We have another house showing tonight at 6:45. Yay! I’m not sure if we’re going to get any over the weekend or not. I guess some people might use their three-day weekend to house hunt, but I would think a lot of people will be out of town. And the weather is going to be crappy, which I don’t think will help our cause. Oh well, having two showings the first week is two more than I expected.

Seriously, I know we have a nice house, I just can’t imagine why anyone would voluntarily choose to live in Duvall. The only reason I live here is because Dave already owned this place when we met. After things got serious and we decided to co-habitate, his four-bedroom house in the boonies seemed more practical than my tiny one-bedroom apartment in Seattle. (Did I mention that I had a view of Elliott Bay? And I could see the Space Needle every time I walked out my front door?) God, I loved that place. But I loved Dave more, so I moved. And I’ve been itching to get out of here almost since the first week I moved here (or whenever the first time I saw a cat mauling a field mouse was), so I’m really looking forward to someday living in a house that both of us love for a change. And maybe a place where we could let Cate play in the backyard without worrying about coyotes. A girl can dream, right?

This is random, but it’s been bugging me for the past few days: we had someone come out to pressure wash the siding and the deck, right? I found the guy because he had a sign up near our house, and he came out to give me an estimate the day I called him. His price was reasonable, and he didn’t give me creepy-contractor vibes, so I was planning our list date around when he could do the job. When I called him to confirm, he said that his pressure washer needed a new part, and he was waiting for it, and could he do the job around the end of this week? I said no, that really wasn’t ok, so I’d just find someone else, thanks anyway. He was like, “uh… let me make some calls and I’ll call you right back.” Ooookay. He called me a few minutes later to say that he found the part locally, so he could come on Tuesday (the 20th) to do it, would that be ok? Um. What?

The thing that bugs me is that he MUST have been lying, right? I mean, was he saying that he was going to go for a week without making any income because he was waiting on a part for his pressure washer? He didn’t have another one for when his main one crapped out? I mean, my mom has an extra sewing machine so she can still do her alterations business when her main machine is in the shop. And then suddenly he magically finds the part within about 10 minutes? I don’t know, it sounded shady.

Anyway, he showed up on Tuesday like he said he would, and he did a decent job, so that was fine. When it came time to pay him, he asked me if I would make the check out to him rather than his company “so [he] wouldn’t have to pay taxes.” I didn’t really know how to argue with that. Am I supposed to say, “Well, as a matter of fact, I think you should pay taxes, sorry”? So I made the check out to him personally, handed it over, and… he left. It wasn’t until later that I realized he never gave me a receipt or an invoice or anything for the work he did. So if he had screwed up something on our property, I would have no recourse whatsoever. (Thankfully, it doesn’t look like that’s the case, as far as I can tell.) Now, my guess is that he’s a sub-contractor of some kind, and if I had made the check out to his company, he would’ve only gotten a small percentage of it, and this way he got to keep the whole amount for himself. But yeah, that was totally shady business, wasn’t it?