We’re on the home stretch with the sale of our current house and the purchase of a new one. A week from today, I’ll have all my stuff moved out of my house. Some of it will already be in my new house, and some will be in transit on closing day. I’ve had a month to do repairs requested by the purchasers of my house, among them the repair of a toilet (which doesn’t need repairing) and getting the roof evaluated for possible hail damage. I also had the microwave, which was on recall, repaired at no cost, and I tried my hand at applying bondo and caulk to a water damaged back door (with pretty good results, I think). For the toilet and roof repair, I had contacted M’s uncle — a contractor — to see if he could refer to me anyone who’d do a good job and not bend me over on cost. His plumber keeps saying he’ll show up but never does, and I went ahead over the weekend and officially gave up on the roofer. The toilet thing is a 1-hour job in the right hands, so I’m not really sweating that, but the roof has been a big unknown.

So I called a random roofer over the weekend to see if he could come do an evaluation on Monday. He said he’d be here bright and early, but he never showed up and never called. We did get a surprise snow flurry at midday, and that’s what he blamed his no-show on when I called him, but it wouldn’t have been an issue if he’d made an appearance in the morning as promised. So there I was, halfway through Monday, with two more workdays before the holidays this week, closing on my unrepaired house on Tuesday next week, and worried from some things the absentee roofer had said that I was going to have to replace my whole roof, a very much unanticipated expense.

Here’s how the rest of the day went:

• Call a bunch of other roofers to try to find somebody who could get out to look at my roof asap.
• Finally find one who can come yesterday afternoon. He calls back to reschedule for this morning. Which is fine, because at least he called to let me know he couldn’t make it, and he was still the fastest responder from among the many roofers I called.
• Sit and wait for the plumber. No show.
• Wait for a call from the power company, who’s supposed to turn on pilot lights at my new house so that I don’t blow the place up trying to do so myself.
• Work.
• Wring hands.
• Grow gray hairs over this roof thing.
• At the end of the workday, have friends show up a week early to help us move. I was going to paint Lennie’s new room yesterday, so they came along and helped.
• After the first coat of paint gets applied, run Lennie and M home for bed-time, go back to buy more paint, and apply a second coat of paint.
• Get home at midnight.
• Can’t sleep.
• Find email waiting for me from the lender on my current home offering me a rates of 5.875% and 7.25% on the two loans I’m getting on my new house. These rates are lower (by 1.5 percentage points on the smaller loan) than what I’m locked in at for the new house. We’re talking a $36 difference per month, $450 a year, $13K over the lifetime of the loans. Nothing to sneeze at.
• Work for a couple of hours until I’m finally wound down enough to hit the sack at 3:00 a.m.

So far, today’s looking a little better. My roofer showed up and seems to think the roof is ok. There are some nails that have popped up and need to have their holes caulked and their shingles renailed. The boots on the fans need to be replaced. There’s one cracked shingle that’ll need to be replaced. Otherwise, he says the roof looks fine. No hail damage whatsoever. I’ll drop $200 to have this stuff repaired rather than the $4K – $5K I was suddenly confronted with paying to buy somebody else a brand new roof. I paint again tonight (and tomorrow night) and will probably be up late again, but it’ll be with one load lifted, at least. I called the lender on my new home and tasked her with trying to break the locked-in rate and get me a slightly better loan. We’re almost there, almost done with all this hassle.