If you follow me on Twitter, or even from reading my last blog post, you might notice I've been very "complainy" and negative about my new place. You might even be rolling your eyes and thinking "Caitlen, get over it, you have more than a lot of people, be grateful that you have a roof over your head and live in a safe area." I get that. And I'm trying to be thankful for what I have and make plans for getting my new place to feel like home. But the issue here isn't that I'm not grateful for what I have, it's that I'm essentially grieving for the place I lost. And when I say that, I'm not even talking about the physical things I left behind (while yes, I am upset that I didn't bring my nice fridge with us and that I had to leave behind the amazing stove I picked out when we moved in to that house, those material items only play a small role in this sense of loss I have going on). For some reason, this move was the toughest move I have gone through to date, and I've been trying to figure out why. While I don't know for 100% sure, I THINK I have it pinned down to the fact that, for the first time ever, I wasn't READY to move. At least, that's a good portion of it. The rest is the fact that the last place was the first that was truly mine - not a place I was renting from someone else. I'll touch on both parts today.
I have always had a sense of wanderlust. My mother was a flight attendant when I was a kid and that came with the perk of free travel. During my childhood we would take day trips to NYC, weekend trips to Disney World, go to San Francisco on a whim (ok that happened once, but it was pretty fun), etc. I learned to love travel from a very young age, and even though I grew up in the same city from birth until I graduated high school, I knew I wanted to experience life in other places. When I went off to college, I started off at a place about three hours from home. It was perfect, as it was far enough away that I wasn't expected to go home every weekend (and I didn't need to worry about my parents just dropping in on me - something I oddly worried about but, looking back, am pretty sure wouldn't have happened even if I'd gone to college in the same city), but it was close enough to where if I wanted a spontaneous weekend at home, it wasn't a big deal to load up my car after Friday classes and head home. But my mind was still elsewhere and I wanted to expand my horizons, so after two years I transferred to a university in TX - a two day drive from home, or, as more often happened, a plane ride home. That move was extremely exciting. I lived in TX for almost four years before moving to Kansas to live with my husband (though we weren't quite married at the time - we got married later that year). I loved TX, and there are many parts about TX that I really miss, but that move was an exciting move as well. As were the moves after that until we ended up in Colorado. Though I hated leaving my friends in those other places and there was nothing about the places that I really disliked, each move, whether I'd been there for 6 months or two years, came at a time that just seemed right.
But for some reason, Colorado was special. From my very first visit there for house-hunting, I was in love with the place. It wasn't even the people, either - you guys, people in Colorado Springs can be freaking rude. To the point where if you're driving through the neighborhood and wave, or even if you pass them in a store and smile at them, they respond with a look of suspicion and confusion. But the view is, obviously one of the best views around, the city had everything I could need (basics like Target, Costco, Barnes & Noble, ample restaurants, even a raw honey shop that I loved to frequent), and for some reason it felt like home very quickly. I looked at many houses when I was house hunting, but from the moment I walked through the front door of ours, I knew it was the one. Of course I viewed it twice before putting in an offer, but I fell in love with it before it was even ours.
The house was far from perfect. The master bedroom was set up to where it was difficult to arrange the room more than one way (the closet was one of those with a sliding door that took up an entire wall, a window took up another entire wall, that sort of thing). The master bath did not even have a door on it (though there was a door to the toilet closet), and, get this guys, it was CARPETED. This seemed to be a trend in Colorado (both the door and the carpeting) but the whole time I always wondered who gets it in their head to put carpet in a bathroom. The laundry was located in the guest bath, and though it had accordion doors for the laundry area, our washer and dryer wouldn't fit with the doors on so we had to take those off and just hang up a curtain. It made it really difficult to keep the guest bath clean because we always had clothes and things in there, falling on the floor and whatnot. Both of the guest bedrooms were very tiny. In one, we had a trundle daybed, and when the trundle was pulled out, both beds side by side literally filled up the entire room. The living room was also set up in a way that only really let us arrange it one way (at least, if we wanted the TV in there), but it always seemed a little off. I'm sure an interior designer could have looked at it and figured out what to fix about it, but we set it up the way we liked and it was comfortable. Overall though, despite these minor shortcomings, the house just felt like home. I loved being in my house and I always felt a sense of peace whenever I was in the house. It's just a feeling I can't describe, but when I think about the house I think of the early 4AM mornings we had before hiking trips or ski days. I think about the time my grandad came out to Colorado to visit and how I was so excited to show him where I lived. I think about the year or so I had an Etsy shop making soap, and the hours I spent in the basement actually making the soap and lining the individual bars up on shelves to cure. I think of how much fun the dogs had running around our fenced in backyard. But mostly, when I think about that house, I think of the sense of peace and joy I had living there. And even though we had a very easy sale and even made some money off of it (money that we've put in a savings account so we can hold it for a down payment for the next house we buy), I kind of find myself wishing we had decided to rent it out instead. But we decided against that because there are just too many horror stories we have heard with that.
From the moment I found out we were moving away from Colorado, I started feeling this sense of loss. When we first moved there, we thought we'd be spending around four years there, but instead we would only be leaving after two and a half. And while that is longer than we have lived in a lot of other places, it still felt too soon. There were things I still wanted to do. I wanted to get another season at Winter Park, for one (our first ski season was there, but then the last one was a Vail epic pass, but Winter Park was always our favorite). I had also wanted to visit Wyoming and Utah while we lived out west - two states I've never seen. I wanted to go to Yellowstone. I wanted to road trip to Los Angeles and see the Big Bang Theory. I wanted to tour the Vineyards on the western slope. We didn't have time to do ANY of that. It's kind of a lesson, in a way though. Don't put things off, because if you keep procrastinating, you might never get to do them. We always thought we had more time for that stuff, but before we knew it, we were planning our move.
The time leading up to putting the house on the market and selling was extremely stressful, as we obviously had to declutter and get rid of a bunch of stuff. We used the same realtor we used when we initially bought the house, so we already had a good relationship with her. I just wish that, when she asked me what appliances we had planned to exclude, I hadn't told her we planned on keeping all of them with the house. We thought moving my fridge would just be too much of a hassle, but honestly it would have been worth it (and we were well under the weight limit allowed for the move anyway). We already had a place set up here in Michigan, but it was sight unseen - however, we'd gotten references for this landlord from another person my husband will be working with here who also uses this landlord and likes him, so we felt confident going with him. The place we are renting is expensive - about $50 more than our mortgage in Colorado, but in an area where property values are extremely low. So I guess we thought we were going to get what we pay for. In the past when our friends have rented houses in this upper price range relative to property values in the area, they get very nice amenities such as stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors in many cases, upgraded cabinets and countertops, etc. So when I told our realtor not to exclude our fridge, I was kind of expecting the same thing.
Boy was I wrong.
I think when we actually got here, saw that the place was a duplex instead of a stand alone house (though our neighbors are WONDERFUL, sweet, and very quiet, so we don't complain really about that), and had 20 year old appliances...well you can imagine how let down I feel. And it's not like the high rent is going towards upgraded anything else, either. The cabinets are cheap particle board like you might find in an RV or mobile home. Countertops are basic formica. No baseboard, no moulding of any kind, white textured walls that kind of make it seem "dorm-like," walls that we aren't even allowed to paint even if we offered to paint them back before move-out, no fixtures on cabinets, etc. It's just very basic feeling, and it's the type of house I would expect if we were paying maybe $300-400 less than what we are. I get why the rent is high - we are in a college town, and the landlord is looking for a demographic other than college kids to rent there. However, I feel that in order to attract that demographic that he's looking for, he should be willing to update some things in the house. We are not rich, by any means, but we also are not broke as college students, either. We're just leaving our 20's, have a bit of savings, and are at that point where we start expecting our standard of living to reflect things besides bare-bones basic. People in my age range who can afford the rent here are looking for more modern amenities, and while we're not looking for anything overly fancy, I do expect things to be a little more energy efficient (by contrast, our fridge runs all the time, we have a non-programmable thermostat that doesn't even show the current temperature, and well, ALL of the appliances are about as efficient as you would expect 20-year-old appliances to be). Also, at this price range, I kind of expect a fridge with an ice maker. That sort of thing. I get that from a landlords point of view, he's renting out the house, not the appliances (even though the appliances come with the house). But by that logic, for the price we pay we should have updated cabinets. Preferably with fixtures that people in my generation tend to prefer. Maybe even updated countertops. Perhaps updating things like the thermostat would have been a nice gesture, too. Little touches here and there that don't make it seem I'm renting a bare bones basic unit. I have lived in enough places and rented enough to know what to expect at various price ranges (again, relative to area property values and rent), and based on past experience, we're getting ripped off. But there's nothing we can do about it because we signed a two year lease, and I don't want to complain too much to the landlord because we're expected to be here for 3 years and so if he doesn't renew our lease at the end of two years, I don't want to deal with moving ourselves before we have to.
This kind of starts to tie into the fact that this place isn't MINE and we have so many restrictions that it's hard to get it to feel like mine. At our last place, if we didn't like something, we did something about it. Remember the carpet in the bathroom I mentioned? We pulled the carpet up and put in tile. Had we been in the house longer, we would have finished the basement. We would have put in granite countertops and tiled the kitchen (it had linoleum floors). The appliances that came with the house were old, so we replaced them (and it was easy because Colorado Springs has an AMAZING factory outlet so we got all our appliances for less than half the price as if we'd gone to a place like Home Depot to buy them). We painted our living room and guest rooms. While there are downsides to owning a house - like when the motors of our furnace broke and we had to drop an unexpected $1000 to get them fixed - the fact that we could do what we wanted with the place without getting permission from a landlord totally made it worth it. It's so strange now that we live here but the place isn't ours to do with as we please. For example, I really want to replace our kitchen faucet with a two-in-one faucet/sprayer like we had at the last place (much easier to fill large pots with water, plus makes it easy to fill the dogs' water jug). But, even though it's something we can easily reverse prior to moving out, we can't do it without first getting permission from our landlord. And I kind of have a feeling he's going to say no. I mean, if he won't even let us paint the walls, it's hard for me to believe he's going to let us change out a plumbing fixture. And though it's not the end of the world getting used to this kind of sink again where I can't actually move the faucet (though I hope I don't accidentally break it before getting used to it again, because I keep grabbing it to try an fill things up with it lol), things like this just reinforce the fact that, though this is supposed to be our home, it's still not OURS. Having been a renter way more than a homeowner in my adult life, I never would have dreamed that going back to renting would be this difficult a transition. And I DO try to see it from his point of view. What if we painted the walls and ended up getting paint all over the carpets and floors? While WE know better and always put plastic down over the floors before painting and use painters tape and things like that, HE doesn't know that we know to do that, even if we say we do. He doesn't know that, if I switch out the faucet, I'll install it correctly rather than causing a leak in the pipes under the sink resulting in water damage. And I get that. It would be a concern of mine, too, if we had decided to rent our own house out rather than sell it (though I think the difference is our house was made for people to live in and has been updated as such, whereas the place we are renting out now was built for renters and was never designed with comfort and amenities in mind). But it's frustrating and discouraging and difficult for me to come to grips with.
And so, I think I just need time to grieve over my sense of loss. I know it's not the end of the world, and while I'll always miss my old house, I'll move on. I'll make this place feel like home. Heck, we already took down the old nasty vertical blinds that were hung over the sliding glass door in the kitchen and replaced them with green curtains. It is AMAZING how something as simple as curtains really transform a room. We plan on putting fixtures on the cabinets, too - just not screwing them in. Instead, we will saw off the screws of knobs and use command strips to attach them. I'm also looking into removable wallpaper to help disguise the ugliness of the cabinets themselves, and if I like it enough, I may even do something to mask the ugliness of the appliances too. There are tons of blogs I've been reading about how to make rental properties feel more like home. So while it'll take a bit of work and probably more $$ than I'd like, we'll get it there. On that same vein, I'm trying to keep in mind that this situation, though longer than other places we've lived before, is only temporary. This is not our forever home. And it's kind of good that we get to experience places we bot love and...well...have no love FOR, before we do settle down in our forever home. Most people might only live in a few places before they buy that house that they'll be in for years and years, but by the time we get there, we will have lived in MANY places. We will know exactly what we like and don't like about a house. What works, and what just doesn't. It will be easier for us to get that dream house when the time comes, and in the meantime, when we live in the less-than-desirable homes, we just gotta go with the flow. And when we get discouraged or feel sad that we're living in housing worse than our college housing while our friends paying the same rent as us for their home get nice upgraded appliances, fenced in yards, etc...we just have to remember it isn't forever! One day our turn will come again for the nicer house too. And, though we don't have the amenities in our new town that Colorado Springs had, I think there's going to be a lot to like about Michigan. Trips into Canada, for one thing. Plus, we can still ski here - obviously they don't have the huge resorts here like Colorado had, but hey, we could have ended up in a place that doesn't even see snow, so I think I'll take what I can get. Also, one of our friend's family has a cottage in northern Michigan that they have offered to us whenever we want to use it, so that'll be a fun little getaway. And, probably my favorite part so far about Michigan is the fact that I am a 12 hour drive from my family. This is the first time since 2007 that it hasn't been a multiple-day drive or a plane ride to go visit them, and though 12 hours is still a long drive, I'll take it.
Showing posts with label Moving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moving. Show all posts
Monday, August 1, 2016
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
I moved to Michigan!
Sorry it's been FOREVER since I last wrote! I've been such a bad blogger. I think I had a pretty good reason, though, as we recently undertook a 1300 mile move from Colorado to Michigan!
Selling our house was SO stressful. It felt like it took us forever to get the house ready to put on the market, and that no matter how much cleaning and purging we did, we still had mountains of stuff left to get rid of or "hide." In the first part of April, my husband's parents came from Nebraska to help us tile our bathroom floor (which had CARPET in it...seriously, who puts carpet in a bathroom!?!?). It looked so awesome afterwards, but it sucked knowing that we would only get to enjoy it for a short period of time. Towards the end of April I then had to make the 9 hour drive to Nebraska by myself in order to drop our animals off with my in-laws (our dogs shed so much that trying to sell our house would have been impossible - there's just no keeping up with all the hair!). We were so thankful to them for watching them because it really did take a lot of stress off our shoulders and of course we knew the dogs were in good hands. It just sucks making long drives like that by yourself, especially when most of it is through western Nebraska and eastern Colorado (if you've never driven through that part of the country, just know that you'd better start off with an empty bladder, and don't drink too much water or soda along the drive, or you're gonna be "holding it "for QUITE awhile).
After I got back from Nebraska, we hired a professional cleaner to clean all the parts of the house that we normally forget to do (ie windowsills, blinds, those sorts of things) as well as clean everything else to a better degree than our sloppy selves could ever attain :p. Then I hired a carpet cleaner - though said carpet cleaner did an AWFUL job and didn't suck all the water out of the carpet after he had shampooed it. Our entire house smelled SO BAD. Two days after that, our realtor came to our house because we were looking at putting it on the market that weekend. She walked in and told us she can't sell the house like that, and that the house smelled like dog, which she noted that our house never smelled like dog when we actually had the dogs in the house. It was so embarrassing for me (I take a lot of pride in my home) but also infuriating. She basically blacklisted that carpet cleaning company at her agency, and recommended another company to redo it. The second company did a great job of getting that smell out, but that person told me that the original person had left 140 gallons of water in our carpets!! (note that we had just a 1700 square foot house and the kitchen and bathrooms at this point were not carpeted). Thank goodness we fixed it soon, because can you imagine the mold problem we potentially would have had?? All in all, it set us back a week in terms of putting the house on the market, and we had to pay for two carpet cleanings, but it all worked out in the end.
So finally things got straightened out, we got our house all staged, and put it on the market. You guys, Colorado Springs is a HOT HOT market. We put our house on the market on a Friday night. The next day, we had TEN showings, and that night we got our first offer. On Sunday we had 5 or 6 more showings, and by Sunday afternoon we had 3 offers and were in a bidding war. In the end, the winning offer was $5000 more than our asking price, AND they paid closing costs. We couldn't have been happier. We'd only been in the house for a little over two years, and I was just thrilled we were able to sell it at all without still owing anything on our mortgage, but we succeeded in that goal and even surpassed it. I was also excited not to have to keep my house pristine for very long and able to leave on a dime for a showing. After all, we still lived there, and though I don't like a super messy house, it's definitely hard to keep a perfect house all the time.
Once we had our offer, everything went pretty smooth, despite a few minor hiccups, like their realtor giving me almost no notice for things (ie I was given 45 minutes notice for the home inspector. My realtor told me to just stay at the house since we were given such short notice, and not only did the home inspector show up, but also four contractors who I had no notification of them coming, which was a bit off-putting because it was still my house, and I had a right to know who would be going in and out of it. The contractors basically went through all our closets and everything taking measurements of stuff and were at the house for over 3 hours - almost as long as the home inspector himself). The buyers also asked for some ridiculous things after the home inspection - like, they wanted us to install a wooden railing on the front porch even though it was up to code, and wanted us to put fancy hinged window covers over the window wells, both of which we said no to, though we agreed to certain other minor things. However, looking back, if I were to sell a house in such a hot market again, I'd probably sell it "as is," because even the minor fixes we had to do added that much more to our already tight "to-do" list in that month we were in escrow. On top of that, the owners kept asking if their contractors could come by to "take measurements." The first time they asked, I got a call from my realtor at 7:30AM saying they wanted to come over at 9. I said absolutely not! Absolutely ridiculous request. Then they asked if they could come by the next day, so I gave in and said yes, thinking this would be their only time asking. Nope I was wrong. The next week they made a similar request, this time with about 2 hours notice. My realtor said it's not unusual for them to want to get contractors in, so again I caved. That time, though, I noticed that things in my plate cupboard seemed to be a bit shifted. I wasn't 100% sure that they had gone through the cabinets though, so I didn't bring it up. Then they asked to come again for measurements the week before closing. I told them absolutely not, because the movers were coming and we were trying to get everything ready so WE could move OUT in time to close. Apparently their realtor kept harassing my realtor to the point where my realtor basically begged me to let them come over for like 15 minutes, so I grudgingly said yes. This time though I KNOW they went through cabinets because after I got back, I opened one of the cabinets and my favorite mixing bowl fell out and shattered (it was on a shelf where I never put that mixing bowl). I was SO mad and felt so violated. That house at the time was still OUR home and it was insulting that they felt they could just come over whenever they wanted, and not only that, but they were going through cabinets while doing their "measurements," something that they should have told us they needed to do. But it's over, the closing was successful, and it's all behind us. But next time I sell a house, that kind of crap will not be going on at all. They are entitled to enter the home during the due diligence period and inspection period, and after that, they should expect to wait until closing.
Anyway, now we are in Michigan. We took some time to visit family both in Nebraska and North Carolina. Because of the housing market here, we chose to rent. One of my husband's coworkers at this new place recommended a landlord for us to rent from, because we were having issues finding ANY housing that would allow our pets (all the houses we could find online said no pets, or had a weight limit for dogs, and the rest of the listings were basically for student apartments, as we are in a college town). So we set this place up with this guy back in April, and rented sight unseen.
It's not a BAD place, but we are paying $50 more for it than we paid on our mortgage, and it's a duplex with only 2 bedrooms (basically we are downsizing by a bedroom). Technically it has an extra room in the finished basement, but we can't use it as a bedroom because it has no windows (and since we don't actually own the house, that policy is actually enforced). So since we have three beds, basically we've converted the basement "living room" into a guest bedroom. Which is fine, because the couch we'd originally planned to go down there wouldn't fit down the stairs (the movers tried for like 30 minutes and finally gave up). But as I was saying, we downsized but are paying more for rent than our mortgage in an area notorious for cheap housing prices. We lost our fenced-in backyard as well, so it's been an adjustment taking the dogs to the bathroom outside one at a time on flexi-leashes instead of just opening the door and letting them out. That's going to suck come winter. Also, the appliances in this house are TERRIBLE and I'm pretty sure haven't been upgraded in the last decade or two. I am absolutely regretting not excluding our fridge from our house sale in Colorado, because even though there isn't a water line here and we wouldn't have been able to use the icemaker/water in the door, we would have had the space (it was a french door/bottom freezer fridge) and it was MUCH quieter than the fridge here, which vibrates so loud that when I'm sitting at the kitchen table I find it hard to concentrate on anything but the fridge noise, and I feel like I have to raise my voice to talk to my husband when we eat at the table. The dishwasher is so small that if I cook anything at all that day, I usually end up doing 2-3 loads of dishes in a day because it just doesn't hold everything (my husband says "why don't you just hand wash them?" but when I've got 100 things to do, the last thing I want is to spend 30 minutes scrubbing pots and pans). I seriously had better appliances in my cheap college housing. We also aren't allowed to paint at all, which I think is a stupid rule because that's one of the easiest things to reverse (just go over it with white paint before you move out, what's the big deal?). And the sliding back door and ALL the windows have those vertical blind/curtain things that are SO ugly, and many of them even have stains on them which is disgusting, so I've been on the hunt for curtains/curtain rods that look nice and also won't bust our budget. The cabinets are made of cheap particle-board, like what you might find in an RV, and with the humidity they stick really bad, and they don't have anything to grab onto, so I'm constantly ripping my cuticles back. We asked if we could add fixtures to the cabinets and of course got a firm "no." So our plan is to saw off the screws of fixtures and use command tape to put them on the cabinets, because there's no way I'm going 3 years wrestling with the cabinet doors like this. The whole place just feels really cheap, which wouldn't be a big deal if we were paying about $400 less in rent, but for what we are paying in the area we are in, we should have updated appliances, nicer cabinets, and perhaps a third bedroom. It's just really frustrating and has been a tough adjustment. And it sucks thinking we're going to be here longer than we were in the house we actually owned. I miss that house SO MUCH already. It was my sanctuary, the place where I could relax and enjoy myself, and I'm just having a hard time achieving that feeling with this place so far. Hopefully it'll get there. We've been working our butts off trying to decorate this place (especially overcoming the white walls and inability to paint) so hopefully with a little more TLC this place will start to feel like home for me. But for now, I'm homesick for Colorado.
Selling our house was SO stressful. It felt like it took us forever to get the house ready to put on the market, and that no matter how much cleaning and purging we did, we still had mountains of stuff left to get rid of or "hide." In the first part of April, my husband's parents came from Nebraska to help us tile our bathroom floor (which had CARPET in it...seriously, who puts carpet in a bathroom!?!?). It looked so awesome afterwards, but it sucked knowing that we would only get to enjoy it for a short period of time. Towards the end of April I then had to make the 9 hour drive to Nebraska by myself in order to drop our animals off with my in-laws (our dogs shed so much that trying to sell our house would have been impossible - there's just no keeping up with all the hair!). We were so thankful to them for watching them because it really did take a lot of stress off our shoulders and of course we knew the dogs were in good hands. It just sucks making long drives like that by yourself, especially when most of it is through western Nebraska and eastern Colorado (if you've never driven through that part of the country, just know that you'd better start off with an empty bladder, and don't drink too much water or soda along the drive, or you're gonna be "holding it "for QUITE awhile).
After I got back from Nebraska, we hired a professional cleaner to clean all the parts of the house that we normally forget to do (ie windowsills, blinds, those sorts of things) as well as clean everything else to a better degree than our sloppy selves could ever attain :p. Then I hired a carpet cleaner - though said carpet cleaner did an AWFUL job and didn't suck all the water out of the carpet after he had shampooed it. Our entire house smelled SO BAD. Two days after that, our realtor came to our house because we were looking at putting it on the market that weekend. She walked in and told us she can't sell the house like that, and that the house smelled like dog, which she noted that our house never smelled like dog when we actually had the dogs in the house. It was so embarrassing for me (I take a lot of pride in my home) but also infuriating. She basically blacklisted that carpet cleaning company at her agency, and recommended another company to redo it. The second company did a great job of getting that smell out, but that person told me that the original person had left 140 gallons of water in our carpets!! (note that we had just a 1700 square foot house and the kitchen and bathrooms at this point were not carpeted). Thank goodness we fixed it soon, because can you imagine the mold problem we potentially would have had?? All in all, it set us back a week in terms of putting the house on the market, and we had to pay for two carpet cleanings, but it all worked out in the end.
So finally things got straightened out, we got our house all staged, and put it on the market. You guys, Colorado Springs is a HOT HOT market. We put our house on the market on a Friday night. The next day, we had TEN showings, and that night we got our first offer. On Sunday we had 5 or 6 more showings, and by Sunday afternoon we had 3 offers and were in a bidding war. In the end, the winning offer was $5000 more than our asking price, AND they paid closing costs. We couldn't have been happier. We'd only been in the house for a little over two years, and I was just thrilled we were able to sell it at all without still owing anything on our mortgage, but we succeeded in that goal and even surpassed it. I was also excited not to have to keep my house pristine for very long and able to leave on a dime for a showing. After all, we still lived there, and though I don't like a super messy house, it's definitely hard to keep a perfect house all the time.
Once we had our offer, everything went pretty smooth, despite a few minor hiccups, like their realtor giving me almost no notice for things (ie I was given 45 minutes notice for the home inspector. My realtor told me to just stay at the house since we were given such short notice, and not only did the home inspector show up, but also four contractors who I had no notification of them coming, which was a bit off-putting because it was still my house, and I had a right to know who would be going in and out of it. The contractors basically went through all our closets and everything taking measurements of stuff and were at the house for over 3 hours - almost as long as the home inspector himself). The buyers also asked for some ridiculous things after the home inspection - like, they wanted us to install a wooden railing on the front porch even though it was up to code, and wanted us to put fancy hinged window covers over the window wells, both of which we said no to, though we agreed to certain other minor things. However, looking back, if I were to sell a house in such a hot market again, I'd probably sell it "as is," because even the minor fixes we had to do added that much more to our already tight "to-do" list in that month we were in escrow. On top of that, the owners kept asking if their contractors could come by to "take measurements." The first time they asked, I got a call from my realtor at 7:30AM saying they wanted to come over at 9. I said absolutely not! Absolutely ridiculous request. Then they asked if they could come by the next day, so I gave in and said yes, thinking this would be their only time asking. Nope I was wrong. The next week they made a similar request, this time with about 2 hours notice. My realtor said it's not unusual for them to want to get contractors in, so again I caved. That time, though, I noticed that things in my plate cupboard seemed to be a bit shifted. I wasn't 100% sure that they had gone through the cabinets though, so I didn't bring it up. Then they asked to come again for measurements the week before closing. I told them absolutely not, because the movers were coming and we were trying to get everything ready so WE could move OUT in time to close. Apparently their realtor kept harassing my realtor to the point where my realtor basically begged me to let them come over for like 15 minutes, so I grudgingly said yes. This time though I KNOW they went through cabinets because after I got back, I opened one of the cabinets and my favorite mixing bowl fell out and shattered (it was on a shelf where I never put that mixing bowl). I was SO mad and felt so violated. That house at the time was still OUR home and it was insulting that they felt they could just come over whenever they wanted, and not only that, but they were going through cabinets while doing their "measurements," something that they should have told us they needed to do. But it's over, the closing was successful, and it's all behind us. But next time I sell a house, that kind of crap will not be going on at all. They are entitled to enter the home during the due diligence period and inspection period, and after that, they should expect to wait until closing.
Anyway, now we are in Michigan. We took some time to visit family both in Nebraska and North Carolina. Because of the housing market here, we chose to rent. One of my husband's coworkers at this new place recommended a landlord for us to rent from, because we were having issues finding ANY housing that would allow our pets (all the houses we could find online said no pets, or had a weight limit for dogs, and the rest of the listings were basically for student apartments, as we are in a college town). So we set this place up with this guy back in April, and rented sight unseen.
It's not a BAD place, but we are paying $50 more for it than we paid on our mortgage, and it's a duplex with only 2 bedrooms (basically we are downsizing by a bedroom). Technically it has an extra room in the finished basement, but we can't use it as a bedroom because it has no windows (and since we don't actually own the house, that policy is actually enforced). So since we have three beds, basically we've converted the basement "living room" into a guest bedroom. Which is fine, because the couch we'd originally planned to go down there wouldn't fit down the stairs (the movers tried for like 30 minutes and finally gave up). But as I was saying, we downsized but are paying more for rent than our mortgage in an area notorious for cheap housing prices. We lost our fenced-in backyard as well, so it's been an adjustment taking the dogs to the bathroom outside one at a time on flexi-leashes instead of just opening the door and letting them out. That's going to suck come winter. Also, the appliances in this house are TERRIBLE and I'm pretty sure haven't been upgraded in the last decade or two. I am absolutely regretting not excluding our fridge from our house sale in Colorado, because even though there isn't a water line here and we wouldn't have been able to use the icemaker/water in the door, we would have had the space (it was a french door/bottom freezer fridge) and it was MUCH quieter than the fridge here, which vibrates so loud that when I'm sitting at the kitchen table I find it hard to concentrate on anything but the fridge noise, and I feel like I have to raise my voice to talk to my husband when we eat at the table. The dishwasher is so small that if I cook anything at all that day, I usually end up doing 2-3 loads of dishes in a day because it just doesn't hold everything (my husband says "why don't you just hand wash them?" but when I've got 100 things to do, the last thing I want is to spend 30 minutes scrubbing pots and pans). I seriously had better appliances in my cheap college housing. We also aren't allowed to paint at all, which I think is a stupid rule because that's one of the easiest things to reverse (just go over it with white paint before you move out, what's the big deal?). And the sliding back door and ALL the windows have those vertical blind/curtain things that are SO ugly, and many of them even have stains on them which is disgusting, so I've been on the hunt for curtains/curtain rods that look nice and also won't bust our budget. The cabinets are made of cheap particle-board, like what you might find in an RV, and with the humidity they stick really bad, and they don't have anything to grab onto, so I'm constantly ripping my cuticles back. We asked if we could add fixtures to the cabinets and of course got a firm "no." So our plan is to saw off the screws of fixtures and use command tape to put them on the cabinets, because there's no way I'm going 3 years wrestling with the cabinet doors like this. The whole place just feels really cheap, which wouldn't be a big deal if we were paying about $400 less in rent, but for what we are paying in the area we are in, we should have updated appliances, nicer cabinets, and perhaps a third bedroom. It's just really frustrating and has been a tough adjustment. And it sucks thinking we're going to be here longer than we were in the house we actually owned. I miss that house SO MUCH already. It was my sanctuary, the place where I could relax and enjoy myself, and I'm just having a hard time achieving that feeling with this place so far. Hopefully it'll get there. We've been working our butts off trying to decorate this place (especially overcoming the white walls and inability to paint) so hopefully with a little more TLC this place will start to feel like home for me. But for now, I'm homesick for Colorado.
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