Memory Lane

So I'm spilling my guts here. After everything we've been through it looks like were going to loose our house in Georgia. We'll be enduring the big bad F word...forclusure. I know that's a little heavy for a blog but this is my journal so...
I thought I would write a bit about our house and what's happened along the way. We love this house and spent a lot of time and money making it a home. We lived there for 3 years which for us is a long time. Taylor was only 4 and Tanner was 2 when we moved into this home. I remember bringing Tate home from the hospital. My sister Michelle lived with us for 8 months here, good times. First day of pre-school, first day of Kindergarten for both Taylor and Tanner. Christmas. You get the picture, there are memories galore. We made the decision to lease it out and move into a house that we were going to fix and flip. When we moved it looked like this:






When our leasor jumped ship and took off it looked like this:






Alan and I flew to Georgia for 12 days over Easter and literally spent night and day trying to put it back to it's former glory. We also spent $15,000 that put is into debt and sucked all of our savings away. We did this so that we could put it on the market and sell it. When we got there we were shocked to find it in the condition it was in. The smell was sooo bad it would just knock you back. They had been breeding dogs in the house and it was just so foul. The damage was overwhelming. The flooring was replaced, every single wall was painted, every piece of trim was painted, I won't bore you with the endless list...Here's what we accomplished:










After all that work the house sat on the market for 11 months. 11 months that I had to work full time to pay the mortgage so that we never paid a single late payment. We had lost to much value in the real estate slump so we decided to risk it again and do another lease purchase. That didn't turn out to be a great solution. Our renters were always late paying rent and were full of lies galore. They missed months that I still had to pay the mortgage and my rent here in Puyallup. The final straw was when they didn't pay rent for 4 months. All while we were trying to buy our house here. We had to work and scramble to pay all of our bills so that our credit wouldn't be ruined and so that we didn't let our landlords down. It was one of the most stressful times ever. We had to go through the process of having the tenants legally evicted. They sqautted in that house to the very last second they could. Thankfully the lord blessed us and we were able to close on our house amidst all of this. We had hoped that we could rent the house out again but we have found out that it's been trashed again. So I'm afraid this is the end of the line for our Georgia home. We no longer have the money to do all the repairs nessissary, nor do we have the money to pay two mortgages. It's super sad and makes me want to cry whenever I think about it. It was such a beautiful house and I hope that someone will live there again that will love it and take care of it like we did.
Forclosure is scary and we don't know what lays ahead of us. We're trying to seek out legal advise so we can be prepared, I guess we'll see.