The door slams shut...

It's funny, not really but sort of, how things work out sometimes.

I finally started to let go of some of the unease I had about making the move from Texas to Alaska and was beginning to see the changes in attitude that I'd been praying for.

And then it looked like it was all going to be for nothing.

Not only could we not get on the contractors' schedules for 2009, we were running into problems everywhere. You know how in the action movies, there is a blast door closing before the hero can get to it, and he's about to be caught on the wrong side of the door with the Scary Thing he's trying to get away from, but at the very last second he squeezes through the crack just as the door clangs down?

That was SO not us.

Okay, let's review...

We can get the basement dug, but we can't get a contractor this year to put the decking on. That means no floors, which in turn means no house. If we put the exterior walls up it would just be a silo.

Conflicting reports from the electric company have us confused as to what exactly we need to do to satisfy their requirements to avoid a huge surcharge for putting in the line to our property.

The timber frame builder could get the frame done, but without the decking, what's the point?

And probably the final straw in the process is trying to sell the house we're in. It's a lovely house with a golf course and lake view, but in this economy, well, we're going to lose our shirts on it. We had originally planned to be able to sell our Texas house for pretty close to what we paid for it, and thereby build the Alaska house without having to shell out much money. But as we all know, things changed in the last year, and our Texas realtor told us to expect to lose in the neighborhood of $100,000 on this house. Now we can't afford to finish out the new house if we wanted to. The best we could hope for is to get the shell of the house up next year, and live in it unfinished until such time as we could afford to put up interior walls.

We considered renting a house for a year, but there simply are no houses to rent there. In a fluid population like we have here in Dallas, that seemed very odd to us, but it's true. We looked. We asked our Alaska realtor to look. There's nothing. 

And so the blast door closed.