The House

This is the third in a series of posts that starts here.

I was at my grandparent’s house; all was quiet. I had checked all of the rooms they would normally be in that time of day and come up empty. I tried calling their landline phone because sometimes they carry the cordless with them when they move around within their assisted living community, but I heard the phone ring in the chair next to me and felt a little stupid for not seeing it. My cellphone started ringing and I thought maybe they were somehow calling me back from an unknown location, but my caller I.D. told me that it was my real-estate agent. I hurriedly swiped the green icon.

It was Wednesday evening, and I hadn’t expected a call from him at the earliest until Thursday night. In my head, I already knew that he was calling to tell me that somebody had put in a much higher offer on our house, and that I would no longer be in the running. I knew it was too good to be true, after all, this house was amazing, and it had everything we wanted. I was wrong. He was calling to inform me that the family had accepted our offer, with only a few minor amendments to the original.

He went on to explain what the sellers wanted, but all I could hear was my blood flowing. All I could think about was telling Amanda the news she had been so nervously anticipating. I was already stripping the wallpaper off the walls in the kitchen in my head when the call ended and all I gleaned from the rest of the chat was that the closing date will be May 4^th. Quatro de Mayo? My phone rang again and I got to tell a friend with a trembling voice, “I got the house!” I was absolutely jubilant.

I made several calls, sent many texts, and finally found my grandparents and told them the news in person. As usual on Wednesday nights, I went to a very large meeting in St. Paul where many of my dear friends in recovery gather and shared it with them as well. I wasn’t bragging, I was telling them the outcome of over three years of hard work in recovery. I started a recent post by saying that four years ago I was sleeping in cars and on couches, I can’t forget that. These people know who I am, and they are the first ones to tell me that things are going really well for me right now, so I need to be careful.

 

Today I signed some more forms, and fielded emails from my mortgage broker and asked probably too many questions. He needs my bank statements from the last two months. Why? Will they see anything on them that will make this all go away? Have I done anything that will cost us this dream? FUCK!

Everybody on the business side of things keeps assuring me that everything is going smoothly, and I don’t have anything to be worried about. All I need to do is wait it out, review and sign forms when they come, and relax; there’s plenty of hard work ahead. Worry is hard work too, and I don’t get paid for it, so I will just sit back and relax until this house becomes our home.

 

I want to thank all of you who have sent encouraging words over the past week. I listen well, and your thoughts are still with me. This is the beginning of a fantastic journey, and I can’t wait to write my way through it all.

 

House(s) 2

Lucky you, two blog posts in two days. This post is a perpetuation of my last so you may consider clicking on the blue link to start from the beginning. I suppose when you get to the end you’ll notice that I stated that I would patiently wait for the outcome of something that was no longer in my control, but I am an addict, so I like to push everything.

In my former state of life, if I had been given an opportunity to spend roughly $150,000, I wonder how long it would have taken me to fuck it all up. Surely I would have tried to procure the loan somehow in cash form so I could “roll it” real quick into more by buying and selling drugs, thus ensuring a larger home, and some money to “play with.” Well, I’m doing things a little differently with a few years away from the hard stuff. I’m “responsible” now, it says so on the contract I signed recently for the offer I put down on the house I love, although the terminology may have been a little different.

Yesterday we found another house in Silver Lake that we both like, and decided we should take a look at it to broaden our horizons on what we could/should be looking for in houses. We both are pretty lucky in that we like most of the same things in houses, so that makes things much easier. This house we are going to look at today has less space, less of what we are looking for, and costs a little more money. It has more of some things like garage space, and property. I emailed my agent last night about looking at it and when I woke up I saw the response and I got a little tingly.

He stated that we could see the other house but he had a good feeling about our offer on the one we love. The selling agent had called him to let him know that the sellers were working on the items we had asked to be repaired before our offer was accepted. Now, that’s not an accepted offer, but it’s great news. It gives us hope. It will also be a bigger let down if anything else happens. I have been prepared to be let down most of my life, but that attitude changed a while back and I might even feel it a little bit on this one if it goes wrong.

Life will not end if we do not get this house. There are other houses, in other neighborhoods, in other towns. Life goes on, and we keep looking for the one. Or it all ends tomorrow at 6pm which is the offer deadline. I will absolutely keep you posted.

On another note, I’ve been a little nervous about talking to my parole officer about this move. Not because I’m afraid she won’t let me, but because of the process involved in me changing counties because I am property of the state until July 22^nd. In my life, when fear crops up, I am told by my sponsor and the Big Book that I need to address it right away, or I will dwell on it, and that will interfere with my primary purpose of placing respectable action and thought into the stream of life, and helping the still-suffering alcoholic/addict. So I had to make that call. And just like everything else I have held on to for a little too long, this was no big deal. She told me that she wouldn’t transfer me because I am too close to the end, and that she was fine with me moving wherever I wanted to so long as she had my address. Well, fuck, that’s 20 solid minutes of worrying I could have avoided over the past couple weeks.

All in all, I am in a happy place in my life. A lot of moving pieces are moving at an incredible speed, and I’m able to handle them with composure and sensibility. I am aware of myself and others that are in my life, and I am able to make decisions in the best interest of everybody involved in this endeavor. And I am not alone. I have loved ones in my corner helping me along the way, and guiding me with the voice of God as I understand him.

It may look as if I’m giving you people a lot of power there, telling you that your collective voice is my God. But that’s the only way it can all make sense to me. I know I couldn’t stay sober without the collective voice I hear at the meetings that I attend, and deprived of the expressions of my three ladies and my family, I would not be in the place I am now. Maybe you can put another name on it, but I choose to call it God because it works for me, and I am happy.

House(s)

Anybody who owns a home has had to buy a house for the first time. If you are in that category of people, you can probably identify with this post.

When I attended the first-time homebuyer’s workshop a few weeks ago, I sat through eight hours of lectures and PowerPoints designed—in my mind—to frighten me into being careful during the whole process. I had the idea when I left that I would be looking at hundreds of houses and when we found the one we wanted, we would just buy it. Well, it’s just not that simple: other people want houses, too. 

After working with a mortgage broker and taking a look at our finances and credit, we hooked up with a real estate agent we were referred to by the mortgage broker I met at the workshop. I like him (the mortgage guy). I clicked with him in the class so I called him up afterwards to get things rolling. He recommended a gentleman with a small business to show us some homes in the Wright-Carver-McLeod counties area. (This is the area we consider "in our range" for time to work, USDA-RD loan approval, and travel time to our respective families.)

 

One week in and we have looked at three houses. Each house was unique in their condition, the first house in that the people were home when we got there. They were just as surprised as us, and they wrapped up their baby in a blanket and left out the side door with another kid into a bus that was parked on the side of their property. Not any part of that sentence was a joke: that really happened.

The first thing we noticed on the inside was dishes piled up in the sink, and an odor of urine. We noticed the large quantity of windows, which were all tightly covered in blankets or drapes, or other fabric shells. There were cobwebs in the corners, and there was dust on everything. The agent told us to overlook that stuff, and look at it for what it could be. The outside was a main street out front and a berm out back protecting the house from the mighty Crow River. We traipsed up the frozen berm and the view was quite nice. The property was located at the bend in the river on which I imagined a dock and a small canoe for fishing with the girls. The image went away when he explained that flood insurance would be rated at the level of the house compared to the river, not that there was protection. I threw up in my mouth when he mentioned how much that could add to the mortgage.

Back inside we went into the basement where there was a makeshift master bedroom with what was clearly some form of drug paraphernalia sitting openly on the night stand. I had been in many homes like that over my years, and it was never easy knowing that children lived in them. The next day, Amanda mentioned that none of the beds for the kids had blankets on them; perhaps they were being used to cover the windows.

The second house is the first and only of the first three houses that we fell in love with. I toured it first, and Amanda and I went back together the next day to give it a more thorough look. It had so much of what we were looking for, including a bathroom that I could call my own. It sits on a corner lot of the small town of Silver Lake, MN. Here is the Wikipedia page on the town if you want to take a look.

The third house was in Glencoe and we had very little interest in it. It was cute, but there wasn’t enough room, so I won’t even put up a link.

We plan on looking around at more homes, but we like house #2 so much that we decided to make a move on it and put in an offer. In my mind that was the end of it, and I already owned the house. The real estate agent quickly informed me that there was already an offer for the house but the sellers had not accepted it. So, I offered the list price to see what would happen. This morning I got a message telling me there were multiple offers and that there was a deadline for the best and highest offers this coming Thursday. I added 5k on top of the list price to see if they would take the bait, and I will find out on Thursday.

For now, we have to be patient and keep looking for houses. If we don’t get this one, there will be others we will love, and there is plenty of time to get it right. I love this house enough to hope that this is it. It is out of my hands now, and all I can do is wait.

Credit and Debits

My last post informed you on the information I received and cultured at the First Time Homebuyer’s workshop I attended over the weekend. This post is dedicated to what I have done over the three days since I published that post.

Click here first.

Amanda and I had a chance to sit down on Sunday night and go over some of the big stuff I took away from the meeting. A good starting point is looking at, and fixing up, our credit. Credit is literally a key to all of the things you want in life, and it’s important to keep it groomed or it can have an effect on life as you go. It is also important to look at spending and income or, a budget. These are the things we discussed.

We sat at the kitchen table, each with our own piece of paper. We wrote down our average net income, and then added it together. We then wrote down all of our fixed expenses like rent, car payments, and utilities, etc. And then we figured in our flexible payments like groceries, credit card bills, and gas. We added them all up and subtracted that number from our net income which left us with what we have left to buy things we want, or save. The number was small, and it shrunk every time we thought of some little expense like garbage which is billed every three months. And it got smaller and smaller. We were essentially not living within our means, and that is what we talked about.

We agreed on a budget which is also flexible. And we talked about what we could do with our credit. Her ex left her credit in shambles and to say the least it needs work. My credit score is at 720, and I just now (like this minute) found out I could qualify for a $160,000 loan based on my credit alone. But this isn’t an “I” adventure, this is us, and I don’t think I’m going to rush into anything quite yet.

Yesterday I gathered all of the necessary documents and sent them to the mortgage guy I met at the workshop, and he started crunching the numbers which resulted in the information I received in the paragraph above.

And yesterday, we walked and drove around to look at some houses in the area after we checked them out online. The two that we really loved had been sold with no reference to that on the website. But we know we are going to fall in love with many houses before we find our home, and there will be much consideration and thought before this becomes final. So much has happened over the past four days, I can’t imagine what this next year has in store for me.

 

Here’s one of the greatest things I gleaned from the seminar: it’s a lot easier to save money if you treat savings as a bill—it has to get paid. This way it’s in the budget, and you can forget about it. It’s gone, until it’s needed.

Equity

Four years ago I was homeless: living out of a car. Not even my car. Not even one car. I lived out of any car or house or hotel I could weasel my way into, and I sold drugs to feed my habit while I awaited my sentencing that would eventually lead me through prison and treatment where I made the choices that lead me to today.

Four years ago I could not comprehend the thought of me owning a home, or even having the wherewithal to start even thinking about the process of buying a home. Today I took the first big leap toward the biggest of investments in Maple Lake at Wright County Community Action where I sat through eight hours of information and lectures.

 

It was very personal, and I felt like they treated me as if I were the only person in the room. In fact, I was the only person that showed up on the student side of things. As the day progressed, a mortgage expert, a real-estate agent, an, uh…. title-insurance-closer-deed-guy thing, and a homebuyer advisor, took turns tailoring their information and advice to my situation. I was honest in what I was interested in and gave them some insight into my past and my credit and it went back and forth and it all moved unbelievably fast and I felt incredibly relieved and inspired when I left. I thought this class would fill me with fear and anxiety, but I left with confidence that I can be in my own home in under a year. Well, I have to be or this certificate expires and I have to do the class again to qualify for certain loans and down-payment assistance.

 

This array of paperwork has every bit of material that we covered and more. If you think it looks like a lot, it is. It’s a lot to wrap my head around, and it seems like a lot of people want my money, but it also appears that there may be some free money around for me to apply for. The First speaker said that somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy people are involved in the home-buying process—not all of them visible—and they all get a little cut. Shit.

As always, I want this to reach the struggling addict or alcoholic who doesn’t think there’s a way out or hope for the future. I’m doing all of this less than three years out of prison. When I got out I started working at a laminating factory for $10 per-hour, and I lived with my mom. I kept my head down and I ran hard, and I never stopped. I kept going to meetings, kept meeting with my sponsor, and traded-up my job twice for something I loved and I just kept moving forward. It was a lot of hard work, but none of it was as tough as living out of cars and hotels, giving away my dignity and my pride.

I’m sick of paying rent. I want something I can call my own. Well, our own. Although Amanda wasn’t with me today at the workshop, she will be a part of everything else moving forward--I hope. We will be meeting soon with a mortgage broker who will assess our finances and combined income and credit to pre-qualify us for an amount we can work with to start searching for our home.

For now, as we discussed for the first hour of the class, I need to draw up a savings and budget plan and stick to it. We need to do that. We are not in that great of shape financially, but they will still lend me hundreds of thousands of dollars and that’s kind of scary. I am capable of turning that $200k into $43 real quick-like with some old habits. Today is the first day of the rest of my life in which I am more responsible economically (said the guy with a $2,500 tattoo commitment.) But I have it in me to set and follow plans and goals, and as long as Amanda is on board, we will do well. I know this.

 

Tattered

I left my last post abruptly for good cause, and I have a two-hour window today due to a cancelled meeting to use as I see fit, so I thought I would try to hammer out something more substantive with my newly found spare time. These unplanned writing intervals usually lead to my best posts, so here goes.

The winter of 2001 was brutal for me. It wasn’t the snow, the wind, or the cold; it was my helpless addiction to everything at once with no source of income other than theft and swindle. I was living on the couch of another addict—I’ve started many posts similarly. I had spent the previous three weeks drifting in and out of blackout as a result of a 16-gallon keg out on the side porch that had gone flat because of the freeze and thaw. I brought it inside after finding out nobody else would drink from it, and I poured cup after cup until oblivion overcame my already fractured mind and the demon took over. It was in this condition that I made my brightest decisions both morally and physically. This is when I would do what I needed to do to get my drug of choice at the time, crack cocaine. Night after night, I would brave the cold in nothing more that a frayed and tattered hoodie, and ragged and ripped jeans.

Often I would go out at night searching unlocked garages for gadgets or unlocked cars. Lawnmowers and snow blowers would frequently fetch me $20 or the equivalent, and the occasional find of actual money in a car could net even more.

One night, toward the end of winter, I was out looking for trouble. I found a garage with an open door and spotted a snow blower inside. I casually walked in and rolled it out, making as little noise as possible. I walked it toward the end of the block and hid it behind a fence, where I would pick it up later.

I walked back to my friend’s house and called around but found no interest: all of the dealers had enough of me and my stolen goods. So, I called my best friend Mack and told him I wanted to get out of the house for a while and he agreed to come pick me up.

 

I had known Mack for a few years and we hit it off right away. When we met, we both smoked weed, and that was all. Over the years, my addiction grew, and our lives grew apart but we remained in communication, and on occasion, would get together and laugh about my life.

 

Twenty minutes later he was there and I got in. I told him to drive to a specific location, and he shyly agreed. He was not privy to the situation, although he knew my M.O. I told him to stop and he saw the snow blower and I asked him to pop his trunk. I could tell he wasn’t happy, probably because he wasn’t that kind of criminal. He liked to smoke weed, and that was it. He got out and opened the hatchback and just then we heard screaming from the corner about a hundred feet: the jig was up.

“Go, go, go!” I yelled.

I ran as fast as I could up the alley, but he just stayed there. I knew he was going to get busted.

I ran through a park and anxiously dodged lights of regular vehicles and cop cars, some of which by now were probably on the way to the scene. I walked and I walked to his parent’s house where I knew I could safely spend the night on a couch in his brother’s basement room.

The adrenaline left my body, and the alcohol lay me down to rest. Several hours later I awoke to Mack with his fist in my face. He was mad at me for some reason. He explained that the man yelling was informing him that he had his license plate written down, so he couldn’t leave. He had to wait for the police to arrive and when they did, they arrested him.

The police brought him downtown and interrogated him but he did not give up my name. Since nobody actually saw a crime committed, there was nothing they could do about it, and they released him without charge. But I was still responsible for that incident.

A little over a year ago I saw him at a funeral for our friend. He had recently had a child and was happy to see me doing well, and we chatted for hours. He told me a story about when he went to Canada on a family vacation and was denied entry because of an arrest in 2001 for which I was responsible. And that is why I am writing this post.

That is one critical reason I still write this blog. I need to access the past and jog my memories for amends that still need to be made, and that is a big one. He said he was over it, but I am not. My actions from back then still influence the lives of those involved now, and I need to fix what I have done. So, I will type up a letter to him instead of writing my next blog post and as usual, I will keep you posted.

I recently (about a month ago) wrote a letter of amends to The Bent Wrench which was one of the resentments I had held on to for a little too long. I haven’t heard back, but I did my part and maybe someday I will have the chance to repair that damage.

This work I do is never over. I do things constantly that let me live in harmony with my past, and I make great strides to ensure I do not create any more harm. The road is long, and I need to keep in mind that no matter how far along the path to recovery I have travelled, the ditch is just as close to  either side of me as when I started. It is up to me how much work I put into myself to keep going straight.

Snow Day

I awoke to howling winds and a persistent tapping on the windows. There’s less noise in a winter storm than in any other season because there is no resistance from the tree leaves, but the frozen rain (not snow) was making an effort to outdo its summer counterpart with a nearly horizontal attack on the windows. I’m a light sleeper, and I could see just the break of day through the curtains and I knew it must be around 6:30am, when the light usually peeks around the horizon. It was time to get up.

6:30 is a late wake up for me, but I knew I had things to do this morning because the kids would not be going to daycare or school today: it is a snow day! So, I went to the gym.

While I was in the middle of my new set of interval training exercises, I had the thought that it was stupid that I had to pay rent and shovel and snow blow the driveway. I have never been a renter and been responsible for such things. I then thought of the future, and the day I finally get to buy a house, which is possibly not that far away.

This coming Saturday I am attending a first-time homebuyers class put on by Wright County Community Action. It’s an eight-hour course in which all of my questions about buying a home will be answered, and all of my fears about buying a home will be confirmed. It was only $30 to register for the class, and although it will take up most of my day off, I am excited to tackle this first vital step of the home-buying process. I will keep you all posted.

 

Right now I am watching Life with Pets. It’s a children’s cartoon movie and it’s the same movie we watched last night. This is a common theme in the life of children. I can’t blame them, I could watch Office Space or Burn After Reading every day if I had the time, but these girls take things to the extreme and will possibly watch this very movie again on this very day, as will I because I have little choice; I’m snowed in.

This is a chance for me to bond with the girls. In fact, I’m going to get off the computer now so I can be present in their lives. To be honest, I can’t think of much else to write on at the moment, so this is it.