Home Sweet Home, Part 2

Yeah, so tonight after bunco, I had the choice of rushing home to finish this journal update, or going to see a late showing of the most recent Harry Potter movie. I love you guys and all, but bottom line, the story of our new house is just no match for the quintessential, classic battle between good and evil. And did I mention that Harry Potter totally rocks??? Also, don’t expect many updates later this week because I just got e-mail notice that my HP7 book is shipping tomorrow and I will NOT be on this computer one single solitary second until the book is completed … and if I find out Snape is indeed a bad guy and Harry doesn’t make it to the end, I will quite possibly be so crushed that I never journal again. About anything.

So, where was I?

Oh, yeah. The house. The crappy little house that we had just bought. Or, as we referred to it, “The Yellow House”, because it was indeed painted sunshine yellow, and we thought the term might be catchy and cheerful enough to lift the unease we felt over buying a house we didn’t love, in a neighborhood we hated. You think I’m kidding? Our neighbor in one direction breeds and raises pit bulls, and the house in the other direction is up for rental as a Section Eight. The house across the street has tinfoil in all the windows, and it sits on a through street for the neighborhood which means lots of traffic back and forth at all hours. The longer we owned it, the more we began to suspect we had made a mistake. A big, impetuous, what-the-hell-were-we-thinking kind of mistake.

::administrative notice:: OK, a few rules I make it a policy to follow here on my blog: No discussing politics or religion, and talking about money is normally in bad taste. But I’m going to go ahead and talk about money … vaguely …. for just a few minutes, manners be damned.

We contacted a company about remodeling and updating the house, hoping to add some square footage and modernize what was already there, but come to find out, it is darn expensive to do that. And while Blaine makes decent money and we’re not exactly in line for the free government cheese, we ARE military, after all, which means we are far from having unlimited building funds. We discovered that remodeling pretty much costs the same as building new, and the core of the house would still be seventy years old and Lord only knows what kind of plumbing, foundation, electrical, etc., problems we could have run into trying to merge the old with the new. Even the builder agreed it could potentially have been a way bigger and more complicated project than we wanted, or could afford.

So then we decided fine, if it costs just as much to build new, then that’s what we’ll do. It’s actually been done a few times in this school district already. Builders buy old crappy houses, tear them down, and then build new houses on the teeny tiny lots. We figured if they could do it, why couldn’t we? And remember, we had a lot and a HALF! So we began plans to do that very thing. Our lot wasn’t big enough, even with the extra half, for my original dream-house floor plan to fit, but we figured we could shrink things down and make a few concessions, and still get an ok house out of the deal. And, it would be new. By golly, we can make this work! (rah-rah, sis-boom-bah, blabbity-blab-blah-blah-gag)

This was about the time of my April-epiphany-I-have-seen-the-light-moment, and I tried to view building a new house in an old neighborhood as “making the best of a bad situation” or “the end justifying the means, in order to get the kids in the school” or any of a dozen other corny catch-phrases, all intended to make us feel better, none of which did. But I was determined that having my family, healthy and whole, in the house together, was more important than the view of the shitty neighborhood out the windows. And if worse came to worst? Blaine’s suggestion was that we just build a really big fence around the whole thing and then we wouldn’t have to look out the windows at anything.

Tearing down a house, just to clear a lot so you can build new? Um, yeah. We found out real quick that is an expensive thing to do. In fact, it’s a huge opportunity cost, right off the bat. And our builder wasn’t very encouraging, to be honest. We wanted to build a house that we could live in and love, and he was trying to keep us {relatively} in line with the rest of the neighborhood. In fact, the exact phrase he used, on several occasions, was “we don’t want to build the Taj Mahal in Dog Patch, USA”, which didn’t exactly endear him to me, because it made me feel that he felt my expectations were unreasonble, when I didn't think they were. We weren’t looking to build a mansion, for pete's sake, just a new house with some nice amenities.

But, he had a point. When builders tear down old houses and build new, they are doing it for cost and then selling for profit. In order for us to do it, it was looking to be way out of our price league. We were going to go ass over elbow in debt, to build a house, in a neighborhood we hated, which we could NEVER hope to get our investment out of because we were outbuilding all our neighbors.

Real estate in Oklahoma is reasonably priced … very reasonably priced, compared to our neighbors on the East and West coast. For what we *would* have been spending, we should have been building a wonderful home, most likely on a huge lot in a gated community with a pool, clubhouse, etc. … not a normal-sized house, with a postage-stamp yard, in a run-down neighborhood, with freaking PIT BULLS on the other side of the chain link fence. (And please lets not get into the whole "As long as you don't raise them to be mean, they are wonderful dogs" debate. When was the last time your heard about someone's pet beagle ripping out the throat of his neighbor's kid???)

Regarding the potential cost of this house, we had made a grave error. I knew it, and Blaine knew it, but thankfully, he was gentleman enough not to rub the “I told you so’s” into each conversation, since he never wanted to buy this house to begin with. By the time of our most recent meeting with our builder, the week before we went to Alaska, I had to acknowledge that I had talked him into a big money-pit mistake, and I had no clue, short of winning the lottery, how to fix it. We vowed to go to Alaska and just enjoy ourselves, and worry about this situation when we got back.

To be continued … again …. I know you guys think I do that on purpose, but I don't. I swear. I'm stopping because it’s after 2 am and maybe I’m the slowest typist in the world but I’ve been working on this update for over an hour and I’m going to bed now people …. BED! Where I will possibly dream about Harry Potter because although it might be a little Mrs. Robinson-ish of me to say, that Danielle Radcliffe is getting better and better looking in each movie.

Joann re comment: Joann, you were right on with your guess, but I deleted your comment and wanted to explain why. I’m making a concerted effort not to have the name of my kids school on this blog …. Not that we couldn’t be tracked down if someone wanted to easily enough, but I figure no need to just post it right out there and make it available. So no offense …. And great guessing!