Yeah, that’s a big hole underneath my stairs.

Our house suffers from “saggy floors”, VERY saggy floors. Home improvement job number one has been fix the floors. We came into some money through selling our minivan and we paid off a medical bill and an old cable bill we recently found out about (it’s from Albuquerque and had gone to a collection agency – yay for pulling your credit report and finding stuff like that). We also now have an “emergency” fund to deal with life’s little unpleasantries that come (like the leak under our kitchen sink that will be fixed tomorrow). And we have enough money to pay for the floor fix (we had gotten an estimate a few months ago).

Anyhooo…here’s the deal. The floors needed fixing but we had no way to access the crawl space under our house. Our contractor suggested going through the space under our stairs so we wouldn’t have to go through the living or dining room floors. Excellent, the bonus is that they will turn the space under the stairs into a coat closet!

Once the guys got under the house yesterday they found a lot of unpleasant stuff. Termite damage to a main support beam that had been sloppily “fixed” and will need to be replaced at some point. An air conditioner duct that has a side missing so it has been just open to air underneath our house – this explains some of the insect (crickets) activity in our house. All of the air conditioning ductwork is literally sitting on the ground underneath the house – can you say rust bucket? We will need to replace everything at some point – and also there will have to be some excavating done so that the new ductwork will not come into contact with bare earth. My dreams of a total kitchen renovation just went up in a cloud of termite dust and rust.

My contractor said if this house had had a home inspection it might not have passed because of some of the issues under the house. And the important life lesson that I should have gleaned is to “get your house inspected!!!” And while I have gotten that message the bigger one is “go with what you’ve got.” This is our house and I love it. We can certainly take on these issues one by one, they will be added to our list of “house stuff” and we will knock them out one at a time. We’ll be rearranging the priority order of the list and that’s ok.

If this had happened a few months ago I would be freaking out. Ack, a looming big expenditure!! And we’re so broke! What will we do!! There would be emotionally fraught discussions and much wringing of hands.

Today, I am very zen about it. We now have a $2k emergency fund. I have taken a hard look at our finances and we are actively cutting costs -YMCA membership is now gone, cable is about to go away as we just got a Roku and love it, and our ongoing toilet leak issue will be fixed tomorrow which will save us $$. Our one credit card will be paid off next month. I’m also doing little things like making my own laundry soap, drying our clothes on racks, tracking down and eliminating the electricity vampires in our house, and streamlining my pantry to cut down on waste.

And we’re looking at ways to increase our income. I’ve taken a dog nanny job and am hoping to start working for our church in an official paid capacity soon. I’m toying with a couple of small business ideas and would also like to push my photography to make some money there (I recently sold a piece at a local show). I could try to find a full-time job (which is hard to come by in this economy in this city) but I would then also have to find and pay for daycare, find a job that worked with Chris’ schedule (he goes out of town a couple times a month so no weekend or evening shifts for me), and I wouldn’t have time for the things that are truly important to me like our family. Just the thought of paying for full-time daycare during the summer months makes me ill. I just don’t think I could find a job that paid me enough to make it worthwhile. It’s so strange for me to not have a job and not be the main breadwinner – I’ve put two different guys through college, brought home the bacon so my ex-husband could pursue his rock star dreams, and was  the breadwinner the last two years we lived in Albuquerque. And yet I seem to be as busy as ever – strange that. Anyway part-time jobs and self-employment seem to be the way to go for me right now.

Getting back on topic. We now feel much more in control of our finances. We have a budget, we have a plan, we’ve cut costs and continue to do so, and we’ve increased income and hope to continue to do so. Finding about the house issues a few months ago would have thrown us into turmoil but today we are taking it in stride.

And we’re about to have a coat closet.

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