It’s that time again… Everyone has gone out of their way to make resolutions for themselves, and those with actual will-power may make it past day #2. I made it a point to not even kid myself and have no resolutions this upcoming year.  Why? It’s simple.  If you truly wanted to make a change in your life you would have done it already, holding off until the first of the year seems more like a cop-out than anything.  For the past 11 months you’ve wanted to either quit smoking, lose weight, learn a new language, pick up painting, whatever the case may be.  If you haven’t done it in the last year, there’s nothing driving you to get it done this year.

So for me, I told myself my resolution is to completely write-off having a resolution. Not sure if that’s a double negative, but either way the only changes I’m making this year is to hopefully be moved into a new home within the next 90 days. Do I consider it a resolution? No… we’ve been trying to buy a house since October but nothings worked out.

We’ve been under contract on three houses. The first house? The financing fell through so we needed to be released from the contract.  The community that we were looking to move to was black-listed by the lender and there was really nothing more that we could do.  The second? After inspection we found out that the Well was contaminated with Lead and Nitrates, because of this the grounds were more than likely contaminated as well. There were also structural issues, half of the house didn’t work, and the water heater was so rusted by the lead in the water that it was about to rot through the floor.

Now? We’re under contract on a house that we both agree is absolutely perfect and with a few modifications over time it holds the “Dream Home” status.  The bedrooms upstairs are all a decent size, the basement is already finished giving us two guest rooms and a man-cave for Sean’s liking. There’s a good sized kitchen, two car garage, gorgeous floor to ceiling brick work on the fire place, massive family room towards the back end of the house and a nice sized yard that will accommodate a pool and plenty of room for the dog to run around.  The problem? The inspection was scary. While structurally it’s sound, there are numerous plumbing issues from the do-it-yourself finished basement that were listed as “Major Defects”. Now, I’m all for the do-it-yourself type of thing but if you’re selling a house, make sure it’s at least up to code. The random little things that they missed were so stupid it’s mind blowing. For me? It’s one weekend fixing random things for maybe $1200 worth of materials. The fact that I now need to figure out how to get a licensed contractor into a house that I don’t own so this stuff CAN be fixed is where things start to get annoying.

We knew going into this house that a roof was going to be needed, house was built in the late 70’s to early 80’s. More than likely it was never replaced, and it now requires four patches for a recent leak. In theory it would be better to just redo the entire roof so it doesn’t need to be worried about for 10 years, but that’s wishful thinking.  The owners have absolutely no money and are in the process of selling just about everything they own so they can afford to move into assisted living. I feel terrible because they’re such nice people (we got to chat with them during the inspection), but we’re going to have to renegotiate the cost of the house because I know that at least $10,000 worth of work needs to go into it before it’s up to code… knowing that they don’t have that money means that they need to at least come down in price so we can work things out with the bank.

Our broker has already told us that the house doesn’t fit the profile of a FHA mortgage, but we could possibly do a 203k loan (which supposedly is a variation of FHA). With this, we can borrow the estimated amount of money at the same time of the mortgage. So if they come down the $10k, then we can borrow the extra $10k (putting us at our already agreed price on the house) and then fix everything that needs to be fixed. All of which needs to be done by a licensed/certified contractor. So that’s where things get tricky, it also extends our closing date. As of right now we’re supposed to close on Jan 25th 2013. This change would then send us into March. Which, I guess is OK because it starts to get warmer so working on the roof wouldn’t be that big of a deal but it’s still one of those “Will it ever end?” type of situations.

It’s upsetting, it’s frustrating, it’s completely bugging me but life still needs to go on so I need to draw my attention elsewhere.  Thankfully I’ve got quite a of work to do, I stopped for a little while because my show is starting in a few minutes. I don’t sit down for much of anything, not a big TV fan but hopelessly addicted to “Mob Wives” on VH1. Not overly thrilled about this season because the original cast members are my favorite.. BUT the changes they made with this season, seems that there’s going to be more knock-down-drag-out type of fights and that makes me happy. Real or fake, I don’t care. It’s just nice to listen to a NY accent when you’re living in a very… rural… area LOL.

As far as life-changing events are concerned. Sean and I are officially engaged!! 🙂 It’s been 7 years of bouncing between two states and numerous ups and downs but he proposed on Christmas Eve at the tree in town. He was super excited to get me out of the house that night, I had a feeling but it wasn’t confirmed until he dropped down when we got towards the tree. He was super cute about it, of course I said yes. He lit up when I did, and it was very sweet. I can’t wait to start the next chapter, and really hope that everything can work out with the house so that we can get through all of the muck and start planning for a wedding and children. I don’t see myself having a huge wedding, not really the “Look at me!” kind of person, I’m perfectly content with a justice of the peace… but when you’ve got a huge traditional Italian family… things just get complicated heh.

So who knows what this year is going to bring… but I’m not setting any resolutions. I’ll just live one day at a time and take it from there.