Unexpected Surprise

My story is a bit original, I hope. It started when my husband and I purchased an old house with a lot of land on the outskirts of our town. It had been a long term goal for us and we were going to use our first home as a rental. So we didn't have to rush out of our first home. We could also now focus on starting a family. The new house needed a lot of work. Ok, I will be honest, the whole place needed to be gutted. The foundation was solid as well as the structure itself. It was the inside that needed the work. It was like the house hadn't been updated in a century. My husband had seen the house for sale during a road trip with his brother. My husband hired an inspector before we purchased the house so we were aware of how expensive a rehab on the house was going to cost. I will be frank, the inspection report freaked me out a lot. It had water in the basement as well as bad wiring (old knob-and-tube wiring), bad pipes, an outdated heating system, and mold. My husband got called away for work right after we closed on the house. Now, just that don't figure, right? Leaving me behind to get things started.

I decided it was time to do what I could to help move the process along and save us some funds in the long term as we were looking at over fifty thousand dollars just to gut the place. I started to destroy the wall that separated the dining room from the living room since it wasn't a load-bearing wall. I discovered a black notebook and twenty thousand dollars in a wall I was removing.

I wasn't sure what to do. The idea of keeping the money was tempting, I will admit given how much the rehab was going to cost. I started thinking someone had to be looking for this money and book. I had seen too many movies about what the bad guys did to get their money returned. You know those movies where it's about drugs or money laundering. I wasn't some street-wise, tough girl that would be able to battle against drug lords or mafia types. After calming myself down, I did the sensible thing. I call the police. I explained about the money and the black book. They said someone would be right over.

Well, my new house was flooded with police. They started to take down the wall but asbestos halted that process as it required a special team to come in and do it since asbestos needed to be handled with care. Soon the walls were removed if they weren't load-bearing, floorboards were ripped up, the basement was pumped dry so a dog could sniff for bodies, and surprising an old bootlegger's tunnel was found. Pipes were moved as well as the old vents. I got updates when I would stop by the house on my way home from work. My husband was going to be thrilled since it would mean we wouldn't have to spend thousands of dollars doing the work being done by the police. The insulation alone would have added thousands to the estimated budget. It took almost two weeks before they cleared the house clean of anything illegal. I was given the clear to enter the house. The police had arranged to have someone remove the debris. They did say they would have the locate sheriffs department do some drive-bys to make sure nothing would happen to the house or me until my husband returned.

My husband returned home the following week. We drove to the new house. He took one look around the shell of the house. He smiled at me. "Well, that was twenty thousand well spent." I am sure you can guess where he spent the night.