how do you live so happily while i am sad and broken down?

I got up at 8:45 this morning. It is now 11:13 pm. All the hours between then and now have been filled with moving fun.


If by fun, you mean torture. If by torture, you mean mind-numbing excruciating pain. If by... well, I'll stop there.

I had forgotten how much I hate moving. It's been four years since I've moved anywhere, and time truly does dull the memory. But hey, everything I own is now under one roof. A new roof, btw. That got done on Thursday and Friday, although the dumpster is still out front til Monday. But roof = new, so rain = not so depressing anymore.

To say the day did not go smoothly would be an understatement. Scott had trouble getting the truck, and we were an hour late getting started. We'd reserved a dolly, but they didn't have one so we had to go buy one at Lowe's. We got back to the apartment to discover that the freight elevator was broken. We took small stuff down the other elevator during the two hours it took them to get that fixed, and then loaded the rest of my stuff. It took us til 4 pm to load all my stuff in the truck; it took us 45 minutes to unload it all at the house. I am still not sure how that's possible. Then we went back to the apartment to get Scott's stuff loaded, and it started to sprinkle. Luckily, the actual rain went north of us, but for a few minutes we were panicking. Finally, we got his stuff loaded, and I put the last load of my stuff in the car and headed for home. It's very weird to think that this is home now, and that the Roosevelt is just someplace I used to live.

It occurred to me while I was eating my dinner that this is the first time I've lived in a house since I was 17. I'm 31 and a half. That's a lot of apartment living.

I've got loads of unpacking to do, and so much shopping - my to-do lists have their own lists at this point - but of course I'm not going to get any of that done this week. I have to go to Oregon for work :( Oh, well, I can always shop online :) (Note for to-do list: fix mailbox so that postal worker will have place to put online shopping purchases) I have managed to get my bed put together and made up, and now I shall go face-plant into it. I would love to take a shower first, but that would require me to hang the shower curtain rod, and I have passed the point in which I should be handling power tools.

So now I go sleep. Ttyl.

*I've been watching Grey's Anatomy all day

When last we left off, I was having a bad week at work, but I'd bought a house.

Over the weekend, I spent four and a half hours with a home inspector having him show me every single thing that's wrong with my new house. Ugh, talk about depressing! The major thing is that the house needs a new roof. I thought this would cost about $8K. I spend the rest of the weekend talking about this, making everyone around me wish I had multiple conversation topics.

Sunday, I talk to my dad. He says the majority of the stuff on the list, he can fix. So now my parents are coming to visit the first week of March, and I am going to learn how to caulk. It's all very exciting.

My friend Hazel gave me a roofing contractor recommendation and the estimate? $3,400!!!! Color me relieved :D So I am trying to get the seller to pay part of it, but I ain't holding my breath.

The rest of my days are filled with exciting things like appraisals and home insurance quotes, so I won't bore you with that. The hardest thing is keeping myself from buying things for the house, but I am NOT JINXING my closing.

Okay, so just to keep track:

*Fell in love with stucco house in East Point
*Scott, Jon, and David all say it's not the house
*My dad comes down, looks at it, says house needs $40,000 in repairs to be livable, not counting the fence I wanted to replace
*Make self fall out of love with stucco house in East Point
*Look frantically for house while parents are in town, and can tell me when prospective homes are missing things like, oh, say, an air conditioner.
*Find charming brick home. Parental approval granted. I like outside, like inside. Not sure about neighborhood.
*Spend weekend researching neighborhood - decide it is a good place, slowly start letting self fall in love with charming brick home.
*Today, realtor calls - home sold on Saturday.

This is wearing me out.

Okay, so the meeting with the realtor went really well. It was actually two people, one is a woman in her late forties and I think she's probably the senior agent in the office, and the other was a really sweet, excitable guy named Jeremy, who is fairly new to the real estate industry. But he and I clicked really well, and I think he'd work hard for me. Every thing they said to me matched up exactly as to what I've read, and I don't feel like they were in any way trying to pull any wool over my eyes.

I'm still trying to set up a couple of other appts with other agents, to shop around and be sure, but I really got a good vibe from Jeremy and I think that's pretty important.

In other news, last night we went out with Scott and Jon to the closing film for the Out Film Festival here in Atlanta... we saw '20 Centimeters,' a musical about a narcoleptic Brazilian pre-op transsexual prostitute. :) It was actually quite sweet.

*sigh*

Up at 5:30 again. I tried to get back to sleep for an hour, and then gave up. So now I'm up, having breakfast, reading through my home-buying guide. I'm looking on some websites that the book recommends, and I think it may be making me nauseous... that's a lot of money. And they have all these calculators out there that tell you whether you're better off renting vs buying, and I don't understand enough about the variables to know if I'm filling them out right.

*sigh*

Everybody I've talked to keeps telling me that it's ridiculously easy to buy a house. And I'm sure it is. But I'm freaked out that I'm going to get into some sort of really bad mortgage arrangement, or end up paying twice as much as I pay now for more headache or something.

In other homefront news, they're re-doing the water pipes in our building. Now, this is absolutely something that needs to be done. We've had leaks all summer, as you might remember from my constant whinging, and I think it's great that they're finally doing something about them. That said, it's going to be a nightmare. We have to take everything out of the kitchen cabinets and our bathrooms, and the work is scheduled to take 7-10 days per unit which will of course translate to at least two weeks of chaos and destruction.

There's a meeting tomorrow night, Scott's going to go to it, and find out more information. We want to try to get them to schedule our unit for the week of Thanksgiving and the week after, because we both work from home at times (me almost constantly this fall, yay!) and that would be the least distracting.

But the reality of it is that there's no way they'll put everything back the way it was. We've done custom painting and wall treatments in the kitchen and both bathrooms, and the apartment complex has flat out said that they will not fix that. And we're only here til February, so there's no real point to re-doing everything for that short of time, especially considering that with the holidays coming up and travelling for work, we'll both be gone half that time anyway. Scott & I talked about it Monday, and we both decided that we'd just clean really well this week, and take some pictures of the apartment the way it is now, and remember it that way. Just, stressful, you know? I don't like the idea of my home being torn up. Well, not when it's not going to be prettier at the end.

I just feel like everything's in this big state of flux right now, and even though I know life will be just as good, with the possibility to be even better, at the end of it all, it's stressing me out. And affecting my sleep patterns and my mood.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about buying a home. eeeevil_genius has been talking about buying for about a year, still not sure whether he really plans to or not, but we decided to start looking at homes. The idea is that he buys and then I’ll rent from him for a year or two or until I’m an old, gray spinster writing gay porn and surviving on Oreos and Tang. We’ve looked at a couple in our neighborhood, just on a lark, both waaaaaaaaaay out of his price range.

But the point of this is that it’s got me thinking about buying a home, and what my mental image of home is, so I thought I’d share.

( Dreeeeeeeeam, dream, dream, dream... )

Now, I fully realize that this house either
a) doesn’t exist
b) exists but costs $56 kajillion dollars.
c) exists but is so run down that it would have to be gutted and rebuilt and I would live for fifteen years in a house under construction with no indoor plumbing and a contractor named Joe who’s become like a member of the family and celebrates Christmas with us.

But a girl can dream.

So that’s mine. What’s yours?