Our House
Is a very very very fine house.
I actually severely dislike that song. It is so gay. Also it bothers me that the two cats are in the yard. I mean, that means they’re outdoor cats because you can’t fence in cats and so they’ll probably get diseases and die or get hit by cars and die or get eaten and die. And no one likes a dead cat.
So yeah. We’re buying a house! Yay!!! We’re actually pretty far into “the process” but I just haven’t posted yet and I figured it’s about time I get around to it as I know that a year or so from now I’m going to want to go back in the archives of my blog and read what I wrote and think, “gee, wasn’t I so naive?!” So… We picked up “house shopping” after we got back from Dubai almost a month ago and, like I expected we would after spending money on vacation and feeling guilty about it, we found our house on our first outing out.
Our Realtor had plans the first weekend after we returned from Dubai, but I was antsy in my pantsy about getting out and looking at houses again, so we decided that I’d go without Alex the following Monday night while he was at Paramedic school. Alex’s mom, Patty, came along with us (since I can’t be trusted to remember details about things or notice important house condition stuff) and we looked at 4 or 5 houses that night. The first few were pretty scary and I was beginning to feel a little hopeless about our efforts that evening, but then we walked through the house on Bradley Blvd.
The hardwood floors were gleaming. The living room was huge. The dining room was open to the kitchen where the was a breakfast bar area. The kitchen had a separate cooktop and wall oven – perfect for my bad back. There were two full bathrooms, three nice sized bedrooms, a full attic and basement, and a family room off of the kitchen. Rare for Schenectady, there was also a ginormous over-sized attached two car garage. But to top it all off, it was sitting at the top of a hill, overlooking Central Park with a view of the lake. As our Realtor put it, it was “the find of the century”. He suggested that I call Alex and tell him to meet us there after paramedic school. Alex loved it too. We made an offer the next day and had it accepted the day after that.
We’ve had the inspection already and are following up on a few things – the house has a slate roof and the section over the front of the family room appears to have been tarred at some point, so we’re getting an estimate to see how much it would be to fix that. Also, the family room is on a separate zone of heat and when we were there for the inspection we couldn’t make the heat come on, so we’re trying to figure out what’s going on there as well. The final thing that came up during the inspection was a situation with the neighbors… They put up a fence that attaches to our house and garage and fences in part of our yard. Our attorney wrote to the seller’s attorney and asked them to get the neighbors to move the fence back to the property line. So hopefully all of that goes well.
Beyond that, things are progressing with the bank and we have a quote for home owners insurance, so we’re “homework-free” for now. The target date for our closing is May 20th and I know that will come up quick. I hope that there are no bumps in the road over the next three weeks and that we’re able to close on time so that we can move in during Memorial Day weekend – that’d be ideal.
So right now we’re researching appliances and trying to make lists of all the things that we’ll need as first time home owners. It’s all very exciting. And scary. I freaked out twice this week already – first over thinking that we’ll need like three times as much as I thought for the closing (which totally turned out to not be the case) and second because a guy that works for me and just bought a house with an older furnace (like we’re doing) woke up yesterday morning to find that his central air/heat wasn’t working. Hearing about that lead me to freak out over hte fact that we’re using all of our savings towards buying the house and that we won’t have a big emergency fund for something like that. Our furnace is definitely old so that worries me – although the home inspector said that our boiler is a “cast iron beast” that, while the life expectancy is only 30 years or so usually, he’s seen some like ours that have lasted 50 years, so hopefully the odds are with us there. I’m sure that wasn’t the last of my freakouts before closing. Poor Alex – he’s a freaking saint for dealing with me.
I hope everything works out. I hope all of my calculations and projections are correct and we do fine with the monthly expenses. I hope our neighbors don’t suck. I hope the place isn’t randomly haunted… I hope the next few weeks go by quickly – I wish I could just fast forward to the part where we’re already moved in and settled in and enjoying our house.
Exciting. Scary. Exciting.
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