My husband is quite the shopper. Not only did he find the property and wing the deal, he found a good realtor to consult every step of the way. If you ever need a good realtor in North Spokane, look up Lee Anderson. He sold our house in less than 48 hours for over the asking price! He also helped us buy the property, making sure the infrastructure was all OK. Good people help make good things happen.
We still needed to find a mobile home. We looked at a few and they were all really small, with tiny rooms and crappy cheap fixtures. One of them even stunk. But our "mobile guy" found a private sale in Chattaroy, and we drove up there to check it out. It was out in the country, and had belonged to an elderly lady who had recently passed away. Her daughter inherited the double wide, and her son inherited the 10 acres under it. This was going to be problematic, but more on that later. The house was spacious, with a "retirement" floor plan of a big family room open to the kitchen with a breakfast bar, big L shaped living/dining room with a big hutch, two bathrooms, big and nice, and two big bedrooms with huge walk in closets. Despite the dark paneling and brown shag carpet, I knew this was it, and we made an offer immediately. It was priced at $18,000 and we offered $16,000 and she took it!
Now that we had the double wide, we had to arrange to have it moved and the site prepared. Here the learning curve steepened. Suffice it to say that the site prep turned out to be very expensive, and because of some mysterious black hole in China that was sucking up all the concrete, we had to wait for "our turn" to get our foundation poured. So we had all summer to start the teardown of the decks that came with the double wide. We planned to recycle as much of the original setup as possible--decks, stairs, and even a fence. Wood is wood, and wood was damn expensive.
We got our buddy Daryl, a very handy carpenter and jack of all trades to help us figure out how to take the decks apart and move them to our property. We had to get everything off the trailer before the movers could break the halves apart to move it. There were wasps in the metal roof which attacked and stung Daryl. Up on the peak of the roof, he just jumped back and said "I have violated the inner sanctum..." The job ended up taking three long days of denailing lumber, piling up scrap metal, and deconstructing the metal deck roof so we could use it again. The wooden roof on the other deck we gave up on, taking the good lumber and leaving the bad. It cost a fortune to hire a big truck haul away the debris.
The 80 year old "daughter" was having a feud with her brother over the sale of the mobile, and the jerk was threatening her if WE didn't get that thing moved by the end of July. She didn't own it anymore, we did. And we were scrambling to get the decks torn down and the lumber moved. Luckily, the brother was all bark and no bite, because it took us until mid August to finally finish that project, and until the end of August for the movers to get out there and get it apart and ready to tow over to our place. Trouble was, we were still waiting for Clacy and the concrete. So during Hurricane Katrina, I called Clacy and wailed my tale of woe. By midweek they came out with the bulldozers and got the forms done by noon. The next day, when people were treading water in New Orleans, we got concrete poured. It was getting pretty cold at night, and I was relieved, but slightly guilty about the Katrina thing, since I was high and dry with fresh water, power, phone, and family.
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