Adjusting to Being Roadkill

Today is definitely better than yesterday. I've gotten over the shock of losing our house to The Man, and have actually started trying to joke about it a little. I realized something yesterday afternoon that definitely points to the whole 'what goes around comes around' thing - the woman who owned this house before we bought it, who as it turns out KNEW that the house was soon to be Roadkill (haha, get it? hey, it's all I got at the moment!), and who sold it to a Flipper, who ALSO knew its future, and never told us, currently is living in a smallish house behind our property. Well, guess who's gonna be front-and-center when the new highway expansion pack is put in place?! HER! I'm not mad at her, really, but I do definitely feel a sort of guilty satisfaction at this karmic turn of events.

Several people have urged us to 'go after' the flipper, the realtor who sold us this beautiful house, and anyone who may or may not have ever known anyone in our zip code. My husband was pretty solidly in that camp for awhile, as a matter of fact. I am completely uninterested in doing so. Whatever is going to happen is somehow meant to be, and I honestly feel like any money we might get from such a situation would be dirty. Also, going up against people who are who knows where, and trying to prove that they in fact knew what was going to happen, seems like a gigantic waste of mental and physical energy. I have a feeling it would only bite us in the ass, and probably the pocketbook, in the end.

There is also the possibility that things will actually work out in our favor in the end. With interest rates being what they are, and housing prices having gone down, we just might be able to lower our mortgage. I am slightly concerned that we won't get what I would consider a fair value for our home, but we've done some work on it since we moved in, and I'm hoping that that will add enough value to counteract any decline in market value. Certainly, whatever they will give us will be more than it will be worth once there's a four-lane road in front of it (or, actually, through it). I'm determined to get at least what we paid for it, plus a little help in the down-payment on a new home, since we obviously weren't planning to move and haven't saved up anything.

I'm going to look at two houses tomorrow that are in my friend Madeline's neighborhood. One of them I've been in love with since we moved to town, but wasn't on the market then, and another one a few doors down. I'm hopeful that things will work out with the first one, since it's so beautiful on the outside, and from the same historic period our current home was built. Also, its current owner is having financial problems, so the house is almost in a foreclosure state. Maybe we can help him out at the same time. At least that way something good would come of all this, anyway.