Not blogging, clearly. The reason in part is because I’ve been quite busy purchasing and taking care of our new house! You can see in Kimberly’s post a number of pictures of our new house. Hopefully in telling my side of the story, I can post some more here.
The pictures there pretty well cover the main parts of the house. Here’s the timeline of how it all went down:
Jun 2009: We decide, “It might be nice if we owned our own house.” We get a real estate agent to help us out and we go look at a lot of dives. Great fun had by all.
Jul 2009: After reevaluating our finances for the 13th time we conclude that any house we can afford is one we don’t really want. (See previous, esp ‘dives’) About the same time Kimberly saw an ad in the paper for an apt which was great size and very cheap rent. (For $5 more per month, we added one bedroom, 250 sq ft., and a yard. not bad, except for all the parts that were bad).
Feb 2010: After living in our new apt for 6 months, we decide that we’d rather be our own landlords for real. Finances have changed a bit, and the market still hasn’t gone back up, so let’s start looking again.
Mar 2010: We found “our house” and decided that we wanted it. Is it perfect? No. Is it a good price? Yes. Does it have hundreds of beer bottles/cans strewn about the basement, and obvious water damage in most parts of the ceiling? (I’m lookin’ at you ‘dive’) No! The carpet was hideous, the light fixtures seriously needed updating (more later) but the major parts of a house were intact and worthy, and it had a nice big yard and garden for us to enjoy. So, we enter a real estate contract to purchase the house.
Early April 2010: Inspector tells us all the things that are wrong with the house, and all the things that are right. Namely, the two most important parts of any house, the foundation and roof, are solid. But, the shower leaks, and the floor sags in a number of places. So we ask them to fix both and they agree. Oh, and they also agreed to pay for $3000 worth of new carpet since in the 5 major rooms in the house there were 5 different colors of carpet. Hideous. 1970s, you did me right by music, but your interior decorating was seriously lacking. BTW, this house was built in 1978.
Apr 26 2010: After much worrying, waiting, and packing, we officially become homeowners! Hooray! Lots of drama involved in getting the money for the new carpet, but it gets installed by the friday following and we move in on…
May 1 2010: Now we get to live in our new house! Thanks for everyone that helped me move. On the one side this involved the generous members of our ward, and on the other my buddies from D&D night. (You may have noticed, I’m a multi-faceted nerd, and yes we still play pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons once a week. Loads of fun.)
One of my favorite things about owning my own house is that if I don’t like something, I can just change it. No more calling the landlord to tell them that when it rains/snows I get a giant puddle of water underneath my stove. No more “just living with it” until we get another contract.
Exhibit A: The carpet pictures you can see on Kimberly’s blog post. Seriously, getting new carpet/vinyl made such a huge difference in the feeling in our house. I’m impressed that Kimberly and I had the foresight to able to see the vision of the house with new flooring. I recommend it to any of you that have old crappy carpet. If it’s named “shag” this is not an option for you. You must get new carpet.
Exhibit B:
Yes, that is a vintage light fixture. Looks closely. The sockets themselves are shaped like candles. And each of the 5 bulbs has it’s own tiny 4 inch lamp shade. We replaced it with the much more innocuous:
Now isn’t that nicer? I feel like I have so much more freedom. Chandeliers and me have never been on good terms. Like the one Kimberly and I sat “under” for our anniversary dinner at Outback last year. The chandelier was so low over the table that I had to bend down to look at her across the table. Who thinks these are good ideas? That being said, one mans trash is another’s treasure. Anyone want an antique chandelier?
Exhibit C: Our shower didn’t drain. This wasn’t much of a problem in the bath tub, cuz you could just let the water fill up the tub, and drain eventually, but in our master bathroom, we have just a shower. And in the few minutes getting clean, the water filled up 2 inches or so, and we sort of had to hurry to make sure we didn’t have a flood. So we tried the good old fashioned dump a bunch of caustic chemicals down there and hope it works. It didn’t work. We opened up the drain to look in and see if we could tell what was blocking it. We did find a giant rock (2″ x 1″ x 3/4″) inside one, and pulling it out helped for a few days, but then the problem came back. Finally, Kimberly’s family came to visit, and her dad brought a drain snake that they had. He shoved that thing down there a while and pulled out a giant wad of hair. Gross. And problem solved. Thanks dad. I’m really glad we didn’t have to call a plumber. (We do need to call one still to fix our spigot issues outside; it leaks. a lot. no thanks to the home warranty guy.)
Well that about covers me for now (especially since I’ve been writing this post for a few months now). Hopefully you can learn more later.
