This isn't the good update I was hoping to do.

It's been a couple of weeks since I posted last so I thought I should update about our situation. We were supposed to move back into our home on Saturday. The contractor called and said it was done so we went and checked it out first. What we found did not make us happy.

First of all, the floors were all redone. I was glad it was all getting replaced because it needed to be updated anyway. Well our awesome landlord used the cheapest materials he could find. The carpet is something you would see in a church building and doesn't even have a carpet pad underneath. It is laid directly on the concrete. Plus, there is a seam going through the middle of our living room that is very visible. There are bubbles in the carpet in the closets in both rooms. The carpet guys didn't cut the carpet to be flush with the wall so there are parts where we can see the concrete. To say I wasn't happy is an understatement. I was even more disappointed with the tile. Again, he used the cheapest tile he could find and it looks like something you would see in a grocery store or Wal-Mart. Those are great for commercial businesses, but it's very dated in a home. I was hoping he would take the opportunity to put a nice tile down that is more modern. I understand that he wants to be cost effective, but it was a ridiculous tile choice especially since he is wanting to sell the place.

The painters were there on Thursday and they said they painted everything including our bedroom and the living room. It was very obvious that the living room wasn't completely painted. There are marks on the walls that I know were there before. Plus, they got paint on a couple of our wall decorations (we were told the living room wasn't going to be painted so we could leave the stuff on the walls as long as we got the furniture out). They also got paint on some of my dishes. If I had realized how sloppy the guys were going to be, I would have gotten everything out of the house. They had told us that we could also leave our dishes because they were going to cover everything with plastic. The plastic didn't do squat and I had to throw away several cooking things. On the upside, Chloe Jo's pink bedroom turned out great!

It ended up that the flooring and paint were the least of our problems. As we were doing a walk-through, I looked at Chloe Jo's closet and instantly spotted mold. Green, nasty mold growing on the walls of her closet. There was no way we were moving back in with mold. Then we found more extensive mold damage under the sink in the 1/2 bath. Needless to say, we didn't move back in on Saturday. We went back to our friends' house feeling very dejected and disgruntled with our landlord causing us to decide to pursue other options.

When we first had to move out of our place, we looked for other rental properties in our area. We were only able to come up with 4 homes that were available. 3 of them were in a part of town that we don't need to be living in. The 4th home is on a highway and I didn't want to live on a highway with a small child. The safety concerns me. We were so upset that we decided to pursue the rental on the highway. Our landlord has never been a good landlord so at that point we were more than willing to move on. We waited until Monday and went in to the real estate office to see about the home. We had to fill out several pages of information before they would even talk to us about the property. After filling everything out, the agent looked over everything and found a "problem." She needed a "local credit reference." This was not something we could provide because we haven't bought any furniture or expensive items in town. Even if we had, we wouldn't have financed them. That being said, the agent started treating us like we weren't worth her time and like she just wanted us to get out of there. I never thought that us not financing furniture or using a rent-to-own place would make us lose out on a rental house. She said the only other option is a double security deposit. That's a lot of money that we don't have.

We left there and I lost it. I have held it together through this whole mess (except for the initial "our house is flooded" realization) until that point. We had pursued all of the options and had come up empty with every single one. I felt like we were homeless and there was nothing we could do about it. We checked into a hotel and are now living here until the mold problem is "fixed." I don't believe for one second it will be fixed correctly. At this point we are going to move back into our current home and keep an eye out for other rentals. We don't want to buy a house here because we don't think we would be able to sell it easily if we were to ever move.

And that's all folks.