House Buying And You

Hi kids, it's been a long time since your uncle Akbar sat down and talked to you, but me and my friend Scotchy would like to take a moment to tell you about the joys and perils of house buying. House buying is a perilous journey, fraught with... well, perils... Some of those perils are obvious: financial ruin, humiliating exposure of one's ignorance, getting shot at while you shop for houses in the neighborhoods you can afford.

But less known are the other burdens you'll face: erroneous MLS sheets, lackadaisical bankers, and best of all, inconsistent sellers! But despite all of these, there are benefits. Shocking, I know!. Uncle Scotchy tells me I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the key benefit, which is that you get to be a home-owner. Landed gentry. To quote an incredibly wise man, "you ain't no kind of man, unless you got land." So true. So poignient, yet so true.

The long and the short of our current situation is that we've got a signed contract in on a house. We recently had said house inspected by a licensed inspektor general, which was pretty cool. He found lots of things that didn't sound so bad when he found them, but read like a laundry list of things that are about to condemn the house once committed to his inspektor's report..en...stag. Ok, I may give up on making the house inspector sound more german. He wasn't really germanic at all, to be honest. All the same, the inspection was pretty cool, we got to see all of the things we'll need to work on, and a few things we'll need to have fixed before we can move in (one in particular will be a requirement for our loan to be approved).

Needless to say, things are pretty exciting over here... Court's been talking to our bankers, and generally being a really good people person (networking, making sure things move on the financial end of things), and I've been trying to coordinate with vendors (inspectors, other kinds of inspectors, our agent) and make sure we have all of our bases covered for the impending closing (April 1, no joke!).

So while we're busy, and a touch stressed, I think we've both calmed down a lot, as we approach home ownership with glee and the utmost readiness. Oh, and the afore-mentioned scotch.

--Ak out

Cattywampus

Cattywampus is a great word. The first time I heard it was in the description of a young horse that was trying to figure out how to carry itself. If you've ever ridden a two-year-old that's trying to figure out how to balance itself and your weight while loping, you get why it's such an apt description. The horse is trying to figure out where it's feet are and appears to be having some issues staying upright, so you just try to stay out of its way and keep one leg on either side of the horse.

Cattywampus is the best way to describe our lives right now. We have completely lost our groove. Our previous lifestyle involved waking up somewhere between 8 and 9, me doing most of the house and animal chores while fitting in my freelance work, and more spare time than we could shake a stick at. We had lunch together everyday, and generally spent our weekends in blissful nothingness. It was really not a bad gig.

Things are a little crazy around the Beck house these days... we knew it was going to be a change for me to start working full time again, but I don't think we had any idea how to prepare for it. Now, we have to get up much earlier to do animal chores, we pay someone to walk Marty for us and weekends are spent either running errands or blankly staring at the TV. My new job already involves some working from home after hours as well as business travel. It's definitely a shift from being a freelancer/stay at home pet owner.

For extra stress, we're in the midst of house buying! We fell in love with a house last week, and now we're working on an offer. We keep telling ourselves that life will slow down soon, but I'm wonder if maybe that's just a cosmic joke? More updates soon, but for now, we're pretty slammed being cattywampus.