July 31st, 2008
Gimme Shelter
Steph and I have bought a house!
I don’t know how I’ve resisted the temptation to write even one entry about this for the past two-and-a-half months, as we applied for loans and negotiated prices and had inspections. Every little step seemed like it could have been a novel (or at least a novella) in and of itself. I suppose I was fearful that posting about it would take the process, which went quite smoothly considering this was a for-sale-by-owner/for-purchase-by-two-confused-indecisive-wrecks situation, and place a dreaded “jinx” (one of the official real-estate terms I now know) on it.
It’s a done-deal now though, as we went to a real-life lawyer’s office this morning and closed. (Actually that last sentence is a perfect example of the other reason I didn’t write about this earlier. I think if I were granting a loan or selling a home to someone, and I were looking around online and found that they felt a need to call an attorney’s place of business a “real-life lawyer’s office” I’d start to have second thoughts…but that’s so where we were, you guys.)
As the house you’re buying is all you can talk about with anyone while you are buying a house (it’s in the sales contract) most of my readers have heard this before, but here’s the basic run-down of what we got:
- A 1000-square-foot brick ranch,
- In East Raleigh, pretty close to downtown (about three miles from where we were living),
- In an out-of-the-way neighborhood that was built in the early ’60s when there were still manufacturing jobs in that general area, and now hosts a mix of working-class inhabitants, college kids, and middle-class folk (including our dear friends Jerry and Andrea, who are now our next-door neighbors),
- On a .25-acre lot with some very nice landscaping (that I will be silently worrying about every waking hour from now on, as it is indisputibly mine and thus, I am convinced, declining into a pile of shriveled vegetation), a fenced-in backyard, and a dog-door for Lilly.
We’re going to take just over a week and do some painting on the interior before we move in. We want to cover every single room in the place. We’re confident1 that we can get it all done before August 9th (MovingDay!™)
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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1 completely uncertain
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