when he asked the husband why they didn't do that the husband (who reeked of whiskey, btw) was like "... oh!! You're going to have to take to me wife. This is her property, I'm just the handy man."
So the wife shows up and at this point, I'm thinking that maybe this is kind of do-able. Not by dream house but I felt a little bit more comfortable about the area and like Tim had said, it was only going to be for a year. Tim asks her if she would consider switching the sink with the washer and dryer if we moved in and she said that she would rather he didn't.
Tim and the husband go outside and I'm talking to the wife inside.. spilling out about how much charm the place has (barf) .. but really, what was I going to say? If I was TIM, I would say that the place was a shit hole. I know that's what he would say because that's what he DID say to the husband outside.
Have I mentioned that I'm the nicer one of the two?
At any rate.. we had to get out of there because we still had a 3 hour ride ahead of us so we told them that we would make a decision and get back to them.
So we left feeling a little deflated.. but a little elated because we had found the two houses on the realtor's list AND we found a drive in movie theater that was still in operation! Fun times. We definitely have our priorities straight, huh?
But what it all meant is that we would have to make yet another trip up.. but this time it was going to have to be a one day trip because we had a catering order that had to go out on Saturday.
The novelty is definitely wearing off...
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