It’s been two weeks
since my last blog post, and while I am sorry for the delay, loyal readers, it
has been because my wife and I recently bought our own home! I’m extremely happy and absolutely love
our place and am overjoyed at both the fact that we finally own our own home, however,
there are a few things I have taken note of that I’d like to share with you all
– if you already own your own home, you probably already know them; if you
don’t already own your own home, let this be a warning to you all…
1)
You don’t get a test-drive
Most everything you can purchase these days allows some sort
of trial-period in which you can use the thing you’re buying and see how well
it works for you. At the very very least you can read reviews of the
product/service and see how well it’s worked out for other people. The beauty of this digital age that we
live in is that everybody can share their experiences with something specific –
right down to a particular brand and size of screw that you might buy at a
hardware store.
Homes, however, are completely different.
You’re allowed to tour the home, inspect the home, envision
what you might do to it and picture yourself living there… But you don’t get to move in for a week
or two and see what it’s really like.
Realtors, being human beings, keep normal human hours of
operation so you’ll always go visit your prospective new home during the
daylight. Often, this means you’ll
be there when the neighbors aren’t.
This also means you’ll be there during warm/comfortable
temperatures. It also means,
however, that you’ll have precisely zero
clue how poorly the house is insulated and how cold it gets at night. You don’t get to hop in the shower and
see what’s leaking, or if the shower head sprays water sideways out of the
joint where it connects to the pipe.
You don’t get to learn that the thermostat is broken and is always on if
the knob is turned to 50 degrees or greater, regardless of the actual
temperature.
When purchasing a house you only get to see it at
prime-times and you only get to play with things a little bit, and listing
agents do as much as they can to slap a band-aid on whatever’s really wrong so
you don’t notice it when you’re taking stock of how the place looks and
feels. Which leads me to my next
point…
2)
Listing agents are dicks
Not all of them, I’m sure, but given what we went through
with ours, I’m comfortable calling them out on their bullshit.
Starting with the interior of the house – when we toured the
place we found that there were these shitty, half-mangled, wooden blinds in
every room. They were undoubtedly
Shopko specials and we assumed that they were leftovers from the previous
tenant (more on them in a second), but we thought “Hey, at least there ARE
blinds in every window, and we can take our time replacing them with what we
really want down the road” (more on that in the next section).
What we didn’t realize, however, was that the listing agent
would sneak in after we closed on the house and remove every single one of
those blinds and steal them away in the dead of night (undoubtedly) in the
three days between us signing the papers and getting the keys.
And speaking of keys, the listing agent apparently decided
that while he was going to go through the trouble of removing the blinds, he
would NOT, in fact, remove the lock-boxes on the front door and the garage
door. We had to hassle him
secondhand through our realtor (who was awesome and incredibly helpful and I
will sing her praises thoroughly) until he gave up the numerical code to the
padlock on the garage, allowing us to remove that one and get the spare
house-key out of it. The box on
the front door, though? That
remained firmly fixed in place for an additional ten days.
Going back to the garage for a second – when we moved in I
attempted to open the garage door only to hear a sickening grinding noise and watch
as the door didn’t actually open at
all when I hit the button. I
immediately stopped it and went to investigate and found that there was an
additional combination-padlock hooked into the garage-door track INSIDE the
garage itself, rendering the door useless. I told our realtor (may her gods bless her and her family)
to tell the listing agent that if it wasn’t removed within 48 hours that we
would cut it off and his response was “I don’t know about that one, it’s not
mine. Must have been left by
previous tenants – go ahead and cut it off, I don’t care.”
Not exactly the answer we were hoping for.
Our realtor’s husband (may he be as blessed as she) was kind
enough to actually drive out to our house (a week after we closed, mind you)
and use his personal tools to cut the padlock off of the garage door. I asked him if he could take care of
the heavy blue box on the front door as well and he was understandably hesitant
to do so. I can’t hold it against
him, I’m sure that those professional real-estate key-boxes are expensive, but
considering it took several more days before the listing agent came by and
removed it (at night, mind you – luckily we were not at home or I would have
given him shit about it), part of me still wishes we had just chopped the
godsdamned thing off and been done with it.
Ultimately we ended up with a pile of papers, signs,
check-in lists, and the exterior garage key-box on our doorstep/porch and just
left it all out there for him to collect because apparently, while it was
crucial for him to reclaim his shitty blinds, he can’t be bothered to take away
his advertising, signage, pamphlets, brochures, or provide us with the actual
keys to our own house (or ensure that we can, y’know, open our garage door).
Which leads me to my next point…
3)
You WILL have to replace and repair things
Bill Gates has more money than god (whichever one you like –
he’s got more than all of them, probably combined) and I can tell you right
now, wholeheartedly, that when he had his multi-million-dollar
digital-dreamworld mansion built in the hills of Redmond, within two weeks he
had to call in repairmen to replace things, fix things, or he took the daring
route and tried to do it himself (more on that later).
This isn’t to say that all homes are shams and that nothing
is ever as good as it seems; but no matter how much you spend or what kind of
home you buy or have built for you, something is already wrong with it. Gremlins exist, of this I am now 100%
certain, and once you have your keys in hand and the realtor, bank, and listing
agents have all fled the scene of the crime the gremlins get to work their
magic. Wanna pull the doors off
the cabinets and replace the knobs?
I promise you now that you WILL strip at least one screw/thread to the
point of utter destruction (and madness).
Are you excited to try out that shower with two heads? Surprise! One of them doesn’t work and the other one only works when
turned to the “pee on your head” setting.
It’s different for every house, I’m sure, but don’t ever
count on simply moving your stuff in, putting it away, and moving on with your
life (more on that later, too).
The happy flipside to this, though, is that some things will
work better than you expected and you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised at
random intervals as you adjust to your new life in your new home. They are happy accidents that remind
you as to why you bought your home in the first place; cherish them and
treasure them. Take pictures,
even, so when things get bad again or something else breaks or falls down you
can remind yourself of the better things in the house and the bliss and
happiness that comes from the self-satisfaction of owning your own home.
4)
You don’t have enough money
I mentioned Bill Gates a moment ago, and I’ll bring him up
again to point out that no matter how much money you’ve sunk into the house, or
even how much you’ve budgeted and set aside to sink into your new house, it’s
just not enough. Again, I’m fairly
certain that within a couple of weeks of moving into his magic-kingdom-mansion,
Bill himself was looking around and asking himself “Damn, do we have enough
money to fix that?”
I had a co-worker once when I was selling cars (I call that
period “The Dark Time”) who told me that whenever he buys a car he always makes
sure that he has an extra $500 in the bank to replace the tires, brakes, get it
tuned-up, oil changed, and to take care of anything else that will inevitably
be wrong with it.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that you have a reserve
built-up as well for when you buy a house.
And however much you’ve set aside? Double it. It
still won’t be enough, but it will be more.
When my wife and I bought our house we had a decent down
payment, we did our finances and figured out that we could afford it, and then
we realized we had some extra money left over – surely enough to make the
handful of “right-away” improvements we wanted to make to the place to really
cement it, once and for all, as “ours.”
We’re now out of money and haven’t fully completed a single
room.
Granted, we have a couple of rooms that are now pretty damn close,
but it’s going to be probably another year before we’ll be 100% satisfied with
it, and then we get to start saving up money to re-do the kitchen (after which
we aim to renovate/rebuild the bathrooms and possibly our back yard… We’ll have
to wait and see where we’re at when that time comes).
Now this may sound very doom-and-gloom-y but I don’t mean it
to be. Quite frankly, I love my
house and at least once a day I look at something and say to myself “Damn, I
can’t believe this is MY place and it’s awesome.” Just know that it’s going to happen, and that it’s cool
because hey, you own this house now –
it’s yours. Unless you’re one of those psychotic
house-flippers and you’re looking to earn a living by being a nomad and
constantly moving from home-to-home to rebuild and resell, you’re going to be
in this house for many many
years. You really do have the time
to get everything done, so relax.
Don’t stress out, don’t worry about it, and just enjoy your new
home. And while you’re enjoying
your new home, just remember…
5)
You don’t know nearly as much about home
improvement/construction/renovations as you think you do
I worked in the shop for my theatre in college for a couple
of years, and I’ve also built a number of sets and done a moderate amount of
construction over the years helping other friends with their homes, projects,
arts and crafts… I know how
powertools work and I’ve used just about all of them (often successfully!).
So when we moved in and made our checklist of little
projects and minor improvements, I felt very confident that I could do it all
myself without destroying the house itself.
I was wrong.
(but not on that grand a scale – relax. The house is still in great shape… We just have an extra hole or two here
and there that I’ll need to patch up and repaint later)
There’s a huge difference between lending a hand to someone,
and being the person needing a hand lent.
It’s one thing to say “Sure, I’ll help you take all the cabinet doors
down in the kitchen, repaint, and re-mount them!” and something quite different
to say “I’M going to take all the cabinet doors down in the kitchen, repaint,
and re-mount them.” One of those
scenarios involves you going home at the end of the day and going to
sleep. The other one involves you
living without cabinet doors for a week and afraid to fall asleep at night amidst
the paint fumes for fear of not waking up in the morning.
When it’s your home that you
bought and you live in – the
latter situation is your new daily life.
Now I’ll admit that we are at a bit of a disadvantage here
as we haven’t yet built up relationships with our friends to the point where we
can just make a handful of phone calls and have a whole team of people here
willing to work for pizza and beer.
We’re daring adventurers who moved here, far away from friends and family,
to build new lives for ourselves (we make Oregon Trail jokes almost
non-stop). We accept that, and I
have seen the other side of the coin back in Walla Walla when friends would
move across town or into a new apartment or house and simply call “the gang”
and they’d have a Money Pit-style crew of ragtag roughnecks at their beck and
call to help out with moving and repairs.
But ultimately, even those people go home and sleep while you’re
surrounded by piles of boxes and detritus and asking yourself “Really? ALL of this shit is MINE!? Where the hells am I supposed to put
all of this!?”
And on that note, you should also know…
6)
You have more too-damn-much stuff
Ruth and I have spent much of the past year trying to
“audit” ourselves in preparation for moving and buying our own place. We’ve made several donations to
Goodwill of either clothes that don’t fit or that we don’t wear anymore or even
old electronics that we’ve upgraded away from. The details are unimportant, just know that we’ve easily
removed about one-quarter of our worldly possessions from our lives in order to
make moving the other 3/4ths that much easier, and that much easier
to organize and put away once we arrived.
It’s been two weeks since we got the keys and we still have
a room that is almost nothing but boxes.
And I don’t even want to think about our garage.
Now I can’t entirely fault this topic upon us and our
hoarding tendencies – it’s actually very closely tied to #4 above in that we
made plans to get bookshelves and storage solutions and make frequent visits to
Ikea and The Container Store… But
each visit cost more money than we anticipated, and before we got to the “Nice
to have” stuff we had eaten up all of our savings on “Need to have” and “Need
to replace” stuff.
In this particular instance I’m actually glad we live so far
away from everybody that we know because I fear that we would have been
graciously gifted with tons of stuff “for the new house” that we would have
then had to either move or put away, and I’m still spending several hours a day
simply trying to deal with the stuff we already have.
On the flip side, however, this kind of thing has come at
quite an opportune time for us, being so close to Christmas, because in going
through all of these boxes we’re finding things that we’d forgotten we owned
and having fun re-discovering some really great items. When we moved out here initially we
didn’t plan on living in Salem for very long, so we never bothered unpacking most
of our things – we just stored them.
We lived a pretty Spartan lifestyle, I’d say, and we didn’t even have
any real decorations in our apartment because we didn’t want to be bothered
with taking it all down, packing it up, and moving it again. Since moving everything in it’s been a ton
of fun, actually, to open a box and go “Holy shit! This is awesome!
I can’t believe I have one of these!” and then try to find a place for
it. Which brings me to my final
point…
7)
It’s all totally worth it
I hate moving.
I once sat down and did the math and I came to the realization that I
had moved something like seventeen times by the time I graduated college. If I include moving to college and the
various changes in dorms/apartments there the number goes up to 22.
22 moves in 22 years of life.
I had uprooted my life and changed residences once a year
(on average) my entire life.
Factoring in my life above and beyond college, I have moved
29 times in the 35 years I’ve been alive – meaning I’ve moved, on average, once
every 1.2 years my entire life.
I
AM
DONE.
With this in mind, I hope you’ll all forgive me the fact
that when it came time to actually pack up our apartment and get it here to
Tualatin I was not in the best of moods.
I don’t smoke anymore, so that avenue of sweet sweet release was no
longer available to me, I just had to tuck my head and barrel forward. My wife is a saint for putting up with
me that day and I cannot ever thank her enough for marrying me and going
through all this shit WITH me, but for a little while there, while we were
moving, the joy of owning our own home was briefly overshadowed by the hell of
having to move into it.
Of course, once we were in and I’d eaten something and had
gotten the chance to sit for a few minutes and collect myself it was all back
to normal and I was happy again, but the thought was there, if ever so briefly,
and it was crushing.
Now, however, I wake up every morning now in a bedroom
that’s painted a color we want it to be (not just the default-white that comes
with renting) and I turn on a lamp that I picked out and installed myself
(without destroying anything in the process) and I look around at our artistic
design choices of decorations on the walls (that we were able to hang exactly
where we wanted without fear of repercussion from an overbearing landlord
bitching about us putting holes in the walls). I eat breakfast in a kitchen that I painted myself (and is still
missing one cabinet door because I still have to replace the hinge I destroyed,
but I’m cool with it) and watch TV in a living room that I also painted myself
and has the light fixtures we want, where we want them (that I also installed,
thank you very much), next to our Christmas tree that we decorated IN OUR OWN
HOME.
I do all of this and I smile because it’s all there, it’s
all ours, and soon enough it will all be perfect. It’s already a home that I’m actually looking forward to
spending the next 10 to 20 years in (if not longer), and it’s only going to get
better as we add even more personal touches that make it truly a home.
And I love every bit of it.
