The New Normal
Sep. 16th, 2015 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matrilIt's downright alarming how fast everything can change. When I last wrote a post here, less than five months ago, we were comfortably settled in our rental, preparing for a relatively laid-back summer vacation.
Well.....
A month later, our landlady informed us that she was going to sell the house. Since it would probably need considerable work before it could go on the market, we couldn't really hang around and hope the new owner would want to keep us as tenants. This wasn't an easy thing for her, nor was she unsympathetic to the trouble it would be for us. It was actually her childhood home. But it was getting harder and harder for her and her husband to maintain the property, as they lived several towns away and weren't so young and spry anymore. The last winter, with brutal temperatures and ice dams wreaking havoc on the roof, was the final straw. So with many apologies, she let us know we'd have to move. Our lease ended in mid-August. We had less than three months to find a new place, pack and move out.
After spiraling into wild panic for a few days, we started considering our options. Our rent was unusually low for a three-bedroom, and everything else we looked at was significantly higher - as in, out of our price range higher. Going back to a two-bedroom was out of the question. Emma is a full-fledged pre-teen; she can't share a room with her brothers anymore.
The possibility of buying seemed absurd. We'd always wanted to, and hoped for it someday, but no matter how we tried to save, some immediate need (car repair, bigger beds for growing children, a cross-country trip for a family reunion while all the cousins are still young enough to be at home) would always come along and take a huge bite out of our savings account. And how in the world does anyone put away enough for the massive mountain of money required of a down payment and closing costs, anyway? Well, we couldn't. Not on a schoolteacher's salary. But if only we could, with the right-priced house, we could comfortably make the mortgage payments. In fact, they'd be far lower than the rent for a similar house.
So my parents very generously offered to help, as their children are all grown and married, and they've been fortunate enough to have always had a steady income through the years. I was surprised to discover, as I mentioned our situation to a number of people, that pretty much none of the homeowners we knew had bought their first houses without some kind of help. It's kind of a perpetual homeowner fund, that you can pay forward to the next generation once you're in a position to do so. I like that. I hope we can help our kids someday. And I am intensely, intensely grateful for my parents' help now.
We contacted a friend who was a real estate agent, and she referred us to a mortgage company. Within a few days, we were pre-qualified for a loan and could start looking at houses. It was so surreal, but everything became real very quickly. You really can't dawdle about making offers, or someone else will grab the house before you've had a chance to think about it. Mark and I had to confront the fact that we didn't have precisely the same priorities about houses. I discovered having a nice basement was important to me, because if I had to do the laundry down there every day for the next twenty years or more, I'd rather not have to fight my way through spiderwebs every time. Mark, on the other hand, could put up with a dusty unfinished basement if there was a spacious yard in the back. I liked the idea of a yard too, but the lawn maintenance seemed a bit daunting. There were plenty of other things, and lots of stupid arguments. In the end, however, we decided on a house, coincidentally the very first place we had looked at, that would suit both of our preferences.
It wasn't our dream home, of course. If we had years and years to look and three times the money to spend, we still probably wouldn't get exactly what we want. It's not enormous, and the street is a little busier than we liked. The kitchen color scheme screams "1970!!" in lurid orange. More importantly, the home inspection revealed a number of issues, mostly from the sloppy do-it-yourself repairs the previous owners had done.
However. Considering our severely limited time frame, and the small scope of our search as we wanted to keep the kids in the same school district, we were very lucky to find a place that worked out so well. One of its biggest selling points, for me, was its location to Emma and Ryan's school - a mere half-mile. Meaning I could walk them to school. I have always dreamed of walking my kids to school, of being able to just stroll down the road and pick them up if they have an emergency or an after-school program, instead of scrambling to arrange a ride while Mark has the car at work. No, I don't want to get a second car. I loathe cars. I wish everything was in walking distance, or at least biking or public transportation. I don't want to live in the middle of a city, but a walkable suburb is pretty much ideal.
To my surprise, the house actually fell just outside the boundaries for that particular school. Probably because they're planning a new, larger building that will merge two schools, supposedly to be completed within three years. So all the boundaries are kind of in interim mode right now. They're usually pretty lenient about out-of-district placement, though, so we put in the paperwork and everything worked out. Luke would continue attending his collaborative school; we just needed to let the bus company know the new pick-up spot.
With the school situation looking to be a lot easier transition than when we moved from one town to another, I could focus on the far more intimidating process of buying a house. Remember that summer when Luke cut his head on the light fixture and needed seven stitches? And he started ripping out the screens and throwing things from second-story windows? And his summer program teacher thought we were neglecting him and called child services? Yeah...this summer might have been even harder.
Months earlier, long before we knew we'd have to move, Mark had found a spectacular summer job - counselor at a zombie/wizards and warriors camp. Playacting, working with imaginative kids, sword-fighting - it could not have been a more perfect fit for him. And it almost could not have fallen around a worse time-slot. Yes, he was finished by the middle of August when the packing and moving and closing on the house actually happened. But everything else - arranging the home inspection, negotiating the purchase and sale, setting up homeowners insurance - that all fell to me. He wasn't at some of kind of office job with easy access to email. He couldn't even be contacted by cell phone. So I had to make the calls, send emails, research things I had no knowledge of until that moment, and make more phone calls. And more calls. What's one of my most hated things in all the world? Making phone calls. I was absolutely miserable, but the bright side is, I did it, and I didn't screw anything up too spectacularly. I came out of it with a trifle more confidence in my ability to be a competent adult. So, there's that.
A lot of the process, really, was hurrying and then waiting. Get this thing by this deadline, and then wait. Getting everything lined up for closing, and then wait. We knew which house we were buying; we had everything arranged by the end of June, but closing wasn't scheduled until August 25th. We arranged to extend our stay in our rental a few extra weeks, which our landlady was happy to accommodate as she was so relieved things were turning out well for us, house-wise. In the meantime, I packed. I actually started during that first frantic week in May, when we had no certainties except that everything would have to get out of our house somehow, some way. So I attacked the clutter in our attic with all the energy of my panic and uncertainty, and generated bag upon bag of trash and recyclables. If only I'd been able to summon that kind of energy when we first moved there, we might have actually had a clean attic from the beginning. But let's be honest - my most potent cleaning energy always comes from panic. Or anger. :P
Well, one way or another August 25th came, and we signed a massive pile of papers and suddenly became homeowners. Then it was time to transfer the growing mountains of boxes from our rental to our first (and possibly last) house of our very own. I would be happy to stay here. Moving is awful. Why would I ever voluntarily do it again, without anyone forcing us from this place? I'm sure I'm tempting fate to ask such question as that. But ten years or so does seem a reasonable stretch of time to stick around a home that you've bought, and by then Emma and Ryan will both be done with high school! By then, we'd have no reason to look for a bigger house. Surely. And yet I'm so superstitious, beneath all my rational, reasonable façade, that I hesitate to say anything with definitive confidence. Ah well. Here we are, for a while anyway.
Luke has transitioned quite well. We brought all his stuff here, you see, so I think he didn't feel too drastic of a change. The first night we slept here, we hadn't brought over the full beds, just the mattresses, and he was fairly jumping off the walls, unable to settle to sleep, far too excited and over-stimulated. We got his bed the next day, and it made a world of difference. Emma and Ryan seem happy as well, with an actual backyard to play in (our old place just had a parking lot in back) and ample space in their bedrooms.
And me? I'm good. I think I find it just as alarming how fast we've gotten used to the changes, as I reflect on how alarmingly fast those changes came. I kind of feel like there should have been more of an adjustment period, that these walls should still seem strange and off to me. I put down roots very deep, and I had a lot of roots at the old place, even after just three years. Is it possible for me to be uprooted and replanted without any fuss? I do find that walking the kids to school, while nice, is a bit more stressful than sending them off on the bus. It's entirely up to me to see that they get to school on time and safely, and somehow that seems like a tremendous pressure even though other parents do it all the time. I'm also discovering that going there and back morning and afternoon, amounting to two full miles, is going to take a while to get used to. Right now I'm sore in every muscle of my body. I'm assuming it's going to get easier....right?
But I love this place. The living room, what visitors see when they first step inside the house, is for the piano, the beautiful amazing grand piano that someone gave me back in January when she inherited it with her house and had no use for it herself. We had to squish and struggle to find room for it in our old place, but now we have a designated piano room. The den in the basement is for the TV and our massive game shelf. We can also plaster those walls with posters (mostly Star Wars, though we have a few other geeky interests on display). I've always wanted a pretty, uncluttered front room. And I've always wanted a den tucked away somewhere that didn't have to be pretty because it's for fun instead. Also, a yard! Where we can put Luke's trampoline! It works both as an indoor/outdoor model, which is why we got it. It worked well enough inside in our old place, but it shared the room with the piano and was just kind of bizarre. Now it's outside and seems so much smaller and...reasonable. Everything looks nicer.
I'm so irrationally sentimental, I almost feel like I need to apologize to our old place. No, you were a lovely house! I treasured the years we spent there; we didn't want to leave! I guess sometimes I have to get forced forward, because I won't make any changes or progress of my own volition. Like a plant that has outgrown its pot but doesn't want to move to the bigger, better pot because it's so comfortable and happy and safe here. I'm sure that metaphor is nonsense, as I have zero knowledge of plant care. I should probably work on that now that I have an actual yard I might grow a garden in some day....
Well.....
A month later, our landlady informed us that she was going to sell the house. Since it would probably need considerable work before it could go on the market, we couldn't really hang around and hope the new owner would want to keep us as tenants. This wasn't an easy thing for her, nor was she unsympathetic to the trouble it would be for us. It was actually her childhood home. But it was getting harder and harder for her and her husband to maintain the property, as they lived several towns away and weren't so young and spry anymore. The last winter, with brutal temperatures and ice dams wreaking havoc on the roof, was the final straw. So with many apologies, she let us know we'd have to move. Our lease ended in mid-August. We had less than three months to find a new place, pack and move out.
After spiraling into wild panic for a few days, we started considering our options. Our rent was unusually low for a three-bedroom, and everything else we looked at was significantly higher - as in, out of our price range higher. Going back to a two-bedroom was out of the question. Emma is a full-fledged pre-teen; she can't share a room with her brothers anymore.
The possibility of buying seemed absurd. We'd always wanted to, and hoped for it someday, but no matter how we tried to save, some immediate need (car repair, bigger beds for growing children, a cross-country trip for a family reunion while all the cousins are still young enough to be at home) would always come along and take a huge bite out of our savings account. And how in the world does anyone put away enough for the massive mountain of money required of a down payment and closing costs, anyway? Well, we couldn't. Not on a schoolteacher's salary. But if only we could, with the right-priced house, we could comfortably make the mortgage payments. In fact, they'd be far lower than the rent for a similar house.
So my parents very generously offered to help, as their children are all grown and married, and they've been fortunate enough to have always had a steady income through the years. I was surprised to discover, as I mentioned our situation to a number of people, that pretty much none of the homeowners we knew had bought their first houses without some kind of help. It's kind of a perpetual homeowner fund, that you can pay forward to the next generation once you're in a position to do so. I like that. I hope we can help our kids someday. And I am intensely, intensely grateful for my parents' help now.
We contacted a friend who was a real estate agent, and she referred us to a mortgage company. Within a few days, we were pre-qualified for a loan and could start looking at houses. It was so surreal, but everything became real very quickly. You really can't dawdle about making offers, or someone else will grab the house before you've had a chance to think about it. Mark and I had to confront the fact that we didn't have precisely the same priorities about houses. I discovered having a nice basement was important to me, because if I had to do the laundry down there every day for the next twenty years or more, I'd rather not have to fight my way through spiderwebs every time. Mark, on the other hand, could put up with a dusty unfinished basement if there was a spacious yard in the back. I liked the idea of a yard too, but the lawn maintenance seemed a bit daunting. There were plenty of other things, and lots of stupid arguments. In the end, however, we decided on a house, coincidentally the very first place we had looked at, that would suit both of our preferences.
It wasn't our dream home, of course. If we had years and years to look and three times the money to spend, we still probably wouldn't get exactly what we want. It's not enormous, and the street is a little busier than we liked. The kitchen color scheme screams "1970!!" in lurid orange. More importantly, the home inspection revealed a number of issues, mostly from the sloppy do-it-yourself repairs the previous owners had done.
However. Considering our severely limited time frame, and the small scope of our search as we wanted to keep the kids in the same school district, we were very lucky to find a place that worked out so well. One of its biggest selling points, for me, was its location to Emma and Ryan's school - a mere half-mile. Meaning I could walk them to school. I have always dreamed of walking my kids to school, of being able to just stroll down the road and pick them up if they have an emergency or an after-school program, instead of scrambling to arrange a ride while Mark has the car at work. No, I don't want to get a second car. I loathe cars. I wish everything was in walking distance, or at least biking or public transportation. I don't want to live in the middle of a city, but a walkable suburb is pretty much ideal.
To my surprise, the house actually fell just outside the boundaries for that particular school. Probably because they're planning a new, larger building that will merge two schools, supposedly to be completed within three years. So all the boundaries are kind of in interim mode right now. They're usually pretty lenient about out-of-district placement, though, so we put in the paperwork and everything worked out. Luke would continue attending his collaborative school; we just needed to let the bus company know the new pick-up spot.
With the school situation looking to be a lot easier transition than when we moved from one town to another, I could focus on the far more intimidating process of buying a house. Remember that summer when Luke cut his head on the light fixture and needed seven stitches? And he started ripping out the screens and throwing things from second-story windows? And his summer program teacher thought we were neglecting him and called child services? Yeah...this summer might have been even harder.
Months earlier, long before we knew we'd have to move, Mark had found a spectacular summer job - counselor at a zombie/wizards and warriors camp. Playacting, working with imaginative kids, sword-fighting - it could not have been a more perfect fit for him. And it almost could not have fallen around a worse time-slot. Yes, he was finished by the middle of August when the packing and moving and closing on the house actually happened. But everything else - arranging the home inspection, negotiating the purchase and sale, setting up homeowners insurance - that all fell to me. He wasn't at some of kind of office job with easy access to email. He couldn't even be contacted by cell phone. So I had to make the calls, send emails, research things I had no knowledge of until that moment, and make more phone calls. And more calls. What's one of my most hated things in all the world? Making phone calls. I was absolutely miserable, but the bright side is, I did it, and I didn't screw anything up too spectacularly. I came out of it with a trifle more confidence in my ability to be a competent adult. So, there's that.
A lot of the process, really, was hurrying and then waiting. Get this thing by this deadline, and then wait. Getting everything lined up for closing, and then wait. We knew which house we were buying; we had everything arranged by the end of June, but closing wasn't scheduled until August 25th. We arranged to extend our stay in our rental a few extra weeks, which our landlady was happy to accommodate as she was so relieved things were turning out well for us, house-wise. In the meantime, I packed. I actually started during that first frantic week in May, when we had no certainties except that everything would have to get out of our house somehow, some way. So I attacked the clutter in our attic with all the energy of my panic and uncertainty, and generated bag upon bag of trash and recyclables. If only I'd been able to summon that kind of energy when we first moved there, we might have actually had a clean attic from the beginning. But let's be honest - my most potent cleaning energy always comes from panic. Or anger. :P
Well, one way or another August 25th came, and we signed a massive pile of papers and suddenly became homeowners. Then it was time to transfer the growing mountains of boxes from our rental to our first (and possibly last) house of our very own. I would be happy to stay here. Moving is awful. Why would I ever voluntarily do it again, without anyone forcing us from this place? I'm sure I'm tempting fate to ask such question as that. But ten years or so does seem a reasonable stretch of time to stick around a home that you've bought, and by then Emma and Ryan will both be done with high school! By then, we'd have no reason to look for a bigger house. Surely. And yet I'm so superstitious, beneath all my rational, reasonable façade, that I hesitate to say anything with definitive confidence. Ah well. Here we are, for a while anyway.
Luke has transitioned quite well. We brought all his stuff here, you see, so I think he didn't feel too drastic of a change. The first night we slept here, we hadn't brought over the full beds, just the mattresses, and he was fairly jumping off the walls, unable to settle to sleep, far too excited and over-stimulated. We got his bed the next day, and it made a world of difference. Emma and Ryan seem happy as well, with an actual backyard to play in (our old place just had a parking lot in back) and ample space in their bedrooms.
And me? I'm good. I think I find it just as alarming how fast we've gotten used to the changes, as I reflect on how alarmingly fast those changes came. I kind of feel like there should have been more of an adjustment period, that these walls should still seem strange and off to me. I put down roots very deep, and I had a lot of roots at the old place, even after just three years. Is it possible for me to be uprooted and replanted without any fuss? I do find that walking the kids to school, while nice, is a bit more stressful than sending them off on the bus. It's entirely up to me to see that they get to school on time and safely, and somehow that seems like a tremendous pressure even though other parents do it all the time. I'm also discovering that going there and back morning and afternoon, amounting to two full miles, is going to take a while to get used to. Right now I'm sore in every muscle of my body. I'm assuming it's going to get easier....right?
But I love this place. The living room, what visitors see when they first step inside the house, is for the piano, the beautiful amazing grand piano that someone gave me back in January when she inherited it with her house and had no use for it herself. We had to squish and struggle to find room for it in our old place, but now we have a designated piano room. The den in the basement is for the TV and our massive game shelf. We can also plaster those walls with posters (mostly Star Wars, though we have a few other geeky interests on display). I've always wanted a pretty, uncluttered front room. And I've always wanted a den tucked away somewhere that didn't have to be pretty because it's for fun instead. Also, a yard! Where we can put Luke's trampoline! It works both as an indoor/outdoor model, which is why we got it. It worked well enough inside in our old place, but it shared the room with the piano and was just kind of bizarre. Now it's outside and seems so much smaller and...reasonable. Everything looks nicer.
I'm so irrationally sentimental, I almost feel like I need to apologize to our old place. No, you were a lovely house! I treasured the years we spent there; we didn't want to leave! I guess sometimes I have to get forced forward, because I won't make any changes or progress of my own volition. Like a plant that has outgrown its pot but doesn't want to move to the bigger, better pot because it's so comfortable and happy and safe here. I'm sure that metaphor is nonsense, as I have zero knowledge of plant care. I should probably work on that now that I have an actual yard I might grow a garden in some day....
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no subject
Date: 2015-09-17 04:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-17 12:52 pm (UTC)I'm figuring (hoping) that after a month or so the walk should seem pretty easy. And the timing works out well for the most part, since Luke's pick-up time is well before Emma and Ryan need to leave and his drop-off is well after we get home in the afternoon. The one exception was yesterday, when both their schools had early dismissal. Luke got home at 12:40 and then we fairly ran to the school (Luke screaming and crying and fighting the whole way because This is not my after-school routine what torture is this?? but it was 12:55 by the time we finally arrived, and even though I'd told the principal that morning that I'd be a little late, the secretary brought out Emma and Ryan with a severe "Dismissal was at 12:30" and I figured I'd just achieved the Lousy Parent of the Year award. Checked the schedule for the rest of the year and was extremely relieved to confirm there would be no further coinciding of early dismissals. But UGH.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-17 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-21 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-21 12:50 pm (UTC)