MHA Loan Modification and the Missing Roof

It's been a while.

The roof is still missing although I did get a contractor to come out and remove the twisted metal and put down some protective stuff over the plywood. It has been 3 weeks since the storm. The adjuster finally came and now we are in the midst of trying to get the generous check endorsed by both our 1st and 2nd mortgage company. They will then dole out the money in small amounts, send an inspector (to verify that we are indeed repairing our house instead of pocketing the insurance money), overall I think we may have our roof repaired by March or April. I am not joking. Apparently Bank of America's idea of protecting their investment is to leave the house without a roof as long as possible. If I could just cash the check and have $20,000 in cash to flash in front of a contractor I would have the roof fixed by now, but NOOOOOO that's not the way it works. I guess some families would just keep the money and live with no roof? WTF?

In bigger news, while I was on hold with the mortgage company trying to report our insurance claim, in listening to the sales pitches on hold I learned that my family does indeed qualify for the fabulous Making Home Affordable Program. Yea!!

We fully qualify for a loan modification. The process is long and arduous. I have filled out all the paper work, copied tax returns, bank statements and profit and loss statements for the businesses (yet another reason why I have not been blogging), bundled everything up and sent it off certified mail. Now all we ahve to do is wait up to 45 business days, 9 weeks, to find out what Bof A is going to offer us. If they do what they are supposed to do our loan payment plus taxes and insurance will be under $2500/month. That would be such a load off.

Now before some of you hard core Republicans and other banking nuckleheads start reading me the riot act I want to put in my two cents on the whole loan modification thing.

1. We don't have a weird loan. We put down a full 20% when we bought this house in 06. It is a regular loan with a fixed interest rate. We qualified for the loan and had the income to support it when we bought the house.

2. We cannot sell our house. We bought it for $680,000 and currently owe about $580,000. According to Zillow our house is worth somewhere between $450-480,000.

3. Our income has decreased significantly due to the banking industry shutting down all loans and the housing market collapsing. I therefore fully blame the banks for our lack of income. Two of our businesses are related to housing and construction. My architecture business is dead because no one is building at all. Our check cashing business is down 60% because none of the plumbers, drywallers, painters, etc are working or cashing checks.

Due to the above points I fully believe that we should take advantage of the MHA program. I'll keep you all updated on the progress and see if we get screwed around with by Bank of America this is where I will air their dirty laundry.

Till next week.

Flagstaff Blizzard

This has been my week so far. Very Shitty to say the least.

One of the worst nights of my life was Monday December 9th. The blizzard was predicted, so we were somewhat prepared, but it was worse than we thought it would be for us in particular.

School was let out early and all parents were instructed to come and pick up the kids since the busses would not be running. Luckily I had just made a run to Sams Club and picked up all kinds of crap in addition to buying batteries that I had no idea how much we would need later.

We all went to bed as usual, but I was still awake when it all started to go down at 11:00 pm. The power went out since the wind was howling around 30-40 mph. Then the fire/smoke alarms went off and continued to go off for the next 6 hours. Obviously all the children woke up in histerics and Carl pulled on some pants to see what he could do to stop them which turned out to be nothing at all.

The alarms are hard wired. While the power was out we could take out the batteries of the alarms downstairs that we could reach, but the upstairs 16 foot vaulted ceilings we could not get to since the 20' ladder is stored outside under the porch.

We moved all the kids downstairs to sleep on the couch where it was somewhat quieter and I put big hats on all of them to try and protect their eardrums.

I even called our local fire house and they had no idea how to turn off the alarms. Once the power wnet back on all the alarms started going off again since they had power. Carl even ventured out in the now 60 mph winds and blowing snow to turn of the main power and that didn't even work.

Somewhere in the midst of all this we heard a loud creak and were suprised to see that a huge piece of our roof ripped off. I was scared to death to see where the peices had landed since we couldn't see a thing out the windows due to the blizzard.

We woke up the next morning and this is what we saw. State Farm has been anything but helpful in getting it taken care of. We have been told it could be a week before a claims adjuster gets out here. Awesome. They really know how to get shit done. In the meantime I'm trying to find a contractor to come and get the loose pieces off the roof and tyvac the thing before the next storm hits on Friday.

This could be the thing that takes our house from us. I don't have the $4400 deductable to get it fixed. The credit cards are maxed out and I am at a loss as to what to do. I'm trying to be cheerful, but this is not going to be a good Christmas.

Oh and did I mention that we also need to replace our garage door. Carl closed the door again after one of the kids left their snow shovel in the jamb and it bend and shattered all the glass in the door.

This is the best week ever.

Holiday Update

I know I'm slacking off. The kids have been home too much lately and it is so distracting. It's like they want to be entertained constantly. It's strange that a playroom full of toys, every movie and vidoe game known to man, 250 DirecTV channels, and even a neighborhood full of kids their own age is not enough for them. I have to constantly feed them, look at what it is that they are coloring, building, watching, referee continuous battles over red crayons, lego guys, and tv channels. I can close the door to my office, but as soon as I do someone comes in and wants to sit on my lap or wants another snack. So I give up and just sit with them and stay in the middle of it all and get nothing done.

I tried the NaNoWri Mo, but failed. I got up to 23,000 words out of 50,000, but I fell off track when the kids and I got sick mid-month. I had previously thought that I was going to spend the month of November just and only focusing on my rugs, but trying to split it between that and writing for 2 hours a day didn't work. So for the next three weeks I am all rugs all the time and will come out the week before Christmas with a brochure of some sorts that I can take down to Phoenix or mail to architects and interior designers in January. I have to do it. My goal is simply to make people aware of what I am doing. I'm going to start tufting rug #2 this week, and like I said work on some promotional materials to get the word out.

I hate that kind of stuff, but I have to start somewhere and let people know that I am a rug maker and an awesome designer.

It's Like Magic

Check this out........ I can now add photos from my digital camera. After talking about it forever I finally have it up and running. Basically it came down to finding the drivers for our really old Canon Rebel. I found it!!! I installed it!!! I am not mentally challenged, it just took me forever.

Here's an awesom shot of one of my little ones at the Grand Canyon.

Here's another one of my little architects and their back yard forts.

And just for fun here is my dear husband in his cracker hat riding around in his cracker car, the old Ford.

It's like a whole new world has opened up. It's totally blowing my mind. Pathetic huh?

Sick with the Flu?

I'm sick and I am running a fever for fourth day in a row. I'm doing the best I can with a cocktail of Extra Strength Tylenol, Mucinex DM, and Nyquil. So far so good. I have no idea if this is the regular flu or the Swine flu. All I know is that I'm sick and I hate being sick. Yesterday it hurt to look at the TV. That is really sick for me. All I could do was listen. Today I'm up and trying to work thru the pain. I'm actually wearing pants and going to try and go thru the motions of a regular day and not give in to the sickness. That usually helps for me. I gave the flu two full days to drag me down and now it's my turn. The kids still have to go to school when I"m sick, dinner still has to be made, and laundry still needs to be folded.
Today I'm catching up and moving forward. I'm going to try to kick ass and take names.
Until Wednesday.

I Always Get What I Want

It's completely done!! Now I just need someone to buy it or a place to sell it. I now have 3 rugs in my entryway. Too many? In most houses yes, but in my house, no, not at all.

I'm excited. The rug is a little rough on the back, but it was an experiment. The canvas is too heavy. The next one I'm going to use something called monk's cloth that is lighter and less dense. For a first try I think it's pretty damn good. It doesn't have to look good on the back anyway. It's the front we're looking at.

My new mantra for this month is "Walk a different path".

I'm doing things a little differently this month. Less  reading, more writing. Less complaining and more doing.
When I sed to sit in my architecture office all day and hate on my life I would often write about the things I really wanted to do. I have fully come tothe conclusion that I am doing all of them now.

1. I write and hopefully it will be a sellable book some day. I feel so much less guilty about not following one of dreams. Writing makes me feel like I'm playing the lottery, only I have more control over the numbers that are picked.

2. I am full on making my rugs. Note "making" them, not selling them yet. I have a creative output which feels awesome. In architecture I hardly ever got any say in what my clients were building, if the project got built at all. Making rugs give me almost immediate satisfaction of seeing something I designed being fabricated. The feeling is exhilirating.

3. At the beginning of the year I wrote down one of my New Year's Resolutions was to "Stop yelling at the kids so much". Giving up my office and the stress of working as an architect has had a direct impact on my stress and therefore the amount of stress I can handle from the kids. I'm not stressed about getting to a meeting, someone getting sick and preventing me from making a deadline, or snow days. I am on a much more even keel when it comes to the kids. I am not stressed about helping them with homework, play dates, school programs, and now since I finally sub-leased my office last week, the financial drain of keeping up an office is gone. I no longer yell at my kids like I used to. AWESOME.

4. The gym. If I had to create the perfect day it would be take the kids to school, go to the gym, come home eat lunch, write, work on my rugs, pick up kids from school.  I am doing all of that today. I am living my perfect day.

Now to take things to the next level I need two more things: I need my husband home with me for at least part of the day.  The next thing I need is to be paid for at least one of my two creative endeavors. Time will get me there. I always get what I want.

NaNoWriMo

I am participating in National Novel Writing Month this November. Right this very second I am writing this because I am stuck in writing my 2500 words for the day. If you want to know more about what I'm writing then check out my other blog http://emilyjweaver.blogspot.com/.

Hopefully I will finish and things will all work out well and the book will become a Blockbuster Bestseller and then the movie rights will be bought and it will be turned into an awesome action flick staring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Today the new wool for my next rug arrives. Once I've gotten it up on teh rack I'll post pictures. It will be even cooler than the first rug and I might even try and go bigger.

That's all the news for now. I've got nothing to rant about today. Althougth I could start raving about the new gym I just joined. I went for the first time this morning and WOW. Their treadmills are so much nicer than mine at home. Here I can never go above 3.5 mph, but on the gym treadmills I was up at a whopping 4.4. I guess my old one just has too many miles on it. I think I've had it for the past 6 years. Anyway the gym was awesome, aside from locking all my stuff into a locker I couldn't get back unlocked, it really pushes me harder to see all the other moms and old people on thier treadmills. I did an extra 5 minutes just to look good and like I said pushed it all the way up to 4.4.... not quite a run, but a good walk that doesn't make my boobs bounce too much.

I joined to try and conteract my perfectly valid excuse of it being too cold in the house to use my treadmill November through March. I usually give it up every winter because it is seriously only 40-55 degrees in our bedroom in the winter and I jsut can't get on that thing in those temperatures. Not working out in the winter along with regular holiday eating usually means that by March I've got an extra 5 lbs to work off. I always get it off, but this year I should maintain my perfectly rounded mom physique.

Enough procrastinating. back to my 2500 words.