Okay, tons of stuff to get through. Since the last update we’ve bought a new house and sold our current house. One piece of advice, never let there be 3 months between buying/selling and closing. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
Axel is doing great. He’s been in daycare for a few months now. It’s hard to believe, but his 9-month doctor’s appointment is coming up. Maren found a great daycare facility that’s on the EPA campus out in Research Triangle Park. It’s called First Environments and it’s been really great.
He’s gone from scooting around to full-fledged crawling in about a week or two. He’s pretty fast now too, so Maren and I generally spend our time with him by following him around the house. His favorite route is to crawl from the living room into the kitchen, which isn’t really surprising as there’s not many other places for him to go yet. And that leads me back to the housing situation.
We’re moving soon, finally. The few months in between buying a new house, selling our current house and closing have been relatively quiet, but with Axel starting to move around, we’re really feeling the limited space. We loved this house and have a lot of good memories here, but it is just too small now. We had been a little concerned that our buyers were thinking about backing out, because even after the inspection and our agreement to fix certain things, they still wanted their own people to re-check the roof and the HVAC. And this was after the home warranty we agreed to purchase had begun, so what they were looking for is still a mystery to us. Then there was the chimney situation.
This, in my mind, was a complete scam. The only problem is that no one appears to have profitted off of it, other than the repair company and they had no input.? What happened was that the buyer’s inspector noted that the chimney was potentially out of spec, i.e. leaning away from the house, because there was a gap along one side. This necessitated an engineer coming out and taking some measurements. And of course, since it’s his license on the line, he recommends that the chimney’s foundation needs to be repaired because the lean was 1/4″ out of spec. The repair guys told me they tried to move the chimney closer, but couldn’t. So, it wasn’t moving, and probably hadn’t moved in 20+ years, but nothing is out there to protect a homeowner from having to do this. All it takes is a guy with a seal from the state to say it’s out of spec and you get to spend a significant amount of money to fix something that didn’t need to be fixed.
Anyway, we’re getting close to our move date, and we’re spending as much time as possible getting things packed up.? Hopefully I’ll have time to get some new pictures of Axel put up.
