Moving

I don’t know when my online access will be up at the new house. It depends on how long it takes my IT guy (Mr. Luo) to set up a wireless network.

It will be nice to have a little more office space, although for some reason I decided the smaller office formerly known as the breakfast room was more aesthetically pleasing than the larger office (bedroom). I’ll miss my husband interrupting me to read aloud from some blog or another that I don’t even care about, as well as the opportunity to tell him about posts on the much more interesting blogs I read. I won’t miss the sound of my husband banging into the filing cabinets every time he gets out of his desk chair. We are trading coziness and togetherness for elbow room. I’m sure it’s a slippery slope to a McMansion in our future.

Meanwhile, I think we are more than half-way through our packing, with 14 hours to go before the movers come.

I’m a little worried about myself, because I am rather anxious over the fact that I do not have time to clean the new house before we move in. The painters didn’t finish till this afternoon, and I couldn’t really take time to clean today when we still had to pack. It’s not that I’m an obsessive cleaner, really. It’s mainly that it is so much easier to clean when there is no furniture or boxes in the way. Or maybe I am turning into my stepmother, or one of my old cleaning-maniac roommates.

Procrastination, Holiday Edition

My husband said we had to stop packing at midnight so he could construct my gift.

I’d managed to order his from Amazon in time for delivery on Dec. 24, but only because I got him something that I had wanted to give him last year, only to discover the local store didn’t have it and it was to late to get it online.

In other shopping news, we continue to do our part for the holiday shopping statistics. Aside from us buying the house, I was out on Christmas Eve day purchasing a refrigerator and packing materials. (If I’d bought the fridge earlier, I could have had in in black, to match the stove and dishwasher that conveyed with the house, but in order to have it delivered by the time we move in, I went with white.)

Also, how much more in the spirit of both Christmas and spending can it be than to hire a carpenter?

Merry Christmas, to those of you who celebrate it.

Homeowners

We closed on our new house a couple of weeks ago.

At the time I started writing this post, a couple of days after closing, it didn’t seem quite real yet.

I hired a chimney sweep first. It made me feel all Mary Poppinish. He wore a chimney sweep hat, which distracted nicely from his old t-shirt (from my university!) and jeans. His two assistants didn’t get into the Victorian vibe.

We found our mailbox by the method of trying the key in every box in the set. Don’t get me started on mailboxes (Mr. Luo says, “really, DON’T get her started) but this is the kind where the little locked mailboxes for a bunch of houses are all in one place.

Homeownership has already changed us. Despite the fact that the small lot (teeny-tiny backyard) was a selling point for us, we perused at length a brochure about local plants that I picked up at the library. Hey, it was partly written by the Botanical Center Named after Famous Recently Deceased Former First Lady, and who can say no to her?

I have not quite decided whether the tub in the second bathroom is damaged and in need of replacement or just not well scrubbed. I got it a little cleaner today while waiting for the chimney sweep. I can’t be the only person in the world who uses some elbow grease on a tub, can I? Based on a sample of my husband and the seller of this house, yes. (It’s at times like this that I worry about turning into my step-mother.)
I’m glad I did a lot of de-cluttering before Zebediah was born, because I don’t have time for it now. We haven’t even started packing. Since we have the apartment until the end of the month, we were waiting till the things that need fixing are done before moving, but now our moving date seems very close.

Random Bullets of Three A.M.

• Counting on nap time or nighttime to get work done is a bit like counting on office hours to get work done.
• Or perhaps worse. My students are more consistent about avoiding office hours unless we schedule a conference than Zebediah is about sleeping.
• That said, it was a glorious day when he started napping in bed instead of on my lap or while being carried, so I’m not really complaining if the naps last anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours.
• By the way, isn’t the whole point of office hours to be available for unscheduled time with students?
• Part of the problem seems to be professors at our university who tell students not to bother them during office hours.
• But maybe I’m just not interesting enough anymore. When I was younger and teaching in Old Colony, students came by just to chat in English and ask me about song lyrics. And we didn’t even have scheduled office hours.
• The relationship between students and teachers is quite different over there though. Both more formal and more familial.
• I just submitted an paper proposal online. The online form insisted that I was over the word limit in my title, abstract, and bio, although Word’s word count tool told me I was under the limit on all three.
• Even counting a hyphenated surname as two words, my own word count of the title comes up under the limit.
• My very first conference paper, in graduate school, included the word “fertility” in the title. Was it a sign?
• I tried to write this proposal before traveling, so as to avoid the whole last-minute thing, but it didn’t happen.
• If I found enough time to find and buy a house, I should be able to find the time to write. It’s harder to do the latter with the baby, however. Meredith Small may have been able to write with her baby in a sling (I read that in an interview once, somewhere), but Zebediah doesn’t approve of sedentary sling-wearing anymore.
• About that house: walk through tomorrow, closing on Wednesday. Yikes.
• About that trip: mutual love fest between Zebediah and his paternal relatives, especially his great grandmother.
• I think he may have a thing for southern accents, or it may just be the great-grandmother charisma.
• It seems a little sad to me that Zebediah has no relatives except his parents nearby, but I suppose to him it will be normal. As a child, I didn’t even know anyone from my father’s side of the family, and I don’t remember worrying about it at all.
• My husband doesn’t seem too warped from having lived far from his extended family for his first twelve years.
• I think Zebediah has already been on more planes by six months than I was on by 14 years.

Negotiating

I am mostly over the desire for everyone to like me, and I’ve never even met our seller yet. Still, every time we made a counter-offer and yesterday when we proposed a post-inspection addendum to the contract, I think of all the bloggers I read who have sold houses recently and worry that we are like the annoying buyers that they have complained about.

Random Bullets of Real Estate

• I have never lived in a house owned by anyone in my family.
• I never felt like I needed to own a place to feel grown up. And my rent has always been so much lower than a mortgage payment that I’m not even sure the tax benefits would have meant much.
• My father bought his first house when he was a couple of years older than I am now. His advice was not to wait so long.
• When I got pregnant, I decided it was time to move to a place with no stairs. My husband falls down the stairs occasionally, and it didn’t seem good to add a baby to the mix.
• I was too tired while pregnant to get going on house hunting, even though I told myself it would be a lot harder after Zebediah was born.
• I don’t think I could have handled four hours of property-viewing in one afternoon while pregnant. Zebediah didn’t mind. Any opportunity to get out of the car every few minutes is fine with him. He didn’t reach his limit until we left the last house.
• Eleven properties was too much for one day to my mind. Is that a normal amount of viewing?
• Any thoughts of relaxing the criteria of “absolutely no stairs or steps in the house” were nixed when my husband tripped over the step from a sunken living room in one of the properties.
• We will also tear out any carpet to replace it with hard flooring, as it is better for people with TFD. I would have thought carpet was better, to cushion the falls, but I learned in the support group that it is easier to trip on carpet.
• In the course of googling to find out what various local homeowners’ associations are up to, I have run across references to city codes as well. It appears that many home owners in my current neighborhood are violating city codes, regarding the number and types of vehicles allowed.
• There’s no HOA for this neighborhood, which would be nice, but I eliminated most of the area due to lead paranoia (pre-1978 houses).
• I am bemused by some of the HOA sites and the way they cite home values as the motivation behind so many rules. The obsession with maintaining and  raising home prices seems a bit unseemly. Also, I can’t help but notice that some of the most desirable neighborhoods, older and closer to downtown, are the most expensive, despite the absence of HOA rules. It all starts to seem a bit nouveaux riche.
• My brother said he was glad his second house was in an HOA neighborhood, because their previous neighbors let things go.
• I suspect we might fit in better with people who don’t mow their lawns as often as they should. Perhaps pride of ownership will change me.
• We want to be able to afford the mortgage on half our income (I’ve read The Two-Income Trap, and I am also extremely risk-averse, financially), but on the other hand, I’d prefer a 15-year mortgage (I do not want to be making payments when I’m 70).
• Our city did not have a big real estate bubble, and has so far escaped the crash. Prices are still rising, and there seems to be a lot less staging of the homes than what I’ve read about on some people’s blogs. The mortgage crisis may be catching up to our market though, so it is quite possible we are buying at the top of the price curve, yet before interest rates go back down.
• We have been moving slowly: I checked our credit reports last December and January, got a referral from a colleague to her real estate agent in March, got a pre-approval a couple of weeks ago, called the agent last week.
• Now I want to be moved by the end of the year. My husband says it’s not likely. Since he has lived in houses owned by his parents, he has more experience with delays than I do.