Cob: RE:Please help :)

[P.Rose]

At 12:05 PM 7/1/99 -0400, you wrote:
>   I cannot believe what I read as a response to Trinas' letter. What the
>heck  is going through your minds. I believe that we should ALL have the
>right to live  within our means and what WE chose as long as no one is
>getting hurt.  

While the one quoted response (one! get a grip.) was a bit over the top,
and presumed quite a bit, it's still true that trying to end-run, resist,
or oppose the building inspector is likely to cause more problems, and 
cost more money, than would making an obvious, good faith effort to meet
his requirements.      I mean, having your children forcibly fostered out,
and loosing your house because your mortgage payments got eaten by fines
and rent, are pretty high stakes, and more than I'd pay for being in the
right.

If you'd planned things a bit more carefully ahead of time (which may not
have been possible) you could probably have done things differently, but
given the amount of time you've got, I'd find out how much a compliant
septic system costs, work on getting the money for that(1) and see if you
can't get a temporary variance (or whatever they call it) for everything else.

*(1)
  Some painful, but possible, sources of money:
  (A) Beg or borrow from relatives, or even friends.
  (B) Try the bank that carries your current loan.  
      they don't WANT to forclose, after all, and if it's 
      just a matter of adding $8,000 to the loan, and extending
      it five years to keep the payments the same, they might 
      go for that.
  (C) Sell the furniture, and downgrade the car. 
  (D) Lease some part of the property to someone else, or sell
      the timber off it.  (the woods will recover, eventually, 
      your family won't.)


If, on the other hand, you really want to do this the hard way,
I'd give serious thought to sending the kids to live with someone
else for the next 12 months or so.

                          --Goedjn

ps.  For what it's worth, I've lived the way you describe, 
     for about three months, when my parents were building their house. 
     emptying the chamber pots somehow became *MY* job.  :-(
     But it didn't seem to scar me permanantly.    But we had the
     advantage of a mile long dirt road, and relatives next door
     with whom we were nominally living.