In the Beginning: We found a House with a Distinct... Musk

So, I realize that keeping up a blog means actually posting things in a timely manner.  Well, we've been busy.  Alright, I'm going to embark you on an adventure I like to call: How we fell in love with this house.

Eric and I were getting pretty discouraged.  We wanted a house with a big kitchen, close to the trails, close to work, with a large yard, and that didn't have any major problems that we'd have to fix.  Also, being a geophysicist, I wanted to ensure that our house was on seismically stable substrate, ESPECIALLY since there was a giant earthquake that shook Anchorage back in '64 over Easter weekend and sunk entire neighborhoods into the inlet.  There was another big one in '86... anyway, I digress.  Seismically stable, to me, means that it needed to be built prior to 1964.  If it survived the big one, it must be pretty stable.  In response to this, our realtor took us to a house built in something like 2003... It was in a cookie-cutter neighborhood where they maximize the house size on the lot size so you have 10' between houses and tiny yards.  You could speak in a normal voice in the bathroom and people in the hallway could hear your words, and to top it off, it was in an area that i knew got flattened during the 1964 earthquake... I can't expect her to know that (although, she should...)  Anyway... it was NOT ideal... I think her angle was just trying to figure out WHY we were pushing so hard against new homes.  I'll give her ups on the big kitchen though... Oh, I should mention, she was our second realtor, so at this point we'd seen about 15 houses.

ANYWAY, it was sort of slow at work, so I was perusing the real estate website, and found our future home show up one morning as a "new listing."  We made an appointment to see it after work the next day with a hand full of other houses in the area... but after mulling it over, I decided it was more dire than that.  So, I forced everyone to drop what they were doing so we could go check it out.  This was June, so Eric was still working out of the basement on his PhD with no job yet.  The real estate agent was headed to the valley (Wasilla, Palmer) and diverted to meet me at the house.

It wasn't love at first sight.  It smelled.  They had left a fan going, but it was a smelly, smelly house.  The realtor thought it might be an incontinent dog.  It was tiny.  No walk in closet?  The kitchen is the size my ideal closet would be... it was SMELLY!  The carpet in the bedrooms made me gag, one of the rooms was painted purple and fuschia.  But, the light fixtures were nice, and it sure had a huge back yard.  Two sheds in the back yard seemingly dropped there randomly... Anyway, we left.  I went back to work... Eric went back to writing or making an excel spreadsheet, and our realtor went to the valley.  I sat at work, mulling it over...

After work that day we talked it over and the next day decided to keep it on our list of houses to see in the neighborhood.  We went across Tikishla park to see two houses in "Airport Heights" (we find out later, this is the side of the park everyone gets stabbed and robbed)... anyway, first house is nice, large garage- plenty of room to work on constructing things... the problem was, there was no construction to do, the house was built in the 80s, it was a split level, and it had a "fair" yard- balanced out by the sweet deck.  We hated how the neighbors houses looked... Anyway, this is boring.  The next house we looked at was a dump.

So, we came back to our house... looked it over again...  it still smelled.  bad.  no fans this time.  the carpet was still disgusting, and the guest bedroom was still painted fuschia.  We said good-bye to our realtor, and on our way to dinner, we were very quiet for the first... oh... 1/8 mile.  In retrospect, I shouldn't have been driving, but I think this is still when I was afraid of Eric driving my car.  Finally, after what felt like forever, I said "Um... how do YOU feel about the house?."  Eric started with "It's like an ugly dog..."... well, that didn't sound good to me!  But he continued with "You get an ugly dog, say, you adopt it and feel good about adopting the ugly dog... well... that dog can learn some sweet tricks, REALLY sweet tricks because it's a smart dog... but it's still ugly... but it's owners love it SO much."  there was a pause on my end... and then I was like- Well.I-want-to-put-an-offer-in-do-you?... he said okay... i had him call the realtor... we put an offer in.

The we went to dinner and I told this same boring story to the waiter... in about 15 seconds... when he asked how we were doing this evening...

It took from June to September 28 to close on the house... but that's another story.

Sorry this isn't more about a wonderful lack of right angles in my life... I felt like starting at the beginning... and it's my blog.

First Post- had trouble figuring out how to blog... but now here are some disjointed thoughts about rough construction

Alright, first of all, you probably all know me.  If you don't, you probably hit "next blog" and ran into my blog willy nilly.  I hope it did not hurt.  Either way, enjoy my ramblings.  This is probably the part of the blog that I'm supposed to talk about myself and have a bunch of well put together stories for you so it makes a hint of sense.  Instead, here's what you should expect:

Eric and I just finished putting starter strip for vinyl siding on the North side of the house.  Starter strip, although invisible, needs to be really level so the rest of the siding doesn't look stupid.  Also, the starter strip has to start kind of level with the other pieces around the corner from it... again so the siding doesn't ultimately look stupid.  Anyway, anyone with a bit of brain, not currently being used as a warm comfortable house for a family of rodents, with minimal experience with vinyl siding or competitive sports, should know that doing either activity with someone you are currently involved with or live with is a TERRIBLE idea.

That said, I am now inside out of the cold, late September rain with a glass of wine while Eric puts together dinner.   We aren't fighting, but a bit of separation is good after such a strenuous activity as drilling about 15 painstakingly level screws into the side of my house that took, collectively, approximately 20 minutes because our neighbors stopped by to chat for a bit.  Ha, try it!!  It's really hard to calmly explain the thoughts in your head while you're playing construction twister- he's balancing the level at "level" position while you're sneaking in with a drill that has a 2" screw perched on it, hoping it doesn't fall off before/during your best efforts to drill it through the right slot in the starter strip, some metal flashing, and a few other layers, all the while you're crouched impossibly low to the ground and a dog is probably licking you in the mouth.  The moment you look out the corner of your eye to see if it's YOUR dog french kissing you, the level goes unlevel and you drop the screw.

So, now that you know where we ARE, let me start with where we started with this project.  We bought a house... I guess technically (and literally), I bought the house... me, a woman, with some general ideas about how to make a house better.  When I am out of ideas, I call my dad (HI DAD!) I usually get my mom on the phone, though (HI MOM!).  Anyway, after purchasing a house, I started collecting all of the power tools I've ever wanted... and not wanted.  I put them in "the blue shed" which is one of two sheds that were deposited seemingly randomly in our back yard... It's my wood working shed!  However, it's too small by about 500 square feet, so I do what I can.  We didn't really plan to do any large projects when we moved in to this house.  Okay, so maybe we planned to replace "a few" windows.  Right, time for a photo.  Here we are after our first bike commute from this homestead.  I'm blocking out the address so the "next blog"gers don't try to steal all of my cool tools.

Anyway, enjoy my first blog post, and if you don't then probably don't read the next one.

Cheers,

B