We’ve noticed a couple of new quirks since moving in, though nothing unbearable. We already knew about the quirky kitchen which has it’s fridge and stove pushed off into little side room just off the kitchen instead of actually inside the kitchen proper. What we didn’t notice when we originally looked at the house was the quirky layout of the bathroom in which the door will only open about 80% or so before it is blocked by the toilet! Not really a big deal, just another quirk. We’d have had no way to know about the final quirk we found prior to moving in because it didn’t become obvious until we turned the gas on and got hot water. The water lines running to the bathroom sink are reversed; meaning when you turn the knob labeled “Hot” you get cold water, and when you turn the knob labeled “Cold” you get hot water. This is a quirk which, while not really a big deal once you realize what’s going on, I’ll probably fix at some point since it’ll be an easy fix to do.

The very first thing I did when moving in was decorate the mantle over the fireplace. Apparently that’s strange, but most people understand once I explain why. The mantle is out of the way and unlikely to get banged into during the move (after all, who puts any major furniture right in front of the fireplace?), and so whatever you put up there is safe. And once it’s set up, it’s a window into the future. Whenever I began to feel overwhelmed by how much there was left to do while moving, I could look at the mantle and see what the house was going to look like once everything was moved in. Further, it distracted from the hideous ceiling fan which is probably my LEAST favorite part about the house (even worse than the creepy basement).

Though move-in day was technically Sunday, we got the key and the OK to start moving on Friday. TheBoyfriend™ brought his mom over Friday afternoon to show her the house and while they were there they turned on the AC. When TheBoyfriend™ and I arrived there Friday night at about 8pm, it was still about 90 in there. Clearly, the AC was not working which added a fair bit of stress to the upcoming move. I called the property manager on Saturday mid-morning and received a call back, right as I was pulling into the driveway at the house. The owner was next door (he owns our house, our neighbor’s and their neighbor’s) replacing their windows and would come over to look at the AC right way. Long story short, he couldn’t fix it so we did have to move in in the heat, but he got somebody out first thing Monday morning and the house was cool by 10:30am. I certainly can’t complain about that and if this is an indication of the speed with which maintenance requests will be handled in the future, things are looking good.

The electricity is scheduled to be started tomorrow (though I’m 99% sure it’s already on since the lights were one when we initially visited the house, it will just be switched to my name tomorrow), and the gas will be turned on Monday. I took Monday off in hopes of finishing moving anything we didn’t get over on Sunday, but will instead be waiting on the gas person because they could arrive anytime between 8 am and 4:30 pm and if nobody is there to let them in, then it’s a $44 charge each time they have to retry, which is nuts. Oh well, I found out we have about 7 people coming to help us move, so I doubt there will be anything left to move on Monday, and having the day off will allow me to start getting things put into place.

I’m slightly concerned about the water as I found out I need to go down to City Hall to start service in my name (since I’ve never had to pay a water bill before), so I’m going to do that tomorrow during lunch. I’m hoping (and thinking) that, like the electricity, the water is already turned on and just needs to be switched to my name, so we’ll have showers, sinks and (perhaps most importantly) toilets available immediately. If not, we have til Friday to be out of the townhouse (and I can extend that to any time until the end of the lease if necessary provided they haven’t found a new tenant yet), so we can run over there to take care of such necessities. Unfortunately, I know the internet will not be switched on until the 19th(!!!), which in some ways freaks me out (oh noes! life without the net!), but in other way will provide for distraction-free time to get the house set up.

All in all, I’m very excited and ready to go. It will be the first house (as opposed to townhouse/apartment) that either TheBoyfriend™ or myself have lived in during our independent adult lives. Can’t wait til tomorrow when I get that key in my hot little hands.

Monday, driving back from signing the lease, I glance down at the mileage on my car. Looks like it’s about time for an oil change. That’s an expense that I can’t afford to put off. My car is fairly high mileage as it is, and so if I don’t take care of it, I could easily be looking at the much bigger expense of replacing the car itself instead of the oil. That’s about $35 dollars out of the $97 I have until the 15th. Further, I had a chiropractor appointment that afternoon. One of the 50 or so ticks I’ve pulled off me in the last month apparently gave me a little gift: Lyme Disease. That’s why my knees have been hurting me the last week or so. I don’t know how much it’s gonna cost to fully treat that when it’s all said and done, but I’m not thinking it’s gonna be cheap and I’ve been warned that it’s harder and more expensive to treat the longer you let it go, so it’s another expense that can’t wait. I also BADLY need a haircut, but that is going to have to wait. I’m thinking I may just put the longest guard on the beard trimmer and and buzz my whole head to that length (and hope it looks alright). The danger in that is that, not having had any facial hair in 5-6 years, my beard trimmer is old and doesn’t hold a charge any more, so I’ll have to pick a day where I have several hours at home since I’ll likely only be able to do it in 15-20 sec bursts, so I’ll be looking quite interesting as the process progresses.

TheBoyfriend™ should be getting his economic stimulus check this week (which is odd since we used the same software to do our taxes and mine was direct deposited but they’re mailing his), so that will be helpful (mine has already been put toward the security deposit), and I’ve been doing extra freelance work lately to try and bring in extra money, but I’m thinking I’m probably going to have to be dipping into my savings before this is all over… …and that sucks because it’s something I really don’t want to do.

Option 1: We can suck it up and pay the extra month’s worth of rent. That’s not gonna leave us starving, but it’ll mean tightening our belts alot tighter than we’d like for a month. On the other hand, we’d get the house, and we’d have a full month to casually move as time allowed.

Option 2: Forget the house, and renew our current lease. That means we’d be paying what we consider too high of rent for a townhouse (in this area, in other parts of the country, it’d be a bargain), and we wouldn’t have the more flexible leasing options that would come available after just a year in the house. On the other hand, monthly rent would be $50/month less than the house, and we wouldn’t have to go through the headache of moving.

Option 3: We could give vacating notice, but wait to put a hold on the house until closer to the end of our current lease. Of course that means hoping nobody else comes along and rents the house while we’re waiting, and if they do it means frantically trying to find a new place before our current lease runs up. We probably wouldn’t end up homeless, but if somebody rented out the house from under us, we might be forced to move in to wherever we could find, even if we really didn’t like it at all. (This one is a little too risky for me, so I really probably only have the first two options)

Haven’t talked to TheBoyfriend™ about it yet, I called him earlier but he didn’t answer his phone so he must be with a client, so we’ll see what he thinks…

Update: Talked with TheBoyfriend™ at lunch and he wanted to sleep on it. But then I got a call, while still at work, asking if we’d made up our minds because someone else wanted to see the house and if we wanted it, she wouldn’t bother showing it to them. So I made the split second decision to say we wanted it, lest the other people she was about to show it to, decided they wanted it and claimed it before us. Not sure TheBoyfriend™ was overwhelmingly thrilled I made such a decision without him, but hey, he always says he wishes I’d make more decisions, and I didn’t want to lose the house. So we move in on June 15th (though since our current lease doesn’t end til July 15th, we’ll probably move over bit by bit at a leisurely pace), and now that it’s decided (though technically I still have to swing by by Wed of next week to sign he lease before it will truly be a done deal), my impatience is kicking in and I want to move NOW.

Not surprisingly it has some pros and cons, but on the whole, we both really like it and are quite excited as it is the first house we’ll be living in together as well as the first house either of us have lived in since living with our parents.

Con - Rent’s $50/month higher than our townhouse would be if we renewed our lease there.

Pro - it’s a HOUSE.

Con - The walls in the living room are kind of a funky color right now. Not unlivable, but certainly not something either of us are crazy over.

Pro - We’ll probably be allowed to paint the walls, but even if we can’t, at least the walls aren’t white!

Con - Bizzare kitchen layout. The first thing you notice when you walk in the kitchen is that there is no fridge or stove. That’s because they are in a small room connected to the kitchen instead of in the main kitchen itself.

Pro - Alot more counter space in the kitchen. We’d actually both be able to cook in there at the same time without tripping over each other.

Con - Both bedrooms are pretty small. In fact I somewhat wonder if we’re going to have to crawl into our king-size bed from the bottom instead of being able to walk up the sides.

Pro - Total square footage is 20 more than our townhouse, plus we’ll have both an unfinished basement and attic space to store things in. We have NO storage in our townhouse, so that will open up even more space.

Con - No obvious place to put the litter boxes where they are out of sight but easy access for the cats.

Pro - One time $100 pet fee. That’s it.

Pro - A working gas fireplace in the living room.

Pro - Off-street parking.

Pro - Big backyard.

Pro - Air-conditioning (which we have in our townhouse but alot of the other houses we looked at didn’t have it).

Pro - After the first year we can lease in two month chucks for $25 extra a month. That will be great since after the first year, timing will be dependent on the progress of the house we’re building.

We don’t have it yet, but all looks good. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

In one sense, that’s because, like dinner and evening plans, I’m really just not that picky over it. I want a house that is modern, or at least close enough to modern that the inside can be decorated with a modern aesthetic and still match the house. I want a very nice master suite (I’d rather dump my money there because it’s been my experience that except when we’re actively entertaining company, we tend to spend most of our time in the bedroom). That’s my requirements, and that’s all my requirements. More or less if the house design meets those, I’m content.

Now, I’m not sure if TheBoyfriend™ is having a hard time finding something he likes in general or just a hard-time finding something he likes within the criteria I outlined above, but one thing I do know, if we don’t get the thing built ASAP, it is never gonna get done because he’ll never decide on one. When he announced on Friday that he wanted to nail down a house plan (by which I mean rough floor plan and structural shape, not architectural blueprints) to send on to some of the modular builders we’ve been considering, I was thinking he meant he wanted to go ahead and flip the floor plan (which we had decided would fit our lot better) of our third and most recent pick and email it on out. I didn’t know that he was looking for a brand new plan until he called me over to his computer saying, “What do you think of this?”

Well what did I think of it? It was beautiful aside from the $800,000 price tag!!!!! He managed to convince me that if we took only the very top story and made that the whole house, along with dropping the (nice to have, but unfortunately prohibitively expensive) ultra-”green” building materials, we might be able to knock it down to something doable financially, maybe; at least enough so to make it worth mocking up to send to the architects to find out. So then it became my job to take out all the interior walls of the floor plan and rearrange them to make one story of a multi-level house usable as an entire house (also, along with getting rid of the rest of the house, so thoroughly changed the plan as to make any copyright issues non-existent).

Now that it’s done I’m thinking I need to make sure I get it to a build as soon as possible or it will join the ranks of the last 3 plans that were (I thought) agreed upon, then discarded. On the other hand, since we’ll likely be there for a long time, I do want it to be a house he’ll be happy with so going through number of designs might not be a bad thing. Plus, stylistically, it seems time is on my side. The first house we looked at I thought was a good mix of our styles as it was kind of a modern take on a cottage. The second one was more of a Mountain Chalet style. The third was classic Mid-Century Modern. And this latest is quite Modern-Contemporary. With each new plan he suggests we’re moving closer to my preferred aesthetic, and since he’s the one suggesting them, I can only assume that means the modern look is growing on him.

So we went hunting this weekend (we haven’t actually seen the inside of anywhere yet, just drove to check out the neighborhood and exteriors of the houses we’d seen ads for on the internet and to scribble down numbers to call from yard signs as we cris-crossed throughout neighborhoods that we wouldn’t mind living in that we suspected might still be in our price range. Learned a few things, half the city is for sale, but very little of it is for rent. What’s more, neighborhood-wise, our city is a strange little place. What’s more, our city is being “revitalized” meaning the lines between good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods is getting a bit blurry. Many of the homes we looked at were in neighborhoods where nicely maintained and remodeled houses sat directly alongside of houses that looked ready to collapse. One was on a street that literally was split down the middle. Look to your left and you’re staring at middle-class America, look to your right and it’s the slums (I honestly don’t recall which side of the street the rental property was on, because the sketchy side of the street was sketchy enough to make us keep driving). Another thing I couldn’t believe is how few homes allowed pets. Now we’re not giving up our cats for a house (one we’ll only be in 2 years max, at that), but having them literally knocked out a good 75% of the homes we looked at. Even the rattier looking houses (some of which were so bad we wouldn’t have even considered them if we could have) said “no pets allowed.” A word of advice to those owners, if your house is about to fall down anyways, having a cat running around it isn’t going to hurt anything.

We still need to contact our main choices and get a tour of the inside of the houses, and there’s a few places we saw ads for in the Sunday paper that we’ve yet to check out, but so far we have two main options we’re considering. The first is the little yellow house in the picture on the right. This one is at the top, but inside, of our original price range (which, once we started looking, we expanded a bit). It’s neighborhood, while certainly not the wealthiest, is clean and decent looking, and the houses, while old, look well-maintained and in good shape. It has a mix of hardwood floors and carpet, and (as best we could see from the window) the kitchen floor is tile, though it could just be a realistic looking linoleum (we were just peering in from a window after all). Two major cons include that we’d have only on street parking, and the stairs you see in that picture are only half of them. The house is built on the side of a steep hill. There’s a path of steep stairs to get up to it, the ground the house is on is level, then in the backyard, there are more stairs as the hill continues to climb. That’d be hell on move-in and move-out day and in fact I suspect we might have to hire professional movers as I’m not sure the two of us could even get our largest TV up and down those stairs by ourselves (considering it took 3 people to get it into our townhouse on flat ground). Also, the stairs would pretty much be prohibitively steep for any visits from TheBoyfriend™’s grandmother. On the other hand, after a year or two of living there, I bet we’d have the cutest asses in town ;-).

The other option is a brick house not too far from the yellow house. This one we like a little better from the outside, but we don’t know much about as there’s no web listing so we’ll need to call the number. We don’t know the price, but there are a couple of other slightly larger houses we looked at in the same neighborhood (one on the same street), that were just barely over what we are looking to pay. We’re hoping that this one, being a bit smaller will also be a bit cheaper and therefore just inside our price range. We also have no idea what the pet policy will be (which is probably more worrisome than the price at this point). Still, I think it’s the favorite at the moment. While it obviously doesn’t meet my modern aesthetic tastes (like the house we’re building will), it still seems to fit us better that the yellow house in my gut. It’s just one of those things where I can kind of see us living in a house like this one (for a couple years that is) more so than in the vinyl-sided bit of americana that is the yellow house. Still we don’t even know if this one is a viable option yet.

And finally there’s a few more just outside the city we need to call on to find out about. Renting just outside the city will give us more bang for the buck, and considering where my office is, depending on where some of them are, it may not add to my commute at all (TheBoyfriend™ has to drive all over the area for his job anyways so it won’t effect him that way at all). Of course if we can’t find anything for what we want to spend, we’ll just stay where we are for now. It’s not like we hate it there or anything, just thought that if we were going to have to pay more anyways, we might upgrade a bit.

My job has really picked up. That’s a large part of what’s been keeping me so busy, but it’s a good thing. For awhile now it’s been slow for me here. Not slow for the company, but there’s been a limited amount of work coming across my desk. So much so that I began to worry some about whether or not my particular position was going to continue to be needed. Not as stressful a situation for me as it could have been, because at the peak of my worrying about it, TheBoyfriend™ came home telling me that his company was casually looking to fill a position that, while not exactly my field, was one which I was qualified enough in that I’d have likely had little trouble getting the job. When feeling insecure in your job, it’s nice to know there’s another one available to you, should you need it.

It’s especially good when you’re looking to build a house, and we finally are. It’s been just over a year since the land surveyor was hired to come out and survey the property we are planning to buy a piece from. This guy is known for being quite slow, but he’s pretty much the only one in the area. Well, it’s taken him a year but he’s finally done. The only thing left to do is to sit down with seller and figure out exactly where the boundaries are going to be drawn, have it notarized and make the purchase. Then we can get a loan and start building. It’s exciting and a bit scary at the same time. TheBoyfriend™ (who doesn’t blog) has suggested that once the building process starts, we should start a blog to document the progress, so stay tuned for that.

We’re more than ready to move, especially since the owner of the townhouse we’re currently renting has discovered that we own cats. We’d neglected to mention them in the past because policy this renting company takes on pets is utterly ludicrous. I’m completely OK with a pet deposit. I understand that animals can cause damage and they need to be able to recoup that cost should those damages occur. What I think is ridiculous and unjustifiable is charging a one-time “pet fee” (we don’t get that money back) that is double the amount of the deposit and tacking on an additional $10 to each month’s rent. We could bring another human being on the lease (which would arguably actually cost the townhouse owner more since they pay water) and not pay a cent more per month, but not a cat that doesn’t cost them a penny. Ridiculous. But I signed the lease, so I guess I can’t really complain, just get this house built and get the hell out.