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katallison--Homebuying is famously all about location; but timing is also a key element. As in, one ought not to close on a house immediately before the two busiest weeks of the year at one's job. The mismatch between my list of things urgently needing to be done, and the amount of time I have in the next two weeks to do them, is hilarious. Also, my body decided this was a great time to contract a disgusting chest cold, which has knocked me down hard for the past several days, so that I can only work for about ten minutes at a stretch before pausing to lie down and breathe deeply (and cough and cough and cough). But! At least I have not (yet) contracted the Dread Death-Dealing Swine Flu of the Apocalypse! (That'll probably come the week I have to move...)
--I am currently (a) living in the apartment, and (b) spending every possible spare minute at the house, sanding and priming and painting and digging and strategizing. The actual move will be somewhere around the weekend of the 10th-11th, and it is borne in upon me that I really might want to start lining up, y'know, movers. And also perhaps throwing crap into boxes. Except for the part where I have no TIME to throw crap into boxes on account of all the sanding and priming and painting and etc. that must be done. And also I have to keep stopping to lie down and cough.
--It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a house must be in want of a pickup truck. Or I'd take a hatchback, even. But what I have is a small urbane Honda Civic sedan, and there are a great many things a homeowner is going to want to be hauling around -- a half-dozen yards of compost, say, or big heavy non-folding patio furniture found by happenstance at amazing clearance prices when making one of the day's half-dozen stops at the hardware store for painting supplies -- that are just not sedan-transportable. (Although I did miraculously manage to wedge a quite large two-wheeled garden cart in the backseat yesterday, and drove it back in triumph from Lowe's.)
--It is, let me say, just a damn good thing that I have both a Home Depot and a Lowe's within two miles of my new house. Good for them, that is. The amount of money I have spent at each in the past week could constitute its own whole stimulus package.
--Preparing surfaces for painting is, I believe, one of those things rather like childbirth; one tends to focus on the cheering outcome (new baby! new wall colors!) and forget the absolutely hellish, painful, laborious process of getting there. Until the next time. (I wish I could now find a snippet I wrote for "End of the Road" in which Fraser and RayK were doing some painting in their little house in Inuvik, and get into a huge squabble about surface prep, and -- yeah, fairly predictable. But it was fun to write.)
--One thing I was actually looking forward to was buying a washer and dryer, because I have never in my entire 56 years on the planet had occasion to buy MY OWN WASHER AND DRYER OF MY VERY OWN, CHOSEN TO MY SPECIFICATIONS AND WHIMS AND NO ONE ELSE'S AND WITH ALL THE BELLS AND WHISTLES IN THE WORLD. However, this was before I realized that (a) there are perhaps 503,982 models of washers and dryers currently on the market, each with minute infinitesimal differences in feature set and with identifiers like "WPDH8800JMV" and "GLTF2940FS" and "EWFLW65HIW," making comparison shopping a headachey affair; and also (b) it is not only possible but very easy to spend $3000 on a washer/dryer combo if one gets carried away with the bells/whistles. Which is rather more than I had planned to spend.
--The former owners of my house were, let us say, Not Gardeners. They had clearly, bless their hearts, sunk a fair amount of money into hiring someone to come in and do some off-the-shelf generic landscaping, to make the place presentable and saleable; but the landscaping that was done consisted of: (a) demarcating "landscaped" areas by dint of walling them off with Big Jaggedy Black Rocks; (b) within those demarcated areas, putting down a thick layer of landscape fabric topped with shredded bark; and (c) planting therein a few randomly chosen shrubs, all of which (conveniently) still have their Home Depot nursery tags attached. And oh my dear god how I HATE landscape fabric, which reduces the soil beneath it to a sort of sterile tuff, and makes it impossible to wander out with a trowel and jam some bulbs in underneath the boxwood on a September afternoon.
Damn, there's a whole entry (or series of entries) I'll have to write, accompanied by photos, on the oddities of my house's current landscaping (the shrub corral! the ornamental grotto! the Wall o' Boulders!) and the changes I plan to enact, which I REALLY WANTED to start this fall before the rain begins, but since I am miles behind on some rather more essential stuff like PACKING and PAINTING THE GODDAMNED KITCHEN, will probably not actually happen until spring. Drat.
Right, more later. Bed now. First day of the quarter tomorrow, and stressed-out undergraduates a-thronging.
--I am currently (a) living in the apartment, and (b) spending every possible spare minute at the house, sanding and priming and painting and digging and strategizing. The actual move will be somewhere around the weekend of the 10th-11th, and it is borne in upon me that I really might want to start lining up, y'know, movers. And also perhaps throwing crap into boxes. Except for the part where I have no TIME to throw crap into boxes on account of all the sanding and priming and painting and etc. that must be done. And also I have to keep stopping to lie down and cough.
--It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a house must be in want of a pickup truck. Or I'd take a hatchback, even. But what I have is a small urbane Honda Civic sedan, and there are a great many things a homeowner is going to want to be hauling around -- a half-dozen yards of compost, say, or big heavy non-folding patio furniture found by happenstance at amazing clearance prices when making one of the day's half-dozen stops at the hardware store for painting supplies -- that are just not sedan-transportable. (Although I did miraculously manage to wedge a quite large two-wheeled garden cart in the backseat yesterday, and drove it back in triumph from Lowe's.)
--It is, let me say, just a damn good thing that I have both a Home Depot and a Lowe's within two miles of my new house. Good for them, that is. The amount of money I have spent at each in the past week could constitute its own whole stimulus package.
--Preparing surfaces for painting is, I believe, one of those things rather like childbirth; one tends to focus on the cheering outcome (new baby! new wall colors!) and forget the absolutely hellish, painful, laborious process of getting there. Until the next time. (I wish I could now find a snippet I wrote for "End of the Road" in which Fraser and RayK were doing some painting in their little house in Inuvik, and get into a huge squabble about surface prep, and -- yeah, fairly predictable. But it was fun to write.)
--One thing I was actually looking forward to was buying a washer and dryer, because I have never in my entire 56 years on the planet had occasion to buy MY OWN WASHER AND DRYER OF MY VERY OWN, CHOSEN TO MY SPECIFICATIONS AND WHIMS AND NO ONE ELSE'S AND WITH ALL THE BELLS AND WHISTLES IN THE WORLD. However, this was before I realized that (a) there are perhaps 503,982 models of washers and dryers currently on the market, each with minute infinitesimal differences in feature set and with identifiers like "WPDH8800JMV" and "GLTF2940FS" and "EWFLW65HIW," making comparison shopping a headachey affair; and also (b) it is not only possible but very easy to spend $3000 on a washer/dryer combo if one gets carried away with the bells/whistles. Which is rather more than I had planned to spend.
--The former owners of my house were, let us say, Not Gardeners. They had clearly, bless their hearts, sunk a fair amount of money into hiring someone to come in and do some off-the-shelf generic landscaping, to make the place presentable and saleable; but the landscaping that was done consisted of: (a) demarcating "landscaped" areas by dint of walling them off with Big Jaggedy Black Rocks; (b) within those demarcated areas, putting down a thick layer of landscape fabric topped with shredded bark; and (c) planting therein a few randomly chosen shrubs, all of which (conveniently) still have their Home Depot nursery tags attached. And oh my dear god how I HATE landscape fabric, which reduces the soil beneath it to a sort of sterile tuff, and makes it impossible to wander out with a trowel and jam some bulbs in underneath the boxwood on a September afternoon.
Damn, there's a whole entry (or series of entries) I'll have to write, accompanied by photos, on the oddities of my house's current landscaping (the shrub corral! the ornamental grotto! the Wall o' Boulders!) and the changes I plan to enact, which I REALLY WANTED to start this fall before the rain begins, but since I am miles behind on some rather more essential stuff like PACKING and PAINTING THE GODDAMNED KITCHEN, will probably not actually happen until spring. Drat.
Right, more later. Bed now. First day of the quarter tomorrow, and stressed-out undergraduates a-thronging.