This hotel is great!

How's the new house, Emily?  Are you getting excited?  What projects are you going to do first?

Funny you should ask that, everyone in the world who knew that we had finally gone under contract on a house after losing out on five other ones to multiple offers and heading across the country to a new state and a new city with nowhere to live.  Because we no longer have a house under contract.  Last Monday we had our home inspection, and we hung out at the house during, meeting with the carpet guy to get an estimate, measuring countertops, arguing about what was actually the highest priority project ("I am not moving in until this is done"), and generally just imagining where we were going to put all of our things because it's supposed to be exciting!  Having a new house!

I was worried the inspector was going to find, like, 57 different mission-critical things wrong with the house.  But he didn't, other than a suspected ceiling leak in two of the front rooms -- one from an upstairs bathroom, and one from some roof flashing.  Some leaks!  That shouldn't be too bad, right?  We had horrific water damage in our house in Virginia during Hurricane Matthew, and the whole repair process took maybe a week.  They ripped it all out, left these high-decibel fans all over the first floor for a few days, and then came back and repaired the drywall and plaster in a day.  We left the new house feeling confident that it shouldn't be a big deal, and that was all we were really going to insist on from the seller.  There shouldn't be much negotiation with something as obvious as that, right?  RIGHT?

We sent them the list the following day on Tuesday.  Then on Thursday, which was the 4th of July, we heard back from our agent.  The seller claimed there were no leaks, and even if there were, he was not fixing anything.  He claimed he had "given enough" by "accepting our offer below asking price" and even threw in that he would fix the mold in the bathroom shower "with ten cents worth of Lysol."

I'm not sure WTF even begins to cover the entire thing.  When we got the call, we were sitting at the pool, with our contraband dog in his nifty little MuttMover, trying to win Dog Parents of the Year and not kill him in the Memphis summer heat (shout out to the couple who saw me feeding my backpack carrots who didn't say anything, but stared at me for an excessively long amount of time), tentatively enjoying the fact that our kid hadn't come and asked us for anything in twenty minutes.

I was ready to tell our agent to tell the seller to F off and walk away.  She advocated that everyone take a day to cool off, and not to make any decisions that second.  You should have seen me.  I was pacing.  I was gesticulating wildly.  Every other word out of my mouth was a cuss word, and yes, there were children everywhere.  We just joined this pool and not only were we the people who fed our backpack carrots, we were the family who yelled loudly and used inappropriate language!  This is not how you make new friends (in theory)!  What were we supposed to do?  I wasn't buying the house with an active leak.  How can he not fix it?  How could he say he had "given us enough?"  What does that even mean?  Who the hell do you think you are, dude?  I didn't want the house badly enough to wait this out and see if the appraiser or our lender was going to make him fix it, and beyond want, I flat out couldn't wait that long.  If we waited another three weeks and then the deal STILL fell through because he refused?  Then I would be another month behind, stuck in this shitty hotel, with nowhere to live.  That would not work.  IT WOULD NOT WORK.  How was this happening??

Despite promising our agent we would wait a day, I texted her that night that we were walking away.  I felt so sick to my stomach.  There was nothing else on the market.  I had been obsessively refreshing Zillow and Realtor.com like they were Ebay, and nothing new was magically materializing.  Is this a safe time to mention that this was also the night I saw a COCKROACH in the kitchen of our hotel room?  DON'T ASK ME WHY WE ARE STILL HERE AND I HAVEN'T BURNED THE WHOLE BUILDING DOWN.  Desperate times, people.  These are desperate times.

It was such a gut punch that this all happened.  On top of being angry, frustrated, disappointed and a bit "rage-y" I also felt inexplicably humiliated.  Why were we not worth fixing this issue that you're just going to have to disclose to your next buyer anyway, assuming you get another buyer?  I had gotten over my initial overwhelmed feelings about the house and was getting attached to it, mentally mapping out furniture and who was going to sleep where when I was ready to announce we were going to host Thanksgiving (surprise!).  AAAAHHH.

Ever solution-oriented in a crisis, I found an available rental while we were at the pool on the 4th, and convinced that agent to show us the house that same day before his family dinner.  The rent is a few hundred dollars more than our mortgage would have been, but whatever, I'm over it.  It's in the "right" neighborhood, and it's a place I can move in to ASAP, which is now my only requirement.  It was fine in person.

We went back and forth this past weekend on if we wanted to wait to find another house or just go for the rental.  We saw more houses on Saturday, and I hated them all.  I saw one more last-ditch one this morning which I actually really liked, but I'm just not in the right mental place any more.  If we knew we would be here more than three years I'd seriously consider it, but I'm ready to just make *some* thing easier about our situation right now -- like knowing where we are living and where our kid is starting school in a month.

Speaking of our kid!  She is gone!  For THREE WEEKS!  We are on day two right now and we didn't even get a phone call from her today.  Am feeling slightly insulted but no news is good news.  Matt drove her and the dog up to Iowa (and then he drove right back down the next day, the ultimate Dad Sacrifice), and she is staying with my aunt and uncle for a week.  Then my parents are coming down to get her in Iowa, she (and the dog) will have a week back with them in Minneapolis (ugh SO JEALOUS), and then she (and the dog) will go to Wisconsin for another week to have fun with my in-laws.  And then finally back down here to TN.  She will be six inches taller and even less interested in me than she was before she left.  We are hoping that we will have a house with all of our things ready to go for her when she comes back.

P.S. If you ever find yourself in Millington, TN, do not take the 6 a.m. Body Endurance class at the local Y.  Maybe I hit a bad day, but I was the first one there at 5:55, we didn't even really start until 6:15, people were sort of moseying in up until about 6:45, and nothing about the class required endurance whatsoever.  I did, however, get caught up on the local church gossip from the previous day.  The instructor sounded like Mater from Cars, had a face like Santa, kept complaining about his bum joints, but had a mysteriously muscular upper chest situation going on under his t-shirt so he clearly knows *something* about working out.