How Not To Buy A House: a lesson in comedy, futility, and madness (part 3)

We left off our house buying saga with the land cleared and prepped. You'd think it would be a fairly short time from that stage until the house was delivered. In our case, you would be very, very wrong. Shortly after all the prep work was done, we started having a fair amount of rain again. B kept using the wet ground as an excuse for why his people didn't show up to deliver and set up our home week after week after week. The problem was that B's dealership was over an hour away (close to 2 hours away) and he never bothered to check what the weather was like up where we lived. There were many days when the ground had dried out up here but it might (may I stress the might) be wet where B worked. My normally trusting mind started to wonder if B hadn't used our down payment for personal gain instead of placing the factory order for our house.

We hit the end of October...still no house on the land.

We hit the 7th of November...still no house.

We made it to the 14th of November, just under 4 weeks from my due date with Joey...still no house on the land.

On November 15th, Joey decided to hell with waiting for the house. He was coming out then. This was the one and only moment I was glad we weren't in our house yet. Our apartment was much closer to the hospital than our new house was going to be and Joey's delivery was fraught with possible complications because I was bleeding a lot and no one knew why. Luckily, Joey's early delivery wasn't a huge issue for him. At almost 4 weeks early, Joey was 7 lbs and 20 inches. We both got to leave the hospital when Joey was 4 days old but I landed my ass back in the hospital for a 5 day stay when Joey was only 8 days old. Yup, I went back into the hospital on the night of Thanksgiving.

While B's continual fuck ups were a small blessing the night I actually delivered, the House Follies caused major problems when I went back into the hospital. There my poor husband was with an (almost) 4 yr old, a newborn, a dog, a cat, and no place for anyone to stay with him to help. But, thanks to the stellar coping abilities of my husband, he and the munchkins made it through my now house having, stuck in the apartment, hospital stay intact. Once I was home (in that piece of shit, hole in the wall apartment), we were able to go back to trying to get our house finished before the end of the year.  Oh yeah, we also had to plan for Christmas when we didn't know where we would be.

By December 15th, we had concluded (quite correctly) that we wouldn't be in the house before Christmas. While that wasn't a great tragedy, the proposal of not only not being in our house but not closing before the end of the year had us in a near panic state. See, we had taken money from Vic's 401K to make the down payment on our house. If we closed before the end of the year, that withdrawal wouldn't count as income. If we didn't close before the end of the year, we would get screwed hugely on the taxes because all that money would count as income and because the $10,000 tax credit for first time home owners that was being offered by the IRS would expire.

So, do you think we got screwed on our taxes or do you think B finally got his ass in gear and squeaked our house in under the wire?

Come back tomorrow to find out.