i would have told him it will cost him many sales and if for your profit on one car i will. which by the way is 15% plus.

but thats what you get for financing anything from a dealer.

Yeah, well. When you wake up one day and you have to replace your walls, all cabinets, floors, every appliance, much of the electrical AND two cars you don't have the luxury of making perfect financial decisions.

And, you know what Ray. If the sum total of comments to me after going through what I've gone through is I deserve something bad because I had to make a decision under these sorts of circumstances, then I would just as soon you not say anything here. Thank you very much.

We have another hurricane heading our way. Unbelievable.

There are three ways to pay for a car - cash, dealer financing, outside financing. All three are valid and which one is best depends on the situation. A blanket statement like that is at best naive.

I remember very few November hurricanes

It's a new world out there

As of right now, they have it as a cat 1 pretty far west of us. If the forecast is correct we'll be ok.

We have bamboo on one side of our house. It formed a really good barrier but there was quite a bit of dead stuff. Milton knocked one really big clump of it over so I decided to clean it up. I had no idea how hard that was going to be. It took me 2 days just to remove the dead stuff.

I hate it now. We went from almost total privacy to a somewhat see-through barrier. My wife and the neighbors hate the bamboo to begin with so nobody is really happy.

Here's the resulting pile.

the idea was that dealers are the least trustworthy in a transaction.
good bye.

My apologies for the early morning rant......

**** just never stops coming at you when you go through this. I've talked to my neighbors a lot about the fact that you just cannot truly understand what you go through unless you actually go through it.

Today I got my property tax bill. I think I mentioned it but I had to jump through hoops to get a homestead exemption. I have the email saying it was approved. However, they didn't apply it. So I have to go deal with this on top of everything else.

I also found out that literally everything we are working on needs a permit, which I haven't even tried to deal with. Sheetrock repair needs a permit. Replacing cabinets needs a permit. Really, anything you do to fix your house needs a permit. I'm sure there will be a day of reckoning with this and it hangs over our heads, but we move on.

They are nowhere near picking up the massive trash pile in our front yard. They are working their way towards us but at a snail's pace. Might be months. Some people are getting dumpsters but I'm guessing we probably need 5 40yrd dumpsters at about $500 a clip, not counting that I have to lift everything into the dumpster. Probably not happening right now.

I ordered tile from home depot. I got an email saying they couldn't deliver it because I wasn't here. Only I have been. They simply haven't shown up. Their phone system is beyond horrible. It took almost 20 minutes of pushing buttons before I could talk to someone. The person said they hadn't left the store yet. But I need to wait around hoping they show up in the window they gave me - 6 AM to 8 PM. Really?

My wife and I have worked from sunup to sundown every day, except for our NY vacation. Although we have made significant progress, you just look around and see 100 more things that have to be done. It wears on you.

Plus, I'm physically exhausted to the point of feeling sick all the time. My hands are in constant pain and I can barely use them. I have shooting pain coming down my arm. I wake up so many times during the night from some sort of physical pain.

OK, I'm done ranting.

OK, one more little rant.

Called Home Depot to try to fix the delivery. Their automated phone system is mind-boggling bad. I mean, even for your typical automated phone system. They kept telling me to punch numbers and I did and nothing happened. They requested I talk and I did and nothing happened. Then they hung up on me.

I kept trying and about 20 minutes later got a human. She said they tried to deliver to my house (they absolutely did not) so they took it back. Then she looked up the home depot near me and my address and told me it was only 20 minutes away and they were on their way. She lied. This, I found out later, wasn't even close to the truth.

3 hours later I called again and they sent me to the store. Fortunately, someone answered that really tried to help me. She took a while but she found out that the order hadn't even been picked so there was no possible way they tried to deliver. My, oh my.

How does stuff like this happen?

Anyway, rescheduled the delivery. Fingers crossed.

Re: filling the dumpster. Some of them have swinging doors on one end to help loading. Maybe you an find one of those to make it a little easier.

GL.

Property appraiser got everything fixed (I think). They will be sending me a new reduced bill. That's a biggie for me.

I don't really have anything to say that will be helpful except I've been following along and everything just really sucks.

I think you're doing a tremendous job. I don't even know what I would do in your shoes, maybe just move and go broke? I really don't know. Even given how much progress you've made I don't think I could handle it lol.

I guess it will eventually all get figured out. I hope you get some breaks in the meantime, and not constant incompetence (not to mention fraud) from services you're paying for.

Thanks. Lots happened since my last update. I had to take a break from the trolls. I'm not sure why people choose to dump on someone going through something like this. But, I mean, just look at our last election. Humanity is taking a turn for the worse.

/rant

So.....

The delivery did get rescheduled. They sent me an email for the delivery window. But, it was getting towards the end of the window and my tile guy was coming the next day so I thought I would call.

The guy on the phone told me it was on the way. Strangely, almost immediately after I hung up the phone, I got an email saying it was on the way. Then, five minutes later I got another email saying it couldn't be delivered because I wasn't home. Only I was.

So, i go down to the store and talk to the manager. Yet again, the order never even got on a truck. She didn't really apologize, but just said it was really busy there.

Anyway, I told them to just put it in the back of my truck and I would take it. Took two trips because it was way too heavy to load in one.

Got the tile, got the tile guy. Tile is in and it looks great.

Our mountain of debris is gone!

I finally got tired of waiting on the city and hired a couple guys to haul it off. Took three trailer loads.

And of course the city truck showed up on our street when the guys i hired were loading the last load.

Oh well, they cleaned everything up really well, which the city wouldn't do. There's really no guarantee what they decide to pick up.

So I'm glad I had it done.

My plan for the kitchen was to try to save the granite countertops. I called around for someone to do it and it actually costs more in labor for them to remove the old ones and then put them back than it is to just order new ones.

So, I figured I would try to pull them up myself. I figured if I break one, then we'll just get new countertops.

We're getting new countertops.

Another storm heading our way. It looks like it might not get too big and maybe go north of us. But, I gotta say, after going through what we've gone through it changes how you think whenever a storm is developing.

I bought a bunch of flashing tape, caulk, and tarps in preparation.

Oh, yeah. I haven't set foot back in home depot again. There's a Lowe's across the street. I ordered my doors there and probably won't ever go into home depot again unless absolutely necessary.

.

Here's the truck the city sends to pick up debris.

However, they won't pick it up if it's too far from the road, or if anything is in garbage bags, or other reasons I'm not sure of. And they leave a lot.

Ot takes three people to do it. One to drive and operate the claw, one on the ground to situate stuff so the claw can pick it up, and one to write stuff down on a notepad. No clue what the third one is really doing other tgan mostly sitting and looking at their phone.

Glad to hear you made good progress despite the hassles. As a small-time owner of HD, I apologize for that.

When the manager whined about how busy it's been, I am 100% certain the phrase, "I don't ****ing care," would've been part of my response. At quite a volume. Might've thrown in something about being incompetent ****s as well.

Good on you to handle it better than I.

Useful way to get rid of bodies! And it’s already paid for.

keep plugging away boat
sounds like there isn't time for perfect, so do what you think is best at that particular moment and move on to the next decision
sometimes life levies an unexpected tax that wasn't on our radar