Moving, Maybe

I am supposed to be moving soon. Actually I was already supposed to have moved. First I was supposed to have moved into the existing place in the spring of '04. That got delayed and delayed and delayed because the person who was supposed to be moving out didn't actually do it until fall. In fall of '04, we actually got to go into the place where I was planning on moving. I had lived there from about age 1 to age 7 and was planning on moving back in. Apparently the renter who had been so slow moving out had failed to tell us, the landlords, that there were problems with it. We knew about the electrical issues and wanted to fix them but she had so much shit in there that we couldn't get to the walls to take the paneling off. What she failed to mention was that since she failed to close the windows so many times, the floors were rotting out and also she didn't mention the crack in the floor of the shower which she had put a mat over. The crack in the floor let so much water out that everything holding the shower up was rotted away. Consequently, my move was delayed still further. We debated over whether it was worth fixing and decided it wasn't. Now we had to go about replacing the unit. My paternal unit declared it too late in the season to order a new one as it would arrive in the beginning of winter and the weather would be bad. heh. So we waited. Meanwhile, friends of ours determined that they could be a dealer for Liberty Homes. They began the process of renewing their expired license. The extremely obnoxious, drawn out, beaurocratic nightmare of a process that took months longer than it should. Finally their stuff went through. It is now the end of July '05 and I have been living half out of boxes for over a year. We get the goahead to pick floorplans and after waiting for them to send them, drive all the way out to central pa for samples that sucked anyway. By the time we figure out what we can pair with what and in what room of what floorplan it is the beginning of September. We submit our order. One week later we recieve a call saying that due to FIMA's order for Katrina victims and workers, our home will not be available for delivery for an extra month. So that puts the delivery date in the end of November. No problem. October comes and goes and no work has been done for the foundation. The old unit has not even been removed. In the beginning of November we get a call from the company again. The date for delivery will be the first week of December, then the second week in December. Suddenly they are spurred into action. They attempt to pull off the old unit. It makes it as far as the front yard. Work begins very slowly on the foundation. Second week in December, the arrival has been pushed back to the thursday after christmas. My father stays home to work on Christmas Eve though all he managed to do was break the backhoe. twice. Finally, just a day before the thing is scheduled to arrive, they get the concrete poured. It has been so cold for weeks that digging for the foundation was extremely difficult. It barely warmed enough to pour the concrete. Then, suddenly, it rains. It rains all day the night before the arrival date. It rains all morning before it arrives. The temperature has warmed enough that the ground is a soupy mess of mud and water. It arrives. The truck gets stuck in the mud several times just trying to get it out of the road. Finally a neighbor with a logging machine helps get it out of the mud and nearly runs over my brother in the process. My house gets as far as my driveway. The rain is still pouring down. The guys with the truck go back to PA. And that is where it sits. In the driveway, just yards away from where it is supposed to be. The weather has warmed up so much that there is no frost at all left in the ground. No one knows when the ground will be hard enough to move it. We don't even know what we will move it with. To top everything off, the water doesn't come out where they said it would and nothing else does either. So he had to make shift something and hope it won't freeze. Also, there are numerous problems with it. A shutter blew off somewhere between here and Central PA. There are cracks under all the windows, Scratches in the paneling in most of the rooms that were very poorly covered up. There are upside down panels in my bathroom and various other careless mistakes. Fortunately the company sent someone out to look at it who said he can fix it in under two weeks once it is level and has heat. Who knows when that will be. I am just hoping and praying for a nice long dry coldsnap.