Even though we have had our LRA money for several month we still haven’t made any progress with the house.  It’s so frustrating, I just feel stuck, that’s the best way to describe it.  We’re having a hard time finding a good contractor.  The company we wanted to use told us 2 months ago that it would be August before they could even come out to give us a bid, much less start it!  Problem is that anyone worth hiring is too busy.  If someone isn’t busy, you have to wonder why.  So we’ve been doing more interviewing and I really, really hope that the last guy we talked to works out.  Even if we have to pay more.  I’m ok with that, I just want to get it done.  He’s presently redoing my mom’s kitchen (and its gorgeous!)….so I’m hopeful he’ll work out.  We should get the bid this week sometime.  When he came out to meet with us last week there were several things on the list though that he doesn’t do, one being the minor repairs to our roof and replacing our chimney cap.  Can’t blame him, I wouldn’t want to get up there either.  So while I was working all day Saturday Jason called around to get some estimates on just having those repairs done.  One guy came by Saturday afternoon and took at look at it.

This is when we discovered that we have a problem.  The chimney is bent.  195 mph for hours and hours would do that.  Our neighbors across the street had that problem and had to totally tear out the fireplace.  Our house is about 30 years old, and they no longer make replacement parts for the tube coming down the chimney and the fact that it is bent makes it totally unusable.  It’s going to have to be fixed.  We’ll still get several more opinions but I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to tear the entire thing out.  Not cheap.  And messy.  Normally they tear it out from the back outside, but because we have the addition on the back of our house, the back of the fireplace is still inside.  They can build a mock room around it when they cut out the bricks, but it’s still going to be a huge mess.  Even if we tarp off every room…..ugh.  I really wish we would have found out about this before we moved back into it, but we thought it was an easy chimney cap fix.

I hope this contractor comes through for us.  I really wanted to have our house on the market this summer because the houses on our street are not selling.  From what I have seen, no one is even looking at them 🙁  Our best odds at selling will be over the summer when people are moving because school is out.

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Ok, I’ll stop whining now.  I’m just sooooo ready to be done.  It’s been almost 2 years and it takes so much out of you.  I can’t even imagine a normal type of life without it, you know?  I went and dug up this old picture to try and remind myself just how far we really have come.  This was our street 3 months after the storm.  It looks sooooo much better now.  I guess I should try and remember that.