That's us. (Thank you, Mr. Dickinson.)

Yes, we did it. We put down earnest money on the house yesterday. (And it's really earnest because I've pretty much cleaned out my savings account. Not that being on leave without pay for so long didn't do most of that anyway.) But I want it to be done. This is a very, very rare housing complex that stays in our price range (no more than $250,000) and is not out in Paulding County or beyond. All the other homes we found under that price are either condos/townhouses or twenty to thirty minutes further west or north from our house. I already have a 40-minute commute on a good traffic day; it's been known to go to ninety minutes or two hours on Thursdays or days before holidays. Another thirty minutes would be simply too much.

This is a leap of faith. We do not yet have the money for the upgrades we want (mostly the hardwood flooring). We'll need it before the house is framed. In a pinch we can just get the things we really need: the extra phone jack in the living room for the computers, the fixtures for ceiling fans, the deadbolt locks, the outside vent for the range, the extra electrical plug in the laundry room for a chest freezer, the hardwood stairs. And the other thing we don't need but do want: the jets in the tub. (The master bath has a separate shower and "garden tub." The only person who takes a bath rather than a shower in the house is Willow. If we leave the tub as is, it might as well be a planter. Besides, we're both getting older and we both have arthritis. There are days I've come home from being crouched up in the lousy chair I'm stuck with at work cramped up like Quasimodo.) Then we can pick a carpet color we can live with and have Lowe's or Ikea do a floor later.

Of course the sale is contingent upon the sale of my mother's house.

I keep thinking of Mrs. Brown's line in National Velvet: "I too believe that everyone should have a chance at a breathtaking piece of folly once in his life."

Anyway, here's what it will look like: Model Dubois. (This makes me chuckle as my cousin Linda's married name is DuBois. They've discontinued the nice smoky sea blue, though. We're going to get grey instead. It's a bluish grey. Our house was a dark grey during most of my early years, so to me it's a nice welcoming color.)

Right now, though, it looks like this.

We were up very, very late last night unable to sleep, talking. Started rambling on about my mother. There are lots of reasons to move: our street is a cut-through between two main roads and there are constantly speeding cars rushing through the neighborhood. It's become a rental community. I'm tired of the feral cats, which Animal Control refuses to come collect—they kill the birds at our feeder. I'm tired of the all-night parties (and the occasional gunshots) from the apartment complex behind us, and the people tossing trash in our back yard. (One of the times I went out there to rake this spring I found a wad of what looked like toilet paper. It was toilet paper: someone had scooped up their dog's poop and tossed it into our yard.) And the mosquitoes and palmetto bugs almost year round from the creek. (We had a big winged palmetto bug come blundering through the den last night; at first glance it looked half the size of Pidge. Willow killed it for us. Good dog!) And the ants. (The ants will have to work damn hard to get into the kitchen of the new house: it's on the second floor.)

But part of it is that I keep bumping into ghosts upstairs. I can't go into the hall bath anymore without looking in that mirror and remembering my mom looking at herself in it: at that horrible ugly black growth taking over the right side of her face and the swollen right eye and the bald, scarred head from numerous surgeries and radiation. She always took such good care of her face and skin. She wasn't vain about it, but every night she rubbed Deep Magic on her face to keep it soft and supple. Before she was sick people didn't believe she was that old, because she kept her face nice. She always took her medicines promptly and properly and took care of herself. How terrible was it for her to look at herself in the mirror those last few days and see an ambulatory skeleton? Especially with the fiction we'd concocted to get her to Georgia: that it would be a nice vacation and it might make her feel better.

It's almost as painful to go into the spare bedroom. But at least when I go in there I don't see that sad face staring back at me through a mirror.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:20:00 AM

Comments:

Have you been checking out the shows on getting your house ready to sell?

And how far back does your new house go?

# posted by  Jerry : 1:22:00 PM

 

We tried to pick the smallest lot they had. It's .18 acre. It goes back to a fence that's before a line of trees.

As for getting the house ready to sell, if we were willing to invest that much money in it, we'd stay. :-) Seriously, it needs new carpet, vinyl, the wallpaper down in kitchen & bathroom, and completely new paint inside, plus the backyard raked and cleaned. (Not to mention the windows.) We were thinking of just calling up one of those places that "flip" homes. We've already put $16,000+ in the house and know we'll never get it back.

I've watched those shows. It usually involves taking many things away. What are we supposed to do with all the stuff? The living room still has all the photos we brought back from my mother's. Can't put them in the storage shed. James' hobby room I won't even address. :-) And the books! Where do we put all of them?

# posted by  Linda : 3:26:00 PM

 

The house has a 35'x 39' footprint. The facing side in the picture is the short side. There is about 6' each side of the house to the adjoining property line. The lot continues another 10-15 yards behind the house.

As Linda said, we have neither the time nor the inclination to do all the stuff it would take to get the house in a really saleable condition. As neither of us are "handy" we'd have to hire most, if not all of it to be done, and having to do it in the areas we are living in to boot. I figure we could put At least another $10-$20K into it to get it all done. (New windows alone would cost around $8-$10K) I'd rather put that money into the new house.

# posted by  Anonymous : 3:56:00 PM

 

Oh, yes we'd need at least new countertops and backsplash in the kitchen.

# posted by  Anonymous : 3:59:00 PM

 

Congratulations Linda and James! I'm so happy for you! Sorry I missed you in chat. I could never get connected on Dalnet.

# posted by  Anonymous : 12:27:00 AM

 

That's a nice size for you two. What's the name of the builder?

I wasn't thinking of major stuff (like removing walls, swapping windows and repainting and putting in new countertops and like that) but more just getting it ready to present to prospective buyers. Sue had us do a severe declutter, discard, and packup before we put our old house on the market, clearing out a good half of the stuff in the kitchen cabinets we weren't going to use again. The garbage men must have hated us for a couple of weeks, when we tossed the stuff that wasn't good enough to go elsewhere. I ended up giving an old stereo away to some painters working next door, and a portable TV to a girl up the street.

And packing up all the books - that was traumatic. (grin) We had about 30 boxes of them alone. We pretty much filled up an 11x12 storage room with the stuff we got out of the house to get it ready to sell. SpaceAge Storage over on Austell was our choice, you might want to check over near where your new house will be for storage options. Find something as close as possible, preferably on one of your routes to and from work. (He said, recommending from sad experience, since it's too easy to keep putting off cleaning the storage locker when you don't go by it on a regular basis...)

As far as photos go... hmmm. Bundle them in small ziplock bags, then put 4 or 5 of those (with the ziplocks folded over but not sealed) in a gallon ziplock bag with a very dry washcloth. Squeeze as much air out of the bag as possible, and seal, and then box it away. That should hold them for a couple of years of storage.

I see you've already got the idea - to make it as open and inviting as possible. For instance, if you have a closet jammed with clothes (most of which you're not going to wear again, yet you don't want to throw out because they're still good) the closet will look a LOT smaller to the potential buyer. Our new house had the closets essentially empty in the two smaller upstairs bedrooms, while the master closet was pretty full. We were suprised how much room there was in the master closet after the owners cleared things out - and how little room there was in the two smaller closets. (Well, Aaron doesn't have that many clothes yet...)

For stuff you donate, don't forget to take the authorized amount when you donate to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. We got probably two house payments worth out of the stuff we cleaned out and donated. We had a surprising amount of stuff we weren't going to wear or use again. Some of the stuff I tossed were mementos I'd been carting around for 20+ years. (Hey, dual 8-bank octal thumbwheel switches out of a Minuteman launch system don't exactly grow on trees, ya know...)

J.

# posted by  Jerry : 8:16:00 AM

 

Wow, guys! That house is so cool, and I hope it gets up soon (and you can sell the house where you are soon) so you can move into it and have room...and no ants! : 0 D

# posted by  Emma : 9:41:00 PM

 

:-) I claim responsibility for some of the clutter. This is why I'm going nuts dubbing off things to DVD. But most of it belongs to James. I know it's not true, but I'd swear we have a box full of just old telephone and computer cable wire... (And I cull out my books once in a while.) Did you say 30 boxes of books? How big were the boxes? We probably would have more like 300 (but I try to use photocopy paper boxes; they're all I can lift and only with paperbacks in them).

# posted by  Linda : 11:18:00 AM

 

You know, come to think of it, the St. Nicholases alone would probably go in 30 Xerox paper boxes. They're big and heavy.

# posted by  Linda : 11:28:00 AM

 

Well, that 30 boxes didn't count the stuff that got dropped off at Goodwill - just the stuff that got boxed and stored. Figure about 40 other boxes of books, scattered around the house.

I did a SERIOUS triage on my book collection. First criteria, was it worth moving? Was I keeping it because I was too lazy to get rid of it, or because I was going to read it again? If I wouldn't waste the time reading it again, out it went.

Second - subject. History and technology got priority, then fiction that if Aaron read it, he'd get something worthwhile out of it.

Third - Again, the 'am I going to read this again' criteria was used. A lot of stuff I just couldn't justify saving - I knew I wasn't going to read it again, and there wasn't a reason to keep it.

The library got a lot of books, Goodwill a lot also. It hurt a LOT to get rid of those books, but then as a long-time pack rat it hurt to get rid of any of the stuff that went out to the curb.

Oh - and that doesn't count the books that SUE saved. (grin)

J.

# posted by  Jerry : 10:30:00 AM

 

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