Missionary Moments

So many transfers, but Josh has a never ending good attitude!

 

January Odds and Ends

Matt had asked Lindy (who goes to M.C.) to prom and she responded.

(He had used the same technique that Abby used to ask Landon last year...give a pizza and say if the answer is yes, eat the pizza and return the box, if the answer is no, eat the box and return the pizza :)

When I ran outside to get pictures of our roof one evening so we could get a bid for our shingles I caught a gorgeous sunset...

We had a couple of days in January where we were well into the negatives!

We had three days in a row where school was delayed two hours because of the extreme temps.

Here's another bit of a long story...

One night, our dryer went out.

Andy tried to see what he could do but ended up calling a technician from Darrell's (where we purchased the machine a couple of years ago) 

After examining it he told us there was nothing wrong with the dryer...it was a problem in the wall.

He told us we need to replace the outlet.  He told Andy what to buy and do.

Andy spent quite a bit of time making the repair.  Matt was helping him and when he went to push the dryer back into place when they were done, it arced.

It created this mess with the exhaust vent and the stubbed gas line.

It was quite dramatic...when Andy came out into the living room to go turn off the breaker, he smelled strongly of "burn".

We had more than one professional tell us that Matt was extremely lucky to be alive.

Oddly enough, the next day I saw the Darrell's repairman in the parking lot at Panda Express as I drove into Macey's.  I stopped on my way out and showed him the picture and asked his opinion.

He said to call an electrician.

We had someone come out and fix whatever was going on in the wall and he said that basically, the whole machine had been live when Matt had moved it.

Unfortunately, now there was a problem with the dryer.  It had shorted when it arced.

So, we called the repairman back and after checking it out he said that we needed to replace the something or other "harness"...that he would order the part and come out and install it as soon as it came in.  I have a very clear memory of him saying to me, "Fortunately, it is all under warranty and you won't have to pay a thing."  Great!

The next week, when he came to fix it, Andy was home and he said the same thing to him.

He fixed it, it worked and all was well...

...until, we got a bill from Darrell's a couple of weeks later for $400...what?!?!

I called them and explained the situation.  There was a bunch of back and forth but the gist is that our repairman says he never told us it was under warranty.

We couldn't believe we were going through this now on top of all the other lies and money lost on the addition.

Why would he say he never said that when he said it very clearly on two separate occasions?

I called and spoke to a woman of authority.

She was sorry but said basically there wasn't anything she could do since it truly wasn't under warranty.

I told her I understood it was our word against his and that we would go ahead and just pay the bill since that seemed to be our only choice but I wanted them to know what a frustration it was.

I told her of the issues we had had when we ordered the machines two years earlier.

There was a big, ridiculous kerfuffle with their delivery man...it had been super frustrating.

The owner and his wife came out and delivered and installed the machines after I expressed our frustrations with the situation over the phone.

To have a second issue was the last straw for us and we would no longer be dealing with Darrell's.

I kept my cool and, again, Vickie was professional and told me she would pass along our story to the owner and let him know the problem, but to yes, go ahead and just pay the bill :(

Arghhhh!

 

January Cookies

We have a Ukrainian family living in our neighborhood with some friends.

Since I did Ukrainian Easter Egg cookies I thought it would be fun to do some Ukrainian Christmas cookies.  While researching for them I found out Ukraine traditionally celebrates Christmas in January.

I found some Christmas star pictures online and had fun with these...

It was very fulfilling when I delivered these to Svetlana on January 7th and she tried to communicate in her limited English that they were traditional Ukranian Christmas stars :)

I wish I would have gotten better pics of these before I packaged them up.

These are my birthday cookies for the year...cupcakes and party hats...

Again, these are terrible pictures but there was a fundraiser for a woman in our community that has cancer.

I made these for them to sell at the event.

I was asked by a friend to do some birthday cookies for her granddaughter.

She was super specific and showed me pictures from instagram (including some of my own) of exactly what she wanted.

I wished I would have had a little more creative license in the process (although I did change up a few things so I wasn't completely copying someone else's work) but I was still pretty happy with how they turned out.

I love it when customers come to pick up their cookies and get so excited and are thrilled with them :)

    

    

It was a good cookie month :)

January House Addition Progress(...or not so much progress)

I will admit I am not looking forward to writing this post.  It's a little bit painful.  Also, it always stresses me out trying to write big, involved things where I have to try and remember details without leaving things out 😕

Chase's brother, Dustin, worked all through December and into January all by himself to get our addition framed.  He was kind and easy to work with.  I don't know if we saw Chase at all during December and had very minimal contact with him via text.

Dustin came to us one evening...January 9th to be exact...and asked if he could speak to us about his brother.  He said he hadn't been paid a cent for all the work that he had been doing and that he had had to spend his own money on some extra supplies.

We assured him that we had given his brother plenty of money to pay him.

Dustin said Chase had been telling him all along that we were waiting on a loan to go through before we could pay.  (That made me so mad that Chase had been lying about our finances.)

After discussing a little longer, Dustin left and Andy and I were left to wonder about whether or not Dustin was telling us the truth or if he was in cahoots with Chase to try and get more money out of us.

I will try and summarize the next several days by saying we looked into things and found out that we were not Chase's first victims and that he was already in a lawsuit with a former client (who turned out to be his second cousin and neighbor in Wellsville).  I spoke with her extensively and heard all about the mess in which Chase had left her.

We were shocked, frustrated and disheartened.

Learning from what this former client had told me, I spent the next week trying to track down all the subs and companies Chase had used to do the work he had done to that point.

I was trying to find out if they had been paid.  

Unfortunately, I was only able to find out about one of them.  Our excavator had not received his money.  I asked him what the bill had been and compared that to the itemized list that we had asked Chase for the week before we found out about what was going on.  It was clear Chase had way overcharged us for that one item.  Who knew what else he had overcharged on?

We sought counsel from an attorney friend, family and others.

We looked into the idea of holding his mini excavator that had been sitting in our backyard for months on end until he payed us the money he had misused. (we were told that wasn't a good idea...but that did come into play later)

We had contractors give us estimations on how much they figured we had in labor and materials in our addition so far.  The gap between those numbers and what we had given Chase was averaging $30,000.

We also had a fun night of drama when Dustin called the the Sheriff's department on Chase.

Chase had told Dustin to move the white dump truck in the side driveway so he get his mini ex out.

Dustin told him he wouldn't until he payed him.  Chase came out anyway around 9 p.m...when Dustin found out he was there he told us to call the police.  Andy didn't feel comfortable with that and told Dustin as much.  So Dustin made the call and we ended up with 3 officials at our door and a search for Chase in our backyard.  They ended up finding him in his truck and told the brothers they needed to settle this in daylight and basically stop bothering us.  Dustin moved his truck the next day.

We knew all along that Chase had been working on a very similar addition on another Nibley home.  Well, when Dustin told us in January who the family was I immediately called the wife and told her all we knew.  They had been super frustrated with how things had been going and had considered letting Chase go when they got their money's worth out of him.  However, like us, they had not been questioning his ethics so I believe my call was somewhat of a shock.

We didn't let Chase know how much we knew about his past and what was going on.  We did let him know though that we were not happy with things.

Andy set up a lunch with him to discuss things.  Andy tried a kind, gentle approach, asking about his family and his personal life before moving on to business.  Chase was an emotional wreck.  Andy told him we needed to see receipts and invoices for everything (we had seen none at this point...just his itemized list on which he could have made up every number)

He agreed to bring them to us a few days later.

The night he came, he was up front with us in that he didn't bring any receipts.  He offered no explanation for that but tried to work the numbers out with us so that we could part ways and be finished.  The way he explained his itemized list (which was deceitful in itself) he came out as owing us $7,000.

He was a smooth talker and we agreed to it.  After he left, Andy was going over the numbers again and realized Dustin's pay had never been addressed.

He called Chase and was told that was our responsibility to pay his brother his $11,000!

When we had time to digest everything we decided we to let Chase know via text we were done paying.  We had already payed enough and then some therefore, Chase needed to pay his brother.

We also had 4 inches of ice in our basement addition, water that had come in the house and forced us to pull up the carpet in multiple areas, a huge pile of dirt left in our backyard and quite a bit of emotional damage on top of being swindled out of $30,000.

We thought of litigation but decided Chase didn't have any money to give us.  

He had already told his second cousin he was going to be declaring bankruptcy and she wouldn't get any money out of him.

We would be spending more money, time and effort to get nothing in return.

We were simply out the money and needed to move on.

By the way, Dustin continued to come and work through all of this.

He wanted to get our roof on so we wouldn't keep getting snow inside.

He wanted to finish the job he had said he would do...even though he knew he wasn't getting paid.

We appreciated his dedication.

We had multiple contractors that looked at the job the last two months tell us Dustin had done a good job with the framing.

Once Chase was out of the picture, we wanted to get things moving again as soon as possible. 

We got a bid from the same contractor that had cleaned up and finished Chase's cousin's home.

It came in as really high so we decided to try and general ourselves...with the help of my dad and my brother's friend TJ.

 To be continued in the February update...

Missionary Moments

 These pictures are in backwards order...couldn't get them to cooperate.

Talking to cousin Jake in Park City...

Showing us his Christmas set up...

Bless this guy's heart!  We were struggling to connect on Christmas day with church schedules and things so we didn't end up talking until late afternoon (evening for him).

He waited to open his gifts until we were face to face.

I didn't realize he was waiting and felt so bad.  What a mature guy :)

It was a pleasure being with him while he unwrapped.

I had the kids try and play their duet for Josh...

apparently he was enthralled :)

He did get quite a kick out of watching Ben line up his animals on the back of the piano bench as they played.