Moving Update + Full Details + Fundraising (Patreon)

Moving, expenses, etc will usually be posts exclusive to Tier 3, but I decided to make this one public because it's sort of the Overall Mega Post. I can't take the time to explaine the entire situation on every platform, having a handy link to the whole thing on here will make fundraising much easier.

Up until now, The Wife and I have rented a small house from a private landlord. He never raised the rent on us over the near decade, he never had much cause too given what the house lacks, and as a result we had the lowest rent in the city. Literally. I checked. But for us and our barely-above-the-poverty-line income, that simply meant we had a little wiggle room month to month (as opposed to not knowing how we'd cover expenses every month). 

Our landlord had been trying to sell his land for a good few years now, and early in January he finally did it. The guy he sold it to wants to clear it all away for a car lot or whatever, and now we have until the end of March to be out. (It used to be the end of February, but we asked for an extension.)

We very, very quickly realized that the rental situation in our city was almost completely out of our league in both rent and availability. If we went balls-to-the-wall aggressive over the next two months and experienced tremendous luck, we'd end up in a one bedroom with all kinds of pet fees, a rent increase by at least 1/3, and my Patreon earnings would go from 'nice padding' to 'absolutely necessary.' And even if we got into a place with semi-decent management, apartment complexes tend to change hands every two years anyway.

Now, The Wife and her family inherited a two bedroom house from her dad, who passed away over a year ago at the age of 86, and it's been vacant ever since. While that is incredibly good news in the long run, there's a reason it's been vacant. Several reasons, actually.

First and foremost, the old man (affectionate) was basically a hoarder. Here are some pictures of the inside even after we had worked on it a bit.

^See that cloth covering the front door window? That's 'cause the window is broken. There's a glass door installed on the outside....but it's installed backwards.

^That's a glimpse of the back deck after The Wife had a go clearing off a bunch of stuff just so we could have an easier time walking in the back door.

^That ominous dark room there at the back? Shelves. A lot of shelves. None of them empty.

^Not pictured: the full-to-bursting closet.

The results after one (1) afternoon dedicated solely to making it easier to walk through the house:

^Also not pictured: The crawl space under the house full of broken crap that The Wife gets to break her back cleaning out. (Although you can kinda glimpse it under the deck.)

But hey, it can't just be a matter of a Bunch of Shit in the house, right? All that takes is some elbow grease and a special pick up from the garbageman. Since that's too easy, the house comes with actual problems:

-Probate! Since the old man passed away, his house, cars, bank accounts, etc all need to be settled in probate. While it's legal for us to move in whenever, probate is still something that has to be settled. We hired a probate lawyer to go through everything for $2,000, and we get to just kinda hope that we git a nice return on the cars and bank accounts. 

-No centralized heating/cooling! The old man lived off of space heaters, fans, and window units. If you've ever done that, I'm sorry. It's miserable. But the even bigger thing is that we have animals in a state that gets both triple-digit boiling and -32 degrees freezing. They need A/C. And because it's been 45 years since A/C was installed in this house, everything required for it to run properly is ancient, unusable, and needs to be replaced. We're getting a second estimate on the cost of installing everything, but given the amount of work we're looking at around $15,000 (and the bank will let us finance only half the amount).

-Electrical issues! At some point in his life, the old man was an electrician. This means he was confident enough to jury-rig the main breaker box in some kind of seemingly incomprehensible way that requires a professional to evaluate. There are also a couple fixtures (a plug here, a switch there) that are popped out and just...exposed and non functional? And the bathroom doesn't have an outlet at all? It's weird. We're getting assessments from two different electricians on exactly what needs to be fixed and for how much, but the general price range we expect could be anything from $500 to $5000. 

-Carpets! I don't even wanna know when the carpeted areas of this house (bedrooms + laundry area + storage) were last dealt with, but they are thin and they are stained. I dunno why there's a huge oil(?) stain in the doorway to the master bedroom, but it's there. We're getting our first flooring assessment this weekend, but from online research it should be around $500 to $750 per area. This is a high priority but doesn't technically prevent us from moving in like A/C and electrical.

-Washer/dryer! There are units in the house, but we have no idea if they still work. They were buried under junk (as you saw) until the last time we were there. If they work, fantastic! We have a stop gap until we can get new units. If not, we'll have to invest in one or both new units. (I've been taking our laundry to a laundromat for a decade now. I am Tired.)

-No dishwasher! Another thing that can technically wait until later while still being important, especially if the electrical work turns out to be A Lot. (I've been hand washing dishes for a decade now. I am Tired.)

Anyone will tell you that this is still ultimately an incredible situation. 2-5 years of paying off $15-$25k in exchange for a two bedroom 1k square foot house is a steal. A poverty life changer. That's why we're barreling ahead and scraping together credit from the bank and loans from relatives while I throw Patreon money at all these problems every month. Because it will be absolutely, entirely, completely worth it. There's just a lot up in the air right now in terms of hard numbers, and we can only borrow so much from relatives while being able to pay back X amount every month. 

So if you just saw me talk about 'fundraising for a move' in a video, or on Discord, or in a livestream, this is what I mean. It's much bigger than the typical "moving expenses." It's why, even though a few of you have already been wonderfully generous, we've gotta keep fundraising. Plus, it's only once all of this is dealt with that we can then start to address the financial burdens that have been hanging over for us for a good long time now.

(Plus there's typical life stuff and channel related stuff in the meantime. I need to see a doctor about an inhaler. My computer chair is about to die. The Wife needs special shoes that her work will accept without throwing her hips out of whack. Etc.)

It's a lot, and if I have to put myself out there and ask for help over and over and over again, I'll do it. But I still promise—no mid-roll ads. They wouldn't help that much anyway. 😂  

Thank you for reading. <3

https://ko-fi.com/brittanydiamond