The house in Salome... History

May 21st 2016 -
  16 years have come and gone since my Dad passed away. 
  In 1998 I was living and working in Wickenburg AZ.. My Dad had  bought the house in  July 1999 on a 30 year loan. 
Only 9 months before he passed.

My Dad's house

  The end of June 2000 we (myself and my 3 sons) moved into his house in Salome.
 As a single parent I could not afford both my rent plus his $500. house payments to keep it current waiting for it to sell.  

With my income and lousy credit I knew I'd never be able to get a loan  for a home any other way so I decided to move in and assume the loan instead of letting it go.

 
This was our home for almost 17 years. 




Raised the kids... 

Got Married ...

Raised a flock of chickens...

Built a pond...

 

  






  We built the pond from scratch, improving on it little at a time for over ten years. We literally brought in tons of rocks that we hand picked during many desert drives.

 We planted rose bushes and trees. We made many memories there, too many to list.

But life always changes.



Time changes...
.... and always will.

And so we must change too

   And so it happened that "unforeseen circumstances" prevented us from the ability to keep up with the mortgage payments. 
Our last years there were coming to an end. We had no know of when it would happen or where we would end up. I think that was the most unsettling. Not knowing what to plan for. Would we end up living in the RV in someone's back yard? Would we have to find an "affordable" RV park and have untrustworthy neighbors? Would we have to re-home Mocha? It was difficult enough re-homing my chickens and letting the garden dry up and watching the property become overtaken by weeds. 

  We only knew that the bank would eventually take over the house. We are thankful that they waited 3 years before proceeding with the foreclosure. That gave us plenty of time to pack up our most important belongings, sell what we couldn't store and give the rest away. But most of all it gave us more time for a windfall to pull us out of this mess.
   

   Many good fortunes carried us through those last few years. Not without some bumps but we made it through.
  

 My one last ditch effort to try to save the house..
 


November of 2012 
I tried to get a better paying job through Knight Transportation .
 By December I got my Commercial Class A CDL and then after Christmas trained OTR (over the road) for almost 2 months to learn the job.
 Yup, that's right, I drove an 18 wheeler (with my trainer) not only  to L.A. but all the way to Connecticut and back! That's another story I'll share later. 
  Long story short, because my night time eyesight wasn't up to par it was mutually decided I wasn't a good fit for  OTR  solo truck driving. We discussed the potability of team driving as I was fine driving during the day but Knight doesn't have teams. 

  So I moved on. 

 Before I went to truck driving school I had quit my previous job driving the shuttle van for LaPaz county so that wasn't available when I came back. 

 I had to find another job.

 I job hunted for 2 months before being hired as an on call driver for Rosewood Center for Eating Disorders in Wickenburg.. 

  14 months later Rosewood cut back my hours so much that I finally had to look elsewhere and finally was hired for assembly line work in Kingman. I stayed in our RV parked at my son and girlfriends house in Kingman and drove 300 miles round trip every other weekend to visit home in Salome. That's another story in it's self. 

I worked there for about 6 months.

  The end of December 2014 I was delighted to get a call from my old supervisor at LaPaz County to tell me the shuttle driver put in his resignation and they wanted to offer the job to me first for my old position. . . Heck yea.

  I still wasn't making enough to be able to cover all the bills plus the mortgage so we had to accept that eventually we would loose the house and write off our equity. 

 On the positive side we paid much less than rent would have been for such a nice place besides not having to ask anyone's permission to do what we wanted with it.
 I could let myself get all depressed about it or accept that a house is just a thing, wood, brick, nails and paint. We have our family and friends, health, (most of it anyway) , food and shelter and an income. Not much of an income but we were getting by and that's a lot better than a great percentage of the worlds population so who am I to complain?

  So where DO we go from here? 

  Well, as they say; 
"Meanwhile, back at the ranch"... Read on here!

"Back on The Ranch"