EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! (and awesome)

On Saturday I was a responsible first time home buyer and I attended a five hour class for first time home buyers where I learned many valuable things about loans (which I did not need), finding a realtor (which I had already done), and having a home inspection (which happened Friday).

Then I went to Starbucks and bought a house.

The class was my friend Pins’s idea, because Pins is a librarian and very thorough, and tries to keep me from doing stupid impulsive things, like buying houses on a whim. Pins came to the class too. We were the only thirty-year-old spinsters in a room full of forty-something married couples. We were impressed that the guy teaching us could tell we were not a lesbian couple. We are often mistaken for a lesbian couple. To be fair, I did ask Pins to marry me once, but I really just had my eye on her fancy schmancy health insurance. She told me I was a gold digger, and that she was holding out for an Irishman. Alas for our doomed romance.

The house, Widdershins, is still ugly. It still smells like piss. It also has mold in the attic, so that’s cheery.

I tried to convince the sellers to have the mold removed. They tried to convince me to let them remove the mold themselves. Eventually we decided that I would remove the mold and they would pay for the materials, because I do not trust their skills. Actually, I do not trust my skills either, but I trust that I am more invested in not breaking the house. If all else fails, I will get a contractor, and that will be ok.

Buying a house, as it turns out, is much like being Bastian in the NeverEnding Story. Not the movie version, where he saves the kingdom and rides around on a luck dragon and then the credits roll. The book version where after saving the kingdom Bastian goes and hangs out in Storyland for a while, and starts forgetting the real world. So then every chapter announces that Bastian’s Last Memory of Home is now gone, as if it’s a new thing that didn’t happen a chapter before.

Presumably this reads better in the original German, or perhaps I was just obtuse as a teenager and didn’t see how all of these instances of Bastian forgetting everything entirely were actually really distinct.

No matter; that is exactly what it felt like to buy a house. Every day or so, I felt like I needed to announce to the world that I had bought a house. I made the final offer; I had bought a house. I did my final walk through; I had really bought a house. I signed the papers; I had really, truly, no denying it, bought a house. But I still wasn’t actually allowed to go IN my house, because they money hadn’t gone through.

Now I’ve bought a house. I don’t think it can get more final. I bought a house and I changed the locks, so nobody who used to own, or live in, or just randomly have a key to my house can come back. It’s my house now.

Changing the locks was my first home project on my own home. I feel like a real adult now.

Yesterday I went out and bought myself a Bosch Drill, and a hammer, and a pry bar. Also some drain goop. And a chocolate bar. Those things are now my tool kit. Except for the chocolate bar. That was just for eating. And also the drain goop will probably not be in the kit for long.

Today I had a pottery class which I attended with my friend Holly, and then Holly came back and shone a flashlight for me while I changed the door handles on my house.

Changing the door handles turned out to be a lot more complicated than I would have thought. Despite the fact that the old handles and the new handles look nearly identical from the outside, the old handles fit the door perfectly, and the new handles… did not.

After much swearing and frightening my friend Holly, who helpfully suggested that I buy a new door and got snapped at irritably for her trouble, despite the fact that she was in my house holding a flashlight for me at 9:30 pm when she could have been at home in her jammies, I took my new pry bar and my new hammer, and I chiseled out chunks of my new door so that the handle with the only-I-can-enter locks actually fit. Then I felt ridiculously proud for a very long time.

Still do, actually.

 

Purchasing Widdershins

Yesterday I made an offer on a house. My first offer on any house ever. The second house I looked at, ever.

This house:

I do not think this house is cute. I only looked at it because I was looking at other houses in the neighborhood that day, so why not glance at this one too? It is ugly and it smells like piss.

The front, with its ancient awnings and the lopsided windows reminds me of a sleepy owl.

Via hearthpwn.com

The living room floor is in desperate need of refinishing. Or possibly replacing. The baseboard heat DEFINITELY needs replacing.

The kitchen is missing a fan and an oven.

The paint is boring and the trim is ugly.

The bathrooms are tiny.

This room is terrifying.

My arms hurt just THINKING of repainting this ceiling.

The plumbing from the kitchen drains through here.

BUT, this house has a new roof. It has a solid foundation. It does not need to be resided any time soon. The electricity appears to be modern– though I’ll let the housing inspector make the determination on that. It is exactly where I want to live.

I can make this house cute.

I can paint the red shutters black so the lopsided effect of the front is lessened, and plant some trees and shrubs to break up the sleepy owl look. I can remove the weird awnings.

I can refinish the floor, or get a couple of friends to come put a new one in with me.

I can afford to put in a furnace.

I can paint and re-trim. I will buy a miter saw. It will be awesome.

I already have plans for the bathrooms.

I can take pain killers when my arms ache after repainting that damn ceiling.

I can live with the plumbing.

So I’m doing it. Before my First Time Homeowner’s class. Without looking at other houses. Alone. With cash. I’m buying a house.

House Hunting Part 1

I’m a first time home buyer. I was pretty sure up until a year and a half ago that I was going to be a never home buyer, because home buyers have to have things like savings accounts and income.

It’s not that I don’t have income, of a sort, it’s just that my income is not very high. Certainly not high enough to make house payments for anything that would house an actual human.

But then something amazing happened. Something incredible. Something that should have been, and kind of was, truly horrifying: my father died. And he died one of those messy public deaths. It made the New York Times.

Now in my own defense, I would like to say that there are many people whose deaths would make me very sad indeed. I am not entirely heartless. I would be unhappy if my mother died. Or my sister, or any one of numerous other family members or friends.

Just not my dad. He wasn’t the worst father out there, but that’s only because he refrained from doing anything actually criminal in his pursuit to ensure that my mother and I (my sister was grown and gone) never forgot how much he disliked us

So when I tell you that my father dying was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, I recognize that it’s the sort of thing a really terrible person says, but it’s also kind of true.

For example, I had $30,000 in student debt that I was going to be paying back for the next twenty years at my current rate. Now I have $2,000, and that should be gone by next month.

I was working an office job I hated in order to pay back those loans, and now I work part time at a book store, and part time in my jammies writing things that go on the internet, for which I am paid. This does not sound like a real job to me, but evidently it is, because I have it.

And finally I am an heiress now, having inherited the money my father never got the chance to retire on, which means that I can afford to buy a house.

This is very exciting. I have always wanted to have a house, but I didn’t see how that was going to happen while I was busy working in an office I hated paying back a student loan that had gotten me exactly 0 degrees.

Today I looked at three houses. They were these three houses:

Via trulia.com

This was the first house I looked at today. It was also the ugliest. It smelled of urine, and it had this sad, neglected feel. Most of the rooms were floored in peeling linoleum and the paint was ugly and old.

Paint an linoleum are easy things to fix however. and it was the only house I looked at today with no visible cracks in the foundation. The electricity worked throughout, the plumbing seemed to be in fine fettle, and it has a fence around the entire yard in good repair. This last is a must for a woman buying a house alone who will probably need a large dog in order to feel safe.

Via hotpads.com

This was the second house I looked at. It was much cuter, but the stone foundation appeared to be missing huge chunks, and the exterior is going to need to be repainted right away.

Once again, paint is not a big deal, but I would prefer not to have to paint the entire exterior of my house immediately. Plus, no fence for my future dog.

The first two houses were just a block or so apart, and the neighborhood is lovely.

I mean, the neighborhood is nicknamed Felony Flats, but it’s totally charming. Old houses and overgrown gardens. Little independent grocery stores and coffee shops. The crime rate’s high where I live now. The crime rate was high when I lived in LA. Felony Flats doesn’t scare me.

Via hotpads.com

This was the third house I looked at, and I shouldn’t have wasted the poor little realtor assistant’s time. As soon as I pulled up I knew I didn’t want it because it’s right next to one of the busiest streets in town. All I would hear all day long is traffic. I wouldn’t ever want to go outside. Even the cute little sun room off the kitchen just looks out at cars rushing past.

So that’s it. Three houses today, and the only one I think I like at all is the one that looks like hell and smells like piss.