History of Erin Boat

History of Erin Boat
The Unnecessary Backstory (the beginning)

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Most Recent Post
End of an Era

Quote of the Moment

Quote of the Moment
Link to Writing Blog

Current Favorite Song

Current Favorite Song
But Anyway by Blues Traveler

Big Things.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

There's something big that I've been leaving out. I think I may have mentioned it a time or two before, but it's really BIG now.

My Dad lost his house.

The house itself is no big loss. Several years ago, before we moved in, he was renting it out. His tenant moved out in the middle of January with no notification to my dad, and with no oil in the tank. The pipes froze, brust, and defrosted. My dad didn't find out anything about it until March, when he finally went down to demand his rent. Of course the tenant stopped paying rent when she moved out.

Most of the house was ruined. The plumbing all needed to be re-done. The wood floors were water damaged. The walls were growing mold and mildew. The former-tenant had left most of her things in the house too, all of which were ruined. And the few things that weren't wet/moldy were flea infested. She had left food in the fridge when she left. Trash in a trash can. Pretty much the only things she took were her clothes and her dishes.  The house was absolutely DISGUSTING. So my dad rented a dumpster, threw out all her things, and tore out the kitchen and bathroom, the two most damaged rooms.

Meanwhile, he was slowly losing his other house, the one we lived in at the time. We had to move into the ruined house, long before it was finished. We moved in before he had put the house back together. It only took him about 2 days to get the new plumbing running in the bathroom, but it was months before he finished the kitchen.

About a year after we moved in, my uncle got married, and we went to California for a week. Apparently, while we were in the Santa Barbara sun, our home was hit by a big storm It ripped half the roof off. And our house was once again filled with water.

Thankfully, this time it only ruined walls and floors, and not the plumbing.

The insurance company never gave my dad the money they owed him.

My father works in construction, and this happened when the economy had hit it's worst point. No one was dropping loads of cash to do a nice project. The jobs my dad got were always bare-minimum work. Things that the customers absolutely HAD to have done (ie replacing a broken window in the middle of december). Small jobs that gave him 50 or 100 bucks at a time.
He couldn't afford to fix the house.
He couldn't afford to pay the mortgage.

Fast forward to now. The roof was never put back on. The house is in bad shape. We have a little more in the way of walls than we did when we moved in, but the house is no where near done. For the amount of money that would need to be spent to fix it, you might as well tear it down and start all over.

But that was still a place for my dad to live. Now he doesn't have anywhere to stay. I have known for months that he was losing his house. It wasn't until recently when he told me the date he had to be out by. Previously, he had told me "sometime in september. Maybe early august" Turns out, that the real date was June 9th. He got a few days extension, until today, and he has a place to stay tonight. Tomorrow he's going to VT to build my uncle a deck, which is fine. My uncle will put him up for about two weeks while they finish that.

After that, who knows. My dad has hardly even looked at getting an apartment. I'm worried for him. He's 55 years old. Needs one minor and one major surgery. Has no money saved up. Has no retirement plan, and now has no where to live. I want to help him but I don't know how.

I'm stuck somewhere between needing to talk about this, and not wanting to think about it. Thus, the large back story to a very tiny bit of info. Sorry about that.

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