Final Closing

In the midst of Hurricane Gustave...(and our tropical storm warnings) we got moved in! Praise the Lord! We are still looking at THIS MESS in our living room but at least the pile is reserved to our "living room only" now....Let me just tell you NOTHING went as planned on Friday but we still got moved in AND we received some tremendous blessings in the midst of the storms. I just have to share what happened!

This was our agenda for the day...see how easily it flows and how nicely it should have worked??

• Breakfast at Cracker Barrel 6:00 am
• Pickup U-haul at 7:00 am at scheduled reservation time
• Load U-haul until 12:00, drop it off at new house fully loaded.
• Drop dog off at groomer's so he is clean when he enters new house
• Grab a bite to eat on the way to closing
• Closing at 1:15 - 2:15
• Go back to new house and unload U-haul (allow couple of hours to unload)
  
• Return to old house for remainder of large items (allow couple of hours to finish loading)
• Grab dinner on the way back to house and finish unloading, set up beds and turn in for the evening.

That all sounded pretty good didn't it? Well, let me just tell you that is NOT the way it happened in the real world! I think the ONLY thing on that list that happened was we ate breakfast at 6:00 am and I dropped the dog off at the groomer's at 12:00...other than that, God just took our plans and threw them from a cup like a pair of dice and said "Here let me roll them out and see what I have in store for you this hour."

When we got to the U-haul place at 7:00 our truck wasn't there and didn't get there for an hour and a half. I can only assume the manager of the place thought we were going to be angry and feared for his life because he immediately had a horrible attitude and cut us off as soon as we announced who we were and that we were there to pick up our truck.

He quickly told us the customer who had our truck just called and said she was filling up with gas and was on her way. Greg started to ask him a question and the man cut him off again...literally stopped him curtly in mid-sentence and said "I don't KNOW when she is going to be here! Your truck is NOT here!" Greg was going to ask if there was a larger or smaller truck available so we didn't have to wait. But after this outburst from the manager, Greg lost his temper and threw our reservation paper down and said "Well aren't you just a jerk this morning!" and he walked out the door. I stood there in shock at what had just happened. Greg doesn't lose his cool like that with people so I wasn't quite sure what happened. He refused to deal with the man anymore.

We stood out by our vehicle and I called around to other rental places trying to find another truck to rent. I had FINALLY located one at Budget (an hour later) when the manager came outside and told Greg the woman customer had just called again and was 10 mins away - she was having a hard time finding somewhere to get gas. This was probably true because of hurricane Gustav, people had been filling up gas tanks and gas cans and stations were running out of gas. The manager told Greg he would only charge us $9.00 for the rental instead of $29.99 and 1/2 price on the mileage - for our inconvenience. Great!!

Okay, so on to the house to start loading. We get the truck loaded, dog dropped off, truck dropped off at the house and grab a bite to eat on the way to the realty company where we are going to have our closing. We get there at 1:15 and we sit and wait until 2:00. Then we are told to come back at 3:00 because the Title Company is not ready yet - tying up lose ends.

We leave and run to Walmart and buy some hurricane supplies (ice chest, grill, etc) because we aren't sure at this point where the hurricane is going to go yet. We get back to the realty company at 3:15 and we sit and wait until 4:50! Finally the lady from the Title company shows up and in about 15 mins we have all our paperwork signed but then we had to wait for the sellers to sign their paperwork because.....we got a refund!! Whooohoooooo!!! We got a refund of almost $600.00 on what we had paid out. We had to wait for them to finish signing their paperwork before we could get our check. That was wonderful!

When we left there we went back to the house and Greg and Dakota started unloading the truck and I went to go pick up our dog. We ended up not finishing up until after midnight and we just threw our mattresses on the floor with some sheets on them and crashed that night - from complete exhaustion.