– Yesterday we signed the paperwork and paid the down payment for our new home. We got the keys and have begun slowly but surely moving stuff in over there. The utilities aren’t on there yet but they will be soon and I planned on doing a live video tour of the new place on April 2nd to share it with you.

– The video home tour will take place at 3pm Indiana time and will be posted @ http://www.harvestofdailylife.com/webcasts-vlog-live-chat for your viewing and chatting pleasure. It will also be recorded and available for you to view at any time after the live broadcast, you just wont be able to participate in the live chat.

– Got a funny call from my OBGYN’s office today! After not calling back to schedule my 3 hour blood test like they wanted on Friday they placed a follow up call this morning that I missed. Then this afternoon I get another call from them and they’ve changed their tune!

I was told by the nurse practitioner that “when the doctor was filled in she decided, since I only failed by one point, and because I have such a hard time with blood draws… that they would LET me skip the follow up test” if I came in and had a chat with my doctor about all the particulars.

I told the nurse that we were going to decline the 2nd test anyway and that we would come in to talk with the doctor about it all since I want to be written a prescription for the blood glucose test strips so I can just test and mange it all on my own. Isn’t it funny and kind of odd that they have changed their tune all the sudden?

– Oh, rent is due on the 1st right… Well, the slumlady never dropped that mutual release letter back off to us like she said she would. We met with her back on March 13th and she assured us she would retun the letter signed, she also said she would swing by to pick up our April 1st rent (as opposed to her just using our security deposit to cover it like we suggested).

Since she is still NOT following through with what she says she’ll do we’ve decided we are also going to quit following through with our own obligations. She can keep our security deposit for April’s rent, we’ll give her a check for any supposid “damages to the property” upon move out inspection and we are done.

Heck she can sue us if she really wants to, we would be happier if she did that way we could lay our case out to a judge (without having to pay crazy fees to begin the legal process) and get this all delt with officially. I bet she wont sue though, she seems to be avoiding paper trails and official stuff like the plague. We probably wont even be able to get her to do a move out inspection.

Oh, on Saturday we hid in the basement waiting out our Tornado warning and the basement flooded again. It was flowing like a river down there, I even took a video of it for fun. Luckily there wan’t ever a tornado, just another flood in the basement. We were kind of hoping that a tree would cave in the roof here or something, that would end our lease early I bet! LOL…

If you didn’t get email notification of the online shower Maiden53 put up for me you can check it out here. Be sure to stop by to sign the guest book and play a game or two. Oh and you’ll be able to see some cute photos of the baby bump (and her heartbeat) there too!

The post Just passing through to leave a quick update or On the move again! appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

All in all it’s been a productive day despite the fact that slumlady has once again failed to do what she said she would! Yep, we still have not been given the signed copy of the mutual release letter she was having her husband sign, damn hobag! We are all “whatev” at this point, we are moving out either way! N is pretty pissed off though.

Oh, did I mention that we are signing the paperwork on our new home on Sunday? We’ll have the keys and can begin the fun of moving, yay! Really we can’t wait to get the heck out of this crap hole ASAP. It will suck to leave this place without a signed agreement that legally breaks our lease but there is nothign we can do if the landlords are going to intentionally dick us around.

And for those of you wondering about the baby bunnies and Maybelle’s labor, luckily she only had the 6 babies I originally mentioned. We were worried that she would have more while we were away in Tennessee and we felt bad that the a buddy (who was pet sitting for us) would have to deal with dead bunnies while we were away. Thankfully, Maybelle had no more babies to birth and she did not scar our buddy for life. We are thankful as I am sure she is too.

On another note, I am thinking we will schedule the live webcast/ chat of the new house for April 2nd so mark your calendars, time is TBD. I’ll send out an email invite to those of you who have expressed an interest in the webcast too. It should be a fun way for us to test the waters for our “going to have tater at the farm” webcast scheduled for june. It will also be fun for those of you that are curious about our new home.

Tomorrow I get to drink my Glucola and have my blood drawn with the OBGYN. Fun times, nope! Don’t be surprised if I don’t post anything new tomorrow. If I pass out during the blood draw I am pretty sure it will leave me exhaused and usesless the rest of the day, just like last time. And since I am laying more these days, per midwife orders I find it hard to lay and operate the laptop… That means less internet for me.

The post Spring showers and forward motion, are we there yet? appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

Today I present you with another episode of The Renters and the Slumlords. I thought this other post was the last of the saga, boy was I wrong but I am feeling a bit punchy so I am going to try having some fun with this.

So, on friday we had our face to face meeting with Slumlady. She was all ditsy and unfocused as usual. She made small talk about my pregnancy the whole time and avoided discussing the real issue at hand.

The best part of the conversation was when she tried to inform me of how dangerous cats can be to pregnant women. We rolled our eyes and explained how N takes care of the pets these days and that everyone knows pregnant women aren’t to handle cat feces.

We were damn polite about this and didn’t even bring up how the moldy leaky basement is more of a health concern than having cats in the house! We really could have gone off about that. I don’t have cat shit particles blowing through the HVAC system, just mold spores. Honestly, which is more harmful?

Anyway, Slumlady’s signature isn’t even on our lease so having her sign the mutual release letter wasn’t even an option here. I explained how she needed to have her husband sign the letter and she assured me it would be dropped back by once he signed. We are giving her until tonight to return it, then we are going to start harassing.

Funnily enough on Friday afternoon after meeting with Slumlady I get this USPS email notification about the most recent certified letter we sent. It has almost been 14 days since it was sent and…

*gasp*…

someone actually picked the damn thing up! I think hell must have frozen over.

Saturday we got the signature confirmation card back from it. After all the phone conversations and us putting stop payments on checks, someone went and picked up our freaking letter with the now canceled check in it. What a joke!

Then I got to thinking. I bet Slumlady went to talk with Slumloard about signing the mutual release letter and he started asking her questions. Now she’s not the brightest light bulb in the bunch and N and I are betting she never even relayed half the information to him.

Since Slumloard only provided us with Slumlady’s contact information it is his own bad, I mean he is the one putting such a dimwit in charge of important stuff…

Well, N thinks that Slumlady got in to some hot water with Slumloard about all this and that Slumloard went to get the letter so he could learn the severity of the situation (since Slumlady is so loopy).

The signature confirmation card shows our letter was forwarded to a different address than the one we were told by Slumlady to send correspondences to. It was forwarded to a P.O Box owned by Slumloard in a completely different city than the address of Slumlady and Slumloard signed for it. Now I am wondering if the two aren’t separated and sabotaging each other or something like that.

It just keeps getting better and better huh?

Now we are waiting to see how the drama is going to unfold. Was Slumloard left in the dark by Slumlady about all our complaints and attempted correspondences? Will Slumloard contact us and try to renegotiate or will he just sign the release? What do you think is going on and what could possibly happen next?

At this point it is all kind of like a soap opera huh? Instead of The Bold and the Beautiful it is The Renters and the Slumlords… I think I am now going to take Teeni‘s suggestion and change my tagline.

Harvest of Daily Life

because real life requires real people …

and cast iron stomachs some days!

The post Instead of The Bold and the Beautiful it is The Renters and the Slumlords… appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

After months of certified letters, emails, phone calls and face to face meetings that accomplish nothing we’ve finally decided to ask the landlords to release us from the lease come May 1st.

We decided that asking to be released from the lease was the better way to go. If we needed to get a lawyer and present all our documentation supporting their breach of the lease we could. It is just that starting the legal battle takes much time and lots of money we didn’t really want to have to fork out if not necessary.

So, N made the phone call to the landlords this morning. He is the professional one who can present things in a non emotional way. I just tend to be blunt and rude about things like this and say stuff like F-you, you are an idiot. LOL…

Anyway, N got a call back about 10 min. before we had to leave for my chiropractor appointment be we figured that would happen and were ready.

During the call he outlined our frustrations with the rental situation. Talked about how paying them rent has been an ongoing challenge as a result of them changing banks and addresses monthly.

He brought up our health concerns over the mold and the fact that we asked them to take action back in November to help remedy the mold issue but they ignored our requests.

He talked about how we’ve sent multiple certified letters that they’ve refused to pick up and he basically said that we would like  to be let out of our lease, penalty free so we find a more stable home before baby Tater comes.

Her response was “Okay, we just need to get the owed rent from February and March first”… She didn’t even care about us wanting to be let out of the lease!

We recorded the phone conversation for our records and we’ll be typing up a letter stating that we’re being let out of our lease by the landlords that she will sign.

We’ve also placed a stop payment on the previously issued checks from February and March per her request and have turned those in to one big cashiers check to give her when she signs the “early release from lease letter”. Thank goodness we are out of here!

Basically we get the keys to our new place on April 1st and will have a month to get out of our current place and to tidy it up before the move out inspection here on May 1st.

We are super stoked and feel like a huge burden has been lifted from our shoulders. We are still trying to be sure we keep good documentation of all of it just to cover our butts but essentially it should be all done and over with now.

We found our new place, got released from our current one and are pretty much on track for getting all this madness taken care of before Tater comes. Yay!

For those of you in similar situations with unresponsive landlords you may find the following posts and references helpful. Read all about our moldy, indiana rental and what we did about it in these posts (arranged from newest to oldest):

• The Filter Queen, a cute country home and more landlord drama…
• Checketty, check, check those things off that list! The landlord comes a knocking
• Slumloards, credit scores and a prenatal chiropractor [in a pear tree]…
• Bubbling with anticipation and watching the world blow by…
• Getting the holiday ducks in a row and not looking like a hobo anymore! Mold test photos.
  
• In Indiana breathing mold is okay but home birth is not, just an FYI.
• I am just a tad angry right now! The saga of the first certified letter.
• Good morning all, got a flood? We do!

You may also find the following external links helpful:

• How to write an early termination letter to your landlord.
• Sample Letter: Breaking fixed term co-tenancy: all co-tenants vacating
• SAMPLE ONLY – Letter Breaking a Lease
• Mutual release from contract/ lease form

The post The final chapter of the crappy evansville landlord drama. appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

I had N get me up early today so I could get busy taking care of some Custom Gifts by Talina duties… Things like bookkeeping, taxes, order processing and all that fun stuff. While I was in business owner mode N was dealing with our February rent check saga on the phone.

You probably can recall all the ridiculous landlord drama I’ve already shared here but I am pretty sure this latest development takes the cake. It requires a little back story though… Feel free to skip the back story if you already know it.

When we first signed the lease with our landlords we were provided with their mailing address for the rent payment. The lease also stipulates that we can make payments directly to the landlords checking accounts and it lists the banks they use. We were also provided with several deposit slips from their bank for depositing the rent checks.

Up until November the address and banking information they provided us with was correct. In November we sent out that certified letter detailing our issues with the safety of the home and we also included our December rent payment. Well, the certified letter was never picked up by them and was eventually returned to us.

Conveniently enough the landlord showed up at our door while our certified letter was in limbo land. She had new bank deposit slips and a letter explaining that they moved residences and also banks… Now our payments should go to their new address or deposited to their new bank account, more deposit slips were provided.

We also discussed our issues with the leaking basement/ the mold and were assured they would come out to take a look at it all after the holidays and make necessary repairs (it’s February now and no landlord has been here to inspect or repair anything).

We paid our December and also January’s rent with one check that was handed over to the landlord the day she stopped by to give us a dehumidifier for the basement after our discussion. We refused to make out another rent check until the first one was actually returned to us… That is the back story in a nutshell.

Well we just attempted to pay our February rent via electronic bill payment and have been waiting since the beginning of the month for the funds to leave our account. At first we thought it was an issue with our own banking facility as they did not process the payment electronically, they sent a paper check instead…

We’ve been worrying that our check is lost in the mail or stolen and have been upset that our bank didn’t process the payment electronically as we had requested.

I was just sure we were going to have to pay about a month in late rent penalties to the landlords and have been waiting to find out exactly what happen to our rent payment.

Today after more digging N found out that our landlords account was closed before our rent payment even went out. We’ve not been notified of a third new account or a new address to send payments to, the info they (the landlords) have most recently supplied was the info we were trying to use.

When N called their bank to try and figure out where our rent check is today the bank representative said she wasn’t allowed to say more about their account but that it had been closed and that our rent payment would have been returned to our bank…

So now we are waiting for our bank to provide some sort of documentation of the check being returned to them as a result of the payees account being closed.

The documentation is important proof of our attempt to pay rent on time and in a timely manner (so we aren’t evicted or charged penalty fees for late payment). We’ve never had a landlord who was so difficult to pay rent to!

The even better part is the landlords are delinquent on the property tax owed to the city on this place, they have been since July 2008 and also have penalty fees and money owed from 2007 on this property (it is public information) and also on all the other 40 properties they owe…

The thing with property taxes here is that if you get severely behind on them the city/ sheriff can auction your property to recoup the owed money… So we are particularly interested in finding out more about the tax situation as it could result in us having nowhere to live. We are also wondering if they are even making the mortgage payments on this property, if it is foreclosed we’ll also be out on our ass so to speak…

Good times huh? Isn’t it amazing how all this randomness and drama just finds us (or do we find it? Never mind don’t answer that…)

In other news, I saw a prenatal chiropractor on Saturday because my pelvic pain was getting so bad I couldn’t sit or stand for longer than 30 minutes. Turns out my tailbone/ right pelvic bone was jacked up. It was stuck between a standing and sitting position which is why only laying on my side made me comfortable.

I’ve got followup appointments scheduled with the chiropractor to check my pelvic alignment and to keep me in check, since the insurance covers 80% of it. We figured it couldn’t hurt to relieve my pain and to keep my back and pelvis in proper position especially since I’ll be having Tater in about 4 months!

For those of you (who have commented) who are also pregnant and having tailbone, pelvic or back pain I would strongly recommend finding a prenatal chiropractor and having them take a look at you.

It made a huge difference for me! I thought I was having circulation issues, possibly getting hemorrhoids and having back pain as a result of the weight of my growing uterus. Turns out all my complaints were resolved once the Doc got my right pelvic bone back in correct position. Amazing!

Oh, and look what just arrived in the mail. It is even cuter than we thought!

We love it even more than we thought we would. The green and blue are so vivid and cheerful and the fabric is super soft with adorable designs and fun textures. Happy day! We even found the perfect way to include just a splash of pink in the room, see:

We also heard back from the mortgage lady today and got the news we expected. Once the disputed items on the credit report are resolved and once the student loan status is changed from derogatory to “in good standing” (in 2 months) we’ll be approved for a mortgage. It is just a matter of going up 18 points credit score wise…

In the meantime N is going to get more answers from his employer about the future of his on air career. Buying a home might not even be something we want to do in this particular city, especially if N’s career growth is limited. Once he knows more about the employers plans for him we’ll be able to decide about our home buying saga.

Basically we’ll either stay here through the remainder of our lease (late august 2009, if the house isn’t auctioned out from under us before that) then we’ll buy something or we’ll move from here ASAP and get in a nicer rental home that we can STAY in for the remaining 2 years left in N’s contract.

*sigh* explaining all this has sure made me tired, are you tired after reading it? I guess that means it is time to move from the office desk to the bed and resume my pregnancy slackerific ways for the rest of the day. Ooo, here are some belly pics (one in undies and bra and one in clothes) since so many are asking. These were taken 3 days ago. Now go place your baby weight bet okay? You could win cash!

The post Slumloards, credit scores and a prenatal chiropractor [in a pear tree]… appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.