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.
