I guess I should start from the beginning of our dilemma. It all began in February of 1999. My father-in-law had passed away almost 2 years before and took with him his income. After giving our financial situation much consideration, my mother-in-law, husband, and I came to the decision that our two family house in Belleville, NJ must be sold. We spent most of that month preparing the old house for sale by dry walling, painting, and lots of cleaning in an attempt to hide the many imperfections that the house contained. By the time March arrived, the house, which we not so lovingly referred to as "the money pit", was ready and so were we. We put the house up for sale with Century 21 and hoped we could at least sell it for $115,000. This way we would be able to pay off the mortgage and still have enough for some kind of a down payment toward a new home. Our real estate agent told us not to b

e anyway. Much to our surprise, however, two separate families became interested in purchasing our disheveled home. Before we knew what hit us, a bidding war ensued. After two weeks of battling it out, a young couple won the war by bidding $131,000. We immediately accepted their offer and set the closing date for June 4th.

n Upstate New York with a small truckload of our remaining possessions. When we finally got there, we began the tedious task of unpacking, content in the idea that in just 2 1/2 weeks the beautiful home would be ours. Little did we know about the god-awful chain of events that was about to be set into motion.

Meanwhile, we had been placing calls to every 'for rent' ad that we found in the local newspapers, but no one had returned our calls. I guess no one really wants you to rent their house to you when you are carting around six dogs with you. We waited and prayed for someone to answer at least one of the more than 100 calls we placed with potential renters. Luckily it was summer and the weather allowed us to sleep on the road, but October was quickly approaching by now and it was starting to get cold. Hope was quickly fading. Life had slapped us with that damn sock again!

e so optimistic since the house was old and needed a lot of repairs, but we held out hop!

Those 2 1/2 weeks came and went by quickly and June 4th was upon us. After a relatively sleepless night, we prepared for the arrival of the real estate agent, the house owner, and our attorney, who were set to arrive at noon. But at 9:00am we received a call from the mortgage company informing us that, unless we could come up with an additional $8,000, we were not going to be able to close that day. We were appalled and heartbroken. Of course we did not have that much money lying around and it was too short notice to somehow borrow the money. As a result, we were forced to postpone the closing for 2 more weeks! We were all so disappointed, spending the rest of the day moping around and cursing the heavens for our misfortune. But we would soon discover that that was only the beginning of our problems.

w resided to get them to higher and dryer ground. Next, we began the tremendous chore of moving all of our valuable and water damage prone belongings from our small basement apartment to the main upstairs part of the house. After we finished that, we started compiling a plan on how to get the water from inside the house to the outside, where it belongs. Fortunately, we owned a sump pump and we ran a long hose from the pump to just over a hill in the front yard. The rain was really coming down at this point and it seemed the more water we pumped out the more water seeped back in. It even began pouring out from the electrical sockets! Fearing the threat of an electrical fire, we shut down the power to our apartment and waited until the storm subsided before resuming the water pumping effort. At this point, we were a

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1968
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)