Well, the Spanish style house I love is already under contract, unfortunately. They wanted kind of a lot of money for it so it is just as well. Meh.

We still haven't heard anything from the crappy "lender" that was supposed to get back with to our mortgage broker. I think that it is safe to say that lender has followed suit of all of the others and decided to back out, or they don't have any money to lend, but they don't have the balls to say so. These cowards don't even tell you that they are not interested in lending to you, they just never get back to you as promised. We are the customers! Where in the hell do they get off treating customers that way? I hope they all go bankrupt!

I don't have a photo yet of the house I am so enamored of, the one built in 1925, but here is the aerial view of it with the property boundaries outlined in yellow. The area is so quiet, peaceful and relaxed.

I will drive by there again tomorrow to see if there are any more flyers out with information about the property. I sure hope there are.

We still haven't heard anything from the damn flaky lender. One of the suggestions I got on my post the other day was to check out USAA, which is open to those in the military or that have been in the past. We checked into it and it was a terrific suggestion because they have great rates on home and auto insurance, great bank accounts and even mortgages. Because they are a government bank, they actually have money to lend, unlike the rest of the banks. Unfortunately they don't do construction loans.

We did have an idea, though. We started looking to buy another house with more land than we currently live on, just so we can get out of here. Mainly because our neighbors are driving us up the fucking wall, but also because we need more room to do the fun and creative things we want to do. I really want to get set up and learn to make glass lampwork beads but have nowhere to do so, and Andy wants to get into more woodworking, but is limited to the cramped space between piles of stuff and my Jeep in the garage.

I think tomorrow we are going to drive around and take a look. We would still keep this house and rent it out, and we would keep the land and keep trying to build, but it might have to wait a bit. We have decided to go ahead and see about suing the county, since they screwed us over so badly that we can't build our house, but in the meantime we don't want to put our lives on hold and we don't want to have to put up with the ridiculously rude behavior of our neighbors, so the thing to do is to start looking around.

In perusing the listings, my favorite so far is actually located diagonally from our other land where we are trying to build. It is about two and a quarter acres and has a stocked pond in the back, a barn with stalls for six horses, and RV parking with electric. I love that area and it already feels homey to me, so I really like that one. The house is in pretty good condition with a new kitchen and baths, so it wouldn't need much work. The first two photos are of the barn property. The other photos are of another prospect.

The only other one we have found to be a possibility is one on about five and a half acres that is located on a producing citrus grove, and it has a fruit packing plant and warehouse with an office on the property in the back. It is a fixer upper and a short sale, so it could be a little more complicated, but the possibilities are endless.

The house looks like it probably needs a good bit of work, but it is HUGE- six bedrooms and four baths and over 2800 square feet and then there is nearly 4200 square feet of warehouse/office in the buildings in the back. There is even a little parking lot back there. But seriously, from the photos it looks like it would take some work. The house does have nice "bones," though. It just needs updating.

I can only imagine what we could do with all of that space. We would have to deal with the citrus groves of, course, so I am sure that would take up some of it, but it could be a neat property. Imagine the parties we could have with all of that parking and room! Of course we aren't big partiers, but that is beside the point. The grove property is listed for a higher price than the barn property, but is also a short sale, so who knows what amount the lender will accept. The barn property was just reduced by $85,000 in the last three months, so they probably won't want to come down much, but it has also been up for sale for nearly two years, so maybe they are getting desperate or tired of trying to sell it and would take less. It is a buyer's market now, and people are practically giving their houses away, so it is anyone's guess.

I feel slightly encouraged by the idea of getting out of the house we are in because it would mean getting away from the constant noise fest next door. Sadly, we could be content here for quite a while if it wasn't for them. We could use a bit more room, but we have some attic space that could be finished out to be a craft room for me, and there is a lot we could get rid of to make more room. I have been hanging on to a lot of things for the new place that I wouldn't need if we were to stay, so that would free up some space.

The biggest limitation of our current house pertains to the lack of workspace for Andy. He could do so much if he had a decent woodshop to work in. A corner of our garage just doesn't cut it. But we could make do if the neighbors weren't so obnoxious. It is pretty bad when your neighbors are so awful that they force you to move. Sadly, I feel like we should disclose their behavior to potential renters or buyers of the house later on, like it is a defect that we legally obligated to tell buyers about, but I don't think that qualifies.

We'll see what happens when we go take a look tomorrow-

This is just insanity. How is it possible that with credit scores in the 800s, a good loan to value, and stable employment that we cannot get a mortgage at any cost? I still see ads from places that claim to lend money even if you have bad credit or no credit, but those are ridiculous; no one will lend to you even if you have perfect credit, so if your credit is bad there is no way. It is not just us, it is epidemic, apparently. The lenders have gotten so gun shy that they don't want to lend to anyone, unless they already have as much money as they need to borrow. Actually, they shouldn't be called lenders anymore- the name is misleading. It would leave one to believe that they actually lend money. An email from our mortgage broker today said this:

If it makes you feel less picked on, I have a lot loan with this investor that is a 50% loan to value, good quality customers like yourselves and the investor has figured out a way to complicate that and delay the process. I still think the delays could be the result of credit lines being dried up temporarily, but for obvious reasons, the banks are not telling anyone that. No matter who the investor is, the delays are there for weeks and then suddenly the loans are cleared to close and then we hit another period of time of delays after that. It has to be something other than having too much volume. We know there is no significant volume of deals in their pipelines right now.

Our mortgage broker has been doing everything within his power to get us a deal since around November or so. He is just as frustrated with this process as we are. Right now our only hopes of building our house have dwindled down to a longshot from a "lender" that refuses to make a decision, a lottery ticket, and whatever other crazy ass scheme we can dream up. It would take probably take a miracle, but if we could find a private investor that wanted to make a nice, safe investment by loaning us the money and personally holding our mortgage that would be ideal.

I responded to an email this evening about the uncertain status of our loan. My email to our mortgage broker and our builder said:

Andy bought a Lottery ticket on the way home today. That is currently our plan B if this falls through.

Our builder replied back:

Please have Andy pick one up for me too? This mortgage and appraisal business is killing everyone looking to build. I hope they all go out of business starving themselves from the good loans they could have made.

And the mortgage broker said:

I have one too. If I win, I will finance it, personally, at 3% interest, no additional money out of pocket. Maybe that will bring the debt ratio down, right?

Something is seriously wrong in this country.

We finally got an update this afternoon on how our mortgage underwriting was going. Even though we have lowered the amount we are asking to borrow, our lender is balking at our debt ratio, which is still fairly low even though it includes our current house along with the amount we will be paying per month on the new mortgage. We are planning to rent this house out after we move, because the housing market is crap, and we don't want to give our house away. Renting it out for a few years will allow time for the market to recover. They had not figured in the amount we could get for rent for the house in doing the calculations, and we are not sure that they will accept that logic. We have a few more tricks up our sleeves, but the options are dwindling rapidly.

The other problem is, now that we have a lender that might be interested, our appraisal is too old, so they want it redone. I fear that it will come in even lower than before, and then we will be back to square one. The hits just keep on coming. Sometimes I really feel that we will never get this house built and that we will be stuck in our horrid neighborhood forever listening to our POS neighbors cackle into the wee hours of the morning and smelling the nasty cigar smoke that wafts over from their back porch. What a horrible thought.

It seems that lenders should change their names from "lenders" to "rejectors" because they are certainly not interested in lending to anyone right now. Our mortgage broker said that it is a very strange time- that he could turn in the paperwork for a "perfect mortgage," one that was well within the loan to value, borrowers with excellent credit, etc. and still they would sometimes not get past underwriting. The underwriters would just never get back to him; they are all running scared. That, to me is stupid and ridiculous. How do the mortgage companies expect to stay in business if they won't lend to ANYONE? No wonder the housing market sucks; no one can get the mortgage they need to buy anything. There is no end in sight unless things change, either.

The idiot mortgage companies and their stupid ass sub-prime loans got themselves into a huge mess, and now Andy and I, with near perfect credit, can't seem to get a mortgage to save our lives. I don't see what they are so worried about- they are going to be bailed out of their financial woes by the government. We, on the other hand, have no one to help us with funding, even though it was local government that put us in this predicament by costing us a small fortune and then delaying us so long that the market fell apart in the process.

I want to scream and strangle someone all at the same time. What has happened to this country and will things ever return to normal? I truly can't see how they could at this point.

Tuesday evening I got an email from our mortgage broker. He was finally ready for us to resubmit all of our documents. It has been so long since we started to try to get financing, that we have had to submit all new pay stubs, bank statements, etc. We originally provided all of that stuff back in August, then again in November after we were delayed further. Hopefully this will be the last time we have to do so.

I sent pdf files of everything that night, and then yesterday I got an informational email from my credit monitoring that my credit report had been accessed. I looked at the report and it was the mortgage company, so that is a good sign that we are getting close- they pulled my report for underwriting the mortgage.

We worked with our builder to manipulate the numbers to make them work with only a minimum out of pocket for us. We still aren't sure how much we will have to bring to the table, but it should be much less than we were looking at before. Cross all your fingers and toes and pray that we get to closing day soon and everything will go smoothly. We are so ready to start construction. As it is it doesn't look good for us to be able to move in by Christmas, but it might still be possible. I sure hope so. That would be the best Christmas present ever.

It has been an extremely busy week, and I simply haven't had time to post. Things are looking up on the whole house building project; I'll have to post about that when I get a chance.

I am still working some angles on the house thing, so hopefully I will stumble upon a winner. Don't worry too much, I am not a quitter even when I probably should be sometimes.

The house. Whenever someone asks me if we've started building it yet it is like opening a wound. I am so sick of dealing with the insurmountable issues. I don't think we are ever going to start building it, really. At least not anymore. After over 25 months of waiting, we finally got the permit, but now we can't seem to get the money to build it, due to the economy taking a dump.

We have excellent credit, but it doesn't matter. The issue is in the loan to value, and there is no way for us to improve the ratio because houses are not selling. The house would not be worth what we would be paying for it when completed, and there is nothing we can do about it. If we cut costs any more than we already have, it will affect the final value of the house, and change the loan to value ratio and we will still not get anywhere. There is no way to get a lender to lend enough to cover the costs to build a house right now, unless you have considerable equity. We have $75,000 worth of equity in our land and it still comes up short.

The only possibility is for us to make up the difference in cash. Cash that we do not have because the county and other agencies that abused us basically robbed us of it. The only option I can think of is to cash out my 401K, take a huge hit on penalties and taxes and hope that what is left is enough to cover what we would have to bring to the table in order to finally get this damn project started. I would sell a kidney, but I think that would be more difficult to arrange with taking time off work for recovery and all of that.

Whatever drastic measures we have to take, someone else may have to pay in the end- I am starting to think that suing the county to recover our losses would be a good idea. Our losses were incurred as a direct result of their incompetence, so it is only fair, right? It just isn't right for this kind of thing to happen to anyone.

In my quest to purchase as many things for the new house in advance, I came upon a quandary. There will be several pocket doors in the house, and I don't really care for the pocket door pulls that are available. There are some high end ones that are okay, but they are unbelievably expensive. So, I settled on some neat bronze pulls that were salvaged from old buildings. They are from the late 1800s to early 1900s, and I found them on eBay, of course. The only problem was that the bronze finish didn't quite match that of the oil rubbed bronze of the modern door knobs I chose, and I want all of the door hardware to be the same finish.

I looked all over the internet to try to find a way to artificially age the bronze. I couldn't find much. One forum I stumbled upon said that you could use egg yolks to tarnish silver practically over night and someone suggested that it might work on copper and bronze as well. There is something about the sulphur in the eggs that causes the chemical reaction that makes tarnish. I hard boiled some eggs, smooshed the yolks, and placed them in a Ziploc bag with one of the door pulls for a couple of days, but it didn't seem to do much. If you ever need to tarnish some silver, this would be your best bet.

I found this stuff called Brass Darkening Solution that is supposed to age brass, bronze, or copper. I tried it out on the first door pull- it has to sit in the solution for a while. I left it in overnight and then rinsed it and put it in a bath of water and baking soda to stop the metal reaction to the acidic solution. Then I rubbed it with mineral oil to give it a nice sheen. I think it worked pretty well. Now I only have nine more to do.

We got a bill from the surveyors for that stupid cross-hatching that the county wanted on our site plan, that only the surveyor could do or it was not acceptable- $440! I am just adding it to the monumental list of what they have cost us through their incompetence- they'll pay for it later one way or another. Seriously, we are not going to just let all this abuse go unchecked. They will have to deal with us, but it will be after we get our certificate of occupancy. We know better than to mess with them before we are completely finished with the house.

I am still here; nothing much is going on. I feel like I used to be able to yammer on about nothing endlessly on my blog before, so why can't I do so now? I can't figure out what has changed.

Speaking of change, we are going through all kinds of change at work as the transition from the Shuttle program to the Constellation program looms ahead. My area had lost a lot of personnel to other areas and we are getting ready to allocate a bunch of empty office space to engineers working on the new program. This translates to lots of work for me because one of my side duties is to assist the IT department in moves and changes happening in my area.

On the house front we think we have found a lender that will work with us. Our mortgage broker is hesitant to get our hopes up too much before the ink is dry on the underwriting, but he has a good feeling about this one. You've got to figure that lenders have to lend money to someone in order to stay in business, right? We have nearly perfect credit, so you would think they would be jumping at the chance to lend us money, but the recent collapse of the housing market has them all running scared. Sooner or later someone will have to take a chance on borrowers like us, or else they will all go out of business. We should find out something this week some time. Fingers crossed yet again!

Not much going on here lately. I have been very busy with my school work, trying to finish my current class up. I know I am going for the best major for me because I find my coursework to be very interesting and get quite absorbed in it, hence my lack of posting.

In other news, we did actually get our building permit for real this time and should be starting soon. We are just waiting to get the financing straightened out. I told our builder how I had it in my head that we simply MUST be in the house for Christmas, and he said he thought we could be there by Thanksgiving, which would be even better. From the beginning, my goal was for us to move in by Christmas of 2007, and sadly I saw that dream slip away. But this time we have a real chance of making it. Fingers crossed and many prayers.

Even my guarded enthusiasm wasn't guarded enough as it turns out. Perhaps i shouldn't have said we had our building permit. Actually the county had called and notified our builder that the permit was ready to be picked up. When he got down there, they told him that they needed a notice of commencement form signed and notarized. We had done that on the front end, and the form had been filed, but it has been over a year now, so the damn thing "expired."

On top of that, they had found a new issue. They wanted to see elevations of the covered walkway between the house and the workshop, and those elevations must be submitted for both the house permit and the workshop permit. This confused me, because we had decided to connect them with a covered walkway in order for the two to be treated as one structure per the county's own definitions, when they ad a problem with the position of the workshop being forward of the house on the lot. But they still are forcing us to get two permits, presumably so they can collect an additional permit fee from us. It is complete BS. Anyway, our builder is completing the elevations tonight and will turn them and the notarized form in tomorrow to get the permit. I will be amazed if he gets it. I think this is just the latest in a long stretch of other "issues" they are going to spring on us. There is a special place in hell reserved for these people, I am sure.

This evening we heard that our building permit is complete and ready to be picked up. We are happy to hear it to say the least, but have been screwed with so much that we are still very guarded in our happiness. It doesn't seem quite real yet.

We are still in limbo waiting to hear back from our mortgage broker on what kind of mortgage deals he can get for us, and also from our builder, on what is going on with our building permit. I expected to hear from him today, and since I didn't, there is a good chance that the county is screwing with us again and has gone against their word and found another issue.

You see, we had the surveyor do the stupid cross hatching on our site plan like they wanted, wasting an additional week of our time, and our builder picked up the survey and took it to the county. They still didn't like it, so he made the ridiculous changes they wanted and took it back again. He walked it around to every single department out there that has any say in permitting and got a verbal approval from each of them that they did not have a problem with it. The fact that we still do not have the damn permit means something else must have gone wrong. Our builder gets just as frustrated with them as we do and sometimes doesn't even tell us of their antics until he has them resolved because he knows it would just upset us, and would be unproductive.

Anyway, we are still waiting and even if we get the permit this week, we have to really pray that something will give with the mortgage thing. Right now it isn't looking good. Due to the housing market being shitty, and the fact that mortgage companies are going out of business left and right, the appraisers are being extremely conservative on their assessments, appraising new construction such as ours for far less than the cost to build it. Because of this, we will have to come up with either $26,000 or $11,000, or somewhere in between depending on what the mortgage broker is able to find. Obviously $11,000 would be easier to gather, but will still be difficult. $26,000 is probably impossible for us right now, short of selling a kidney. Please keep us in your prayers because we'll need them.

I'll keep you posted.

After everything else that we have been put through trying to build our house, now that the market for houses is way way down, we can't get the money we need to build, at least not without bringing more than $25,000 to the table. That would have been fine two years ago, before we were raped for nearly $50,000 just to be able to build, but now it is not going to happen. So, I don't know how things will work out. I was alerted to this issue via an email from our mortgage broker this evening, and this was my response:

We do not have $15,000 plus closing costs to put down. Two years ago, before the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Army Corps of Engineers, the St. Johns River Water Management District, the State of Florida Environmental Health Department, and the county royally screwed us, we did have that money to put down. But now, sadly no.

Over the past two years of hemorrhaging money, we have pissed away approximately:

$25,000 in interest to hold the property while the county screwed around and toyed with us over such BS as cross hatching on the site plan
$12,000 in legal fees to get a waiver to build when the county commission should have granted it to us without a lawyer as we met all of their criteria to the nth degree
$9,000 towards a road that couldn't be built

These are just the major expenses- there are tons of smaller ones that we have incurred due to the incompetence of the people working at the county and the other regulatory agencies. They would ask a stupid question, then it would take $500 worth of talking to our environmental permitting company to satisfy them. Or they would decide that we had to have the conservation easement cross-hatched on the site plan, and that it had to be done by the surveyor and that would set us back even further (haven't gotten the bill for that one yet, but it is coming). Plus, we have about $35,000 down on the land itself.

Sorry if this is more information than you wanted. Please see what you can do with the other lenders.

If you can't find anyone to do the mortgage without money down, I guess we'll have to just give up and forget the whole thing. There are no other options; we are at the end of our rope. I don't know how anything gets built in this county.

We have so very much outgrown this house. Add to that the fact that we are storing all kinds of spoils and plunder for the new house, acquired through my bargain madness, and you have a whole room full o' crap, and several other portions of rooms stacked with boxes o' crap. Well, not really crap, good stuff I got cheap.

As requested, here are some photos of some of my great deals. The Pottery Barn wrought iron headboard was $10.50, and the matching bench was $21.57. A similar headboard is on sale at Pottery Barn for $549. While mine is an slightly different wrought iron pattern that they don't sell anymore, I think it was a tremendous deal. The Whirlpool cooktop and wall oven, both new, were $430. The entry door handleset and deadbolt was $39.99. These and many other items are stacked quite high in our room full o' crap.

I have become quite the bargain hunter, and this weekend was taken up with collecting my spoils. Friday afternoon we picked up a brand new wall oven and cooktop that I found on Craig's List for a super cheap price, and then today we drove down to South Florida to pick up a gorgeous Pottery Barn wrought iron headboard and matching bench that I won on eBay for the new house. The headboard was ten dollars and change and the bench was just over twenty-one bucks. A hell of a deal.

We are now having trouble getting our construction loan for the amount we need because home sales in our area have been so abysmal lately and the appraisers are forced to used past sale information to determine value. The completed value of our house has to come in at a certain minimum amount or they will not lend us enough to build it. Compounding the lack of comparable sales in the area is the fact that nothing that has sold and that is considered "comparable" is even remotely similar to our property, making comparisons difficult to to make with any kind of accuracy.

There were quite a few things on the appraisal of our finished home that did not seem to be correct, so our mortgage broker is going to question the appraiser about several items that don't seem to add up. He had me send him a list of different items to ask about. He will run down each line item with the appraiser in an effort to clear up the discrepancies.

We are getting pretty tired of the constant road blocks with our house project. On the other hand, notification of the the latest crisis didn't have the same effect as earlier crises did. I simply have gotten to the point that I cannot get freaked out when given the bad news every time because we always seem to get things worked out, and it isn't worth the mental anguish.

Just gimme my new house, already!

It has been a few days since I have posted. Where have I been? Why right here, mostly. On Thursday I went to visit my grandma in South Florida and spent some time down there with my parents and my aunt and uncle that were visiting.

Since I got back I talked to our builder, and we finally have our septic permit (Yay!), so the building permit is just around the corner. I have been buying things for the house rather furiously on eBay the last few days. Due to the enormous site costs of building our house, such as the massive quantities of dirt required, the high price of putting in a water main extension and such, there are a lot of areas we need to save money in. So anything we can save anywhere helps out a lot. Fortunately, I have found that eBay is a tremendous resource in buying things such as doorknobs, faucets, sinks, etc. and I have set out purchasing a lot of the stuff already. From the looks of things our new house is going to consist of many, many eBay items, everything from stair handrails to leaded glass windows, and more. Sometimes it pays to be cheap.

Yesterday I talked to our builder, who said that the State Department of Environmental Health was in the process of issuing our septic permit. As soon as possible afterwards, he will turn in the responses to all of the county's "comments" about our building permit, and within a couple of weeks time we should be issued the final permit.

I talked to the mortgage guy too, and we are in good shape to be closing on our construction loan right around the same time, so it appears that we will finally actually start our house project around the third week of January, God willing. It will be so great to see some progress.

This afternoon I stopped by the property and walked around, just because it has been a while since I have been there. I snapped a few photos with my camera phone and then played with some effects on my MacBook. They don't look too bad for camera phone shots, do they? Oh, how I can't wait to be living out there!

This week is soooo slow. Every single day has felt like a Friday all week long, but occurring one after the other. I think it is because of the general apathy of the workforce that is mostly beyond ready for a holiday break.

Anyway, I was looking at different countertop materials today, trying to figure out what I can get for the new house that isn't too expensive. The world of countertops has really changed lately. In addition to the normal laminates, ceramic tile, granite, quartz, solid surfacing, stainless steel, butcher block and marble, now the options include concrete, recycled paper mixed with resin to form a stone-like surface (Paperstone), recycled aluminum shavings imbedded in resin (Alkemi), terrazzo type counters with recycled glass imbedded in them (Vetrazzo), pewter, and even countertops made with semiprecious stone and lit from below with LED lighting.

Surprisingly, the ones that are made with the most inexpensive and mostly recycled materials are among the most expensive. Go figure. I think that if I can find them for a reasonable price, I will go with slate. I like soapstone as well, so that might be an option if I can't find reasonable slate. Remember when everyone just had Formica? I guess it was much easier to choose back then.

This evening, our builder came over and we went though the itemized projected costs of our house to be built, and finally signed a contract with him after working with him for about a year and a half.

We should be only days away from getting our final building permit and beginning construction. We can't wait.

Okay, things will eventually work themselves out with the property, but it is causing us to jump through more hoops and will take up even more time. I just hate that these regulatory agencies have so much power now that they can completely mess with you like they have with us when all you want to do is build one little house on your own land.

All I have to say is that I better be putting up a Christmas tree in my new house in 2008, or someone will pay!

That title is supposed to be a scream. I am so frustrated I cannot even put it into words. I have gotten to my wits end when it comes to building a house on our property- a saga that some of you have witnessed for nearly two years now. I am ready to give up and lose everything because I just can't stand the absolute abuse we have been taking from the regulating agencies funded by my tax dollars plus the additional fees we have paid them to abuse us. Every other week there is some other hurdle we have to jump, and this time it is one where they have written us into a corner with their regulations.

I don't even want to talk about it any more. Go over to Tortoise Hollow to read the ugly details. Our dream may be gone forever at this point. I hope not, but the light at the end of the tunnel has suddenly gone very dim.

It is September, but it is still damn hot here. Really damn hot. I got the opportunity to discover just how hot this morning when Andy and I went out to our property where the new house will be built to do a little work. It was hot but also there is so much moisture there in that area that the humidity is a killer. We had to wear jeans and hiking type shoes because of the conditions, and gloves as well. I had a hat on at first to keep the sun off but it became cloudy and the hat was just holding all of the heat in.

Andy was really suffering from the heat as he was having to do most of the work- I am a girl, after all and do not have the arm strength to swing the machete, but I did what I could. Despite being covered in insect repellant, the mosquitoes found me anyway and bit me all over my face and arms. I can't wait until winter!

While we were in the back part of the property re-staking points, I came upon poor little Ollie's grave site. It has been over a year now since we buried him there and I am so glad that we will be living close by him soon. I stopped and had a "moment" at his little mound marked with a cross even though I was covered with dirt and sweat. It has been a long time since I have been out there to visit him and I miss him a lot still.

Anyway, to read more about what we accomplished at the property, go over to Tortoise Hollow. The posts at "The Hollow" should start really picking up here in the near future as things are moving along more quickly.

Okay, not really, I lied. But that is what I say to Andy when I look out the front windows and there are parked cars lined up all across the front of our property. This is pretty much a weekly occurence, so I say it a lot. It is like an inside joke anymore that we're nearly always having a party.

Our weekend has been good, but we didn't do much of anything. Just the usual crap like grocery shopping and laundry that we normally do, plus dog training for Annabel. We did go out and meet with some people at a kitchen design place and they are working on putting together a plan for our kitchen in the new house. We will go in again next Saturday to see what they came up with. And we did meet with our builder briefly out at the property yesterday. We were supposed to meet with the dirt guy and the land clearing guy at the same time, but one was stuck on a broken down boat in the middle of a river somewhere, and the other we don't know. It was storming outside, so we wouldn't have made much progress anyway.

We stopped in at a flooring store and looked at some options. We saw some neat things and started researching on the internet. We had planned to use carbonized bamboo flooring throughout most of the house originally, but after reading some reviews I realized that bamboo is not the right product for us. I researched some other options and I think we have settled on laminate flooring as the most practical for us. We want the same thing throughout the living rooms, bedrooms, kitchen, etc., and even real wood floors we were concerned would show too much wear in the traffic pattern. Laminate seems to be the perfect option; it is very durable and there are so many choices. Andy had a hard time switching gears for the new flooring idea as he generally does- he is less willing to accept change than I am and takes a while to warm up to something new, but he eventually comes around.

This afternoon there was a huge ruckus from the kids, birds and dogs alike, when someone came to the door. It was someone from the neighborhood to tell us that we had been chosen for "Yard of the Month."
Yard of the Month was started a couple of months ago by our successors as officers of the Homeowners association. They chose the first one, and then whoever wins each month has to chooose the winner for the next month, and they get a $25 gift certificate from Home Depot and a yard sign and such. I have joked with Andy since the beginning of the program that he needed to try harder so he could get Yard of the Month. He doesn't care in the least because we are just trying to get out of this neighborhood; our yard actually is one of the nicest ones even without him really trying and just doing the minimum required to keep the yard up to our standards. I guess most of the neighborhood is comfortable living below our minimum standards, though.

Just as a side note, we went out to lunch on Saturday while we had the oil in Andy's truck changed. I don't know if you have an Uno's where you are but if you do and you go there, you must try the buffalo chicken quesadillas. They were so effing good. I got nothing else right now. i hope you had a nice holiday weekend.

It is past my bedtime and I haven't had time to post, but I'm taking a minute to write a little bit. Andy had class tonight and I met with our builder to go over our final site plan for the new house. It was pretty interesting and we worked out a good plan that Andy and I will be very happy with. When Andy came home he was talking about how anxious he was to get started on the house. I realized that while I also am very ready to get started, I feel a lot more patient than before now that I know thinga are moving in the right direction. I just feel peace in knowing that we will get the house done. I hope that patience stays with me through the duration.

Our building permit with its attached approved waiver is creating ripples throughout the county offices. Our builder was there today getting things moving again and told us how he wished we could have witnessed the spectacle. It seems that a waiver such as ours has never been granted before in ths county so the county employees were very confused by it. He thought it was a riot to see them scrunch up their faces when they looked at our memo from the clerk of county commissioners detailing the decision.

The builder is still putting together estimates on clearing and dirt for us, and soon we will have our final estimate and can move forward with closing on our construction loan. Things are going pretty well, though we don't have much of a hand in the part occurring right now. We're just waiting for things to come together right now, which is a familiar posture for us. The fun parts lie just ahead!

Okay, now for the details of this morning's County Commission meeting. I am so happy that we are getting to build our house, but Lord, this morning was excruciating.

The meeting started at 9:00. There is always the usual crap at the begininng, the handing out of awards and recognition and whatnot. It is unreal how much time was wasted with piddly little crap, people thanking other people with long drawn out speeches talking about the same thing over and over. This part is rough, but to be expected, as this kind of thing occurs at every meeting, pretty much. Today, time was of the essence for us as we had our whole team there at our expense and some of our team had to leave at a certain time. So the more things dragged out, the worse it was for us.

The part of the meeting that was right before us on the agenda was the public comments section. The speakers were to get three minutes each, and there were a handful of them or so. The second speaker that was there under the public comments was not there with a public comment- she had missed the deadline for the agenda and brought a personal issue before the board under the public comments section which they then went on to belabor for over half an hour, even though they stated that she should have followed due process. I found it rather irritating that she took up so much time as she stated she was a developer and was there on a zoning issue- there had been a mistake by the zoning office and she was trying to get the fee waived for her to get a variance. She stated that she couldn't pay it, and they went round and round. We were starting to get antsy as time was ticking by and it got later and later. There was an executive session scheduled for 11:30 and we needed to get in and be heard before that or we would not be heard until the afternoon at which point we would lose our subject matter experts due to other commitments. Anyway, I felt very little sympathy for this girl. Here she was a developer and she couldn't pay a measly $600 fee? Shoot, it probably cost us more than $600 just in fees to pay the team we had there at the meeting on standby for the half hour of our time she wasted. We had to pay $1700 to the county just to have our piece heard today and paid $500 the last time we were heard, not to mention the six grand in legal fees, but since she was about to cry and they felt sorry for her we had to sit and wait while she whined about a $600 fee. I would have liked to stand up and tell her "Here's $600, now get out of here!" Ridiculous. I really think they need to rearrange these meetings to where the public comments come last. Especially since the next three commenters were little old ladies that had nothing better to do than come to the meeting and bitch about the way things are handled in the county. Two of them are ladies that come to every commission meeting and speak basically the same piece at each one. I guess they don't have anything else in their lives, so they come and be heard.

Anyway, through some miracle we eventually got to our turn and our whole team went down to the podium to set up. Our attorney was ready for an argument and it never came. The commissioner from our district quickly made a motion to approve our administrative waiver and it was seconded and passed by all. It was over before it even began, but since we won, we didn't care. Andy thought it was a bit of a let down that we didn't even get to hear our attorney's pitch, but I didn't care. I know the commissioners were briefed by the county attorney and he must have done a good job because they were ready to go along with us from the beginning. It was just surprising that none of them had anything to say about it because they all seem to like to hear themselves speak so much. My personal feeling is that they didn't want our attorney's pitch to be part of the public record, so it was better for them if they just approved it and the public would never reaslly know what the issue was. That way they wouldn't come off looking bad for denying us previously. Who cares? It's over!!!!!! We are building a house!

At last the drama is over. At this morning's County Commission meeting we were granted a waiver to allow us to build our dream house after many months of waiting. Thank God! It was all over so quickly! I will write more about exactly what went down later on; for now I am just letting it sink in.

Only about one more hour until the start of the County Commission meeting that could change my life for the better or possibly the worse. We are going to be leaving in about twenty minutes for the meeting- I'll be back with the conclusion this afternoon! Please send your prayers if you are the praying kind.

Tomorrow is a huge day for us. We will be attending the regular meeting of our County Commission and have an item on the agenda to be heard. This is our final attempt at getting a waiver in order to build our dream house.

Some of you are familiar with the story, which has now been dragged out over a year and seven months. We have gone before the Commission once before and failed, but this time we have an attorney on our side and are trying something different- something that has only been brought before the Commission one or two times before by anyone, ever. We will have their full attention this time, after they so quickly dismissed our case the last time.

There are more details over at my Tortoise Hollow blog if you want to catch up with what has been going on. It is exhausting to think about and I can't believe it has been this long since it all started. I hope to be able to post happy news tomorrow. It should be all over by noon or so at the latest, but I don't know when I'll get a chance to post. I'll let you know as soon as possible.

Ah, I have just realized that the "minutes" I posted yesterday only made sense if you have been following our case, and most of it has not been posted here, but rather at the Tortoise Hollow blog. These minutes were from the meeting that took place in early May and we have moved on since then to get an attorney and go for an administrative waiver under the section of the county code that covers "takings." A taking is when a government entitity takes a piece of private land for public use and the fifth amendment says that they must pay the owner of the land for it. It is considered a "regulatory taking" when someone's land is regulated to the point that they cannot use it for its intended purpose and it is considered the same as if the land was physically taken. Please check Tortoise Hollow for the full scoop. We are now closing in on the final date where our case will be heard by the board. The final decision is only days away, however scary that may be.

The minutes from the County Commission Board meeting we took our property/road case to finally were approved and published after many weeks. It is rather surreal to read them after living the situation, but everything in them is true. Here they are with all names changed, including mine.

"Jennifer Hurley stated in February 2006, she purchased a 7.59-acre property in North Merritt Island with the intent to build a primary residence; and since then they have been working toward getting all the permitting in place. She stated they have secured wetland permits from the DEP and the Army Corps of Engineers; and the only thing that stands in their way is the Code that says the property must abut a County-maintained road. She requested a waiver of that section of the Code.

Commissioner One stated they had a lengthy discussion; they worked with Permitting and Enforcement Director Blankety Blank and staff; and the dilemma is they are on a right-of-way. He stated if this was an easement, they could do a flag stem lot; but it is a public right-of-way that creates other issues that they have not been able to overcome. He stated he has shared with them the concern that the Board had previously with similar kinds of approvals; and requested Mr. Blank explain the ramifications of a decision to approve. Permitting and Enforcement Director Blankety Blank stated approximately 14 years ago the Board had staff prepare the Ordinance; it has been amended a couple of times; but it requires somebody to have access to a maintained roadway, either public or private subdivision, and/or an easement with legal access to a maintained system. He stated the other option is to enter into an unpaved road agreement and then build the roadway; and after the roadway is built, it is then accepted and maintained by the County. He stated if the Code was to be waived, they would have access in a public road right-of-way that was not built to any standard; there would be no maintenance of that and no guarantee that they would be able to traverse it safely; and there could be accidents or problems with emergency vehicles, so that would be the ramification. Commissioner One inquired how does this differ from Tamarind Groves where there is the same kind of scenario. Mr. Blank stated Tamarind Groves is a little different; they are actually ingress/egress easements that are dedicated to all of the individual homeowners; but they appear to be road rights-of-way to someone who is not familiar with the legal aspect of it. He stated this is actually a platted, dedicated road right-of-way that was accepted by the Board many years ago; Tortoise Hollow Lane is the name of it and it was just never built; and platting things without actually building the infrastructure is not allowed today. Commissioner One inquired what is the solution to Ms. Hurley’s problem. Mr. Blank stated the first possible solution is for the Hurleys to enter into an unpaved road agreement and build a road, which would be a very expensive undertaking; and they have already submitted their first round of plans for review, utilizing that portion of the Code. He stated he talked to them in the past about possibly vacating the road right-of-way; they would have to work with all the property owners that would be affected; and it is his understanding that not everyone is willing to do that. He stated he would be more than willing to sit down with all the parties to try to explain the best possible solution for all of them; but ultimately they have to make this decision. Commissioner One inquired have there been similar requests previously; with Mr. Blank responding other than the West Tamarind Groves area, he is not aware of anyone requesting to waive this portion of the Code. Commissioner One stated he is struggling with it.

Ms. Hurley stated they did start out with the unpaved road agreement; they spent a lot of money having the road designed only to find many months into the process that they could not get the design approved because the area is surrounded by wetlands and canals; due to the road height that was required and where the drainage swales had to be, they could not fit it within the 50-foot roadway; and they were told that they would need to acquire an additional 15 feet on either side of the 50-foot right-of-way. She advised there are properties on either side that have houses built on them; they were able to build before this was an issue; and technically their legal access is from Johnalessi Road, but since there is a ditch that runs along Johnalessi Road, they use Tortoise Hollow Lane for access to their homes. She stated they cannot get the extra 15 feet on each side because the property owners will not give or sell the property; the drainage swales would end up only five feet off the foundation of one of the existing homes, which would
cause drainage problems; and that is where they got stopped. She stated they discussed with
Mr. Blank and one of the County engineers about the possibility of building the road using retaining walls to build up on either side and then using culverts along the entire length; but it is not possible to tell if that would be approved or not without it being engineered; and they cannot engineer another road on the possibility that it might work. Ms. Hurley stated even the road as designed would be $125,000 or more; and with the retaining walls, it is anybody’s guess how high that amount could go, but it is a major public works project. She stated they also investigated the option that Mr. Blank brought up about vacating; they talked to Commissioner One about it; but it is not believed that it would be practical because there is a 26-acre undeveloped parcel at the end of the road that could be divided into as many as five or six properties later on; and vacating would be taking away the public access for those people. She noted they could not vacate because it is platted with the property across from them; and those owners tried to get it vacated in 2004, but were denied for the same reason, access problems for the large property in the back and the fact that some other properties, such as hers, could be divided.

Commissioner Two stated the Ordinance change was in 1991; and he was on the Board when it occurred. He stated people built on roads and had an agreement that they were going to maintain the roads; but the County Attorney advised the County was really in error in making it available with building permits. He stated the problem was once the County gave someone a building permit, it had certain obligations to be able to get emergency services to them; and it would have to be on a County-maintained road. He stated the other idea was the flag stem where someone owned the land that went to the street; it was just a narrow access, but it was fee simple ownership; and thinking in these terms, there has been continuing discussion, not just in Tamarind Groves, but in the Limon area as well about opening up different areas for County maintenance in order to have building. He stated the County has said it will accept if and when it is built up to County standards; sometimes that is not a problem; but other times it is a problem. He stated the first problem is that in allowing people to build, the County has to service them with emergency services; and if the Board approved this 900 feet, people not only in Tamarind Groves but in other places in District A will be asking for the same thing, which will be problematic. He stated one problem is that they are going to be compelled to go in and maintain; and there will be the person who wants to build and once he gets his home in there, he will ask for benefits. He stated many people buy on a dirt road and then come in to ask the County to pave that road; and this is even more compelling than paving because there is an obligation to the people once the County gives them their certificate of occupancy. He stated it will involve a different Commission; there will be different people because the property may change hands; and the Board may be putting itself in a posture of having to do certain things to meet certain basic requirements as a County. He stated he hopes the Hurleys can work something out; he hopes Commissioner One will meet with them to work on it; but he is not able to support the request because of his concerns.

Commissioner Three stated that is also her concern; they have a parcel and the question is how to get to it; but she does not know that it is the Board’s responsibility to make sure they have access to their property. She stated a lot of times in Florida people buy a parcel that is landlocked; there should be a way to get to the parcel; but she does not think the waiver is the right way to go as it would set a dangerous precedent.

Commissioner One stated he suspected this was going to be the discussion; and he is going to move for denial, but he will continue to work with the Hurleys to see if the issue can be resolved with the property to the north. He stated the Board will not approve the waiver.

Motion by Commissioner One, seconded by Commissioner Three, to deny the request of Andrew and Jennifer Hurley for waiver of Section 65-109, Some County Code, to allow a building permit to be issued on a parcel that does not abut or have access to a County-maintained road. Motion carried and ordered unanimously.

Chairperson Four stated Commissioner One will be working with the couple to see if there are any other possibilities. Commissioner Three stated it is important for the Hurleys to have access to their property; and hopefully Commissioner One and staff will be able to work out something. Ms. Hurley stated they have exhausted all of their options."

So, if you haven't been following the saga of us trying to build a house on the property we bought almost a year and a half ago, it will be coming to a head here pretty soon, probably in early July. That seems far away, but time seems to flow at warp speed anymore, so I am sure it will be here before I can blink. I talked to my mom on the phone yesterday and she asked if I was nervous or worried about the outcome of it all, and truly I could say that I am not. I feel like the entire situation is out of our hands now and we are just basically spectators for this final stretch.

The full story can be found at www.tortoisehollow.com, but the condensed version is that we are in the last stages of fighting to be able to build a house on our property before we must give up and go to court to legally force the county to pay us the full market value of our land plus all of our expenses in trying to develop it and legal fees for regulating it to the point that it has become worthless. This is not something that happens very often, but it is our last resort.

So really, we have high hopes that the curent administrative waiver we are working on will be approved, but we must also plan for all scenarios. Andy and I discussed what would happen if we are not allowed to build. We decided we would go to court to get our money back and we would start over in looking for a new place. We even think we would still want to build. Does that make us gluttons for punishment? Maybe so.

Life has been jam packed for me lately. Yesterday I had to get up at 3:15 am in order to set out early on the drive to Gainesville for my liver appointment at Shands. It is about a two and a half hour drive and my appointment was early so I left the house at around 4:30 and got on the road.

I hate highway driving, especially in my Jeep; it is like driving a box into the wind. The particular route took was completely mobbed with semis too, so I was white knuckling it almost the whole way there. Semis scare me to death sometimes. Truck drivers drive like maniacs sometimes. But the appointment was pretty good. The doctors at Shands seemed to know a whole lot more about what they were looking at than my local docs had. For instance, they were able to tell me with almost complete certainty that my elevated liver enzymes were not caused by an exposure to something in my environment. This was because when the AST and ALT were high, my alkaline phophate and bilirubin levels stayed the same.

The doctors at Shands did not believe that my local doctors had effectively ruled out everything either. They said that it was basically down to things such as Alpha 1 Antitrypsin deficiency or Auto-immune hepatitis or even Celiac disease- Can you believe that Stacy?-, though I don't have most of the symptoms for Celiac, but it is still possible. So they are going to go over the slides from my liver biopsy with their pathologists and they sent me for more tests. They did tell me that there are a certain number of patients that they never do figure out what is causing their liver problems. Fortunately for me, my liver enzymes have finally gone down after seven months of being high to the normal range. They have dipped down briefly before, only to bounce back up the next month, so I still have to make sure that thhere isn't some cause that I need to know about.

When I got back from my trip, Andy and i had to head down to Melbourne, which is about 45 minutes to the south to meet with a lawyer about our property. We had been referred to him by some people at the county that were trying to help us so that we can build on our property. The next action to take is to have the attorney ask the board of commissioners for an adminstrative waiver for our building permit under the "regulatory takings" section of the local building code. We have the attorney now on retainer and hopefully the fees will not hurt too badly. I have noticed that when we are continually paying out large sums of money that it gets easier to write a big check without flinching. You just say to yourself, what's another couple of thousand anyway? It is just money, right? Well at least as it pertains to our house project- it still pisses me off to no end to be paying over three dollars a gallon for gas, but I won't bother to rant about that injustice because I am sure we are all feeling the pain of that.

The lawyer liked the giant "book" I had, which is really a leather binder stuffed to the absolute limit with every pertinent document, photo, aerial diagram, letter and so on that has anything to do with our property and what has been tried so far and said that he needs all of that information, preferrably in that book type of format. Most of the stuff in the big binder I have is the only copy we have of those documents, so I went to the local office supply store last night and made copies of everything, even color copies of some of the stuff and then bought a big binder and tons of page protectors and index tabs so I could make a nice organized, cohesive collection of our paperwork just like my big book to send to the law office. I spent a few hours and about fifty bucks compiling it, and then I mailed it priority down to the their office today. It was a lot of work, but the easier I make it for the lawyer to research our case, the less he will have to bill us for at his rate of $225 an hour, so I feel that it was well worth it to make that stuff as easy to flip through as possible. So that is why I had no time for blogging last night.

Anyway, things are going well, I am terribly busy at work, and all of the animals are doing fine. Hopefully I will have to time to slow down and breathe a little here pretty soon. You know how it is- everything always happens all at the same time and then you have to try to keep up. I hope you are all doing well too.

We had a meeting with our district's county commissioner yesterday, and a whole other cast of characters and it seems that we now know what we have to do to get the building permit for our house. I posted about it on my other blog so stop over there to see what the outcome was if you are interested.