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.
Lady With a Hammer 