More on the house
Thank you, everyone, for your congrats!
Posting will still be a little spotty, and as you can imagine, it will tend to be on this one subject for the next several weeks. Pictures will come eventually!
It's such a profound sense of relief to finally have a house. For four+ years, every spare dollar has been dedicated to saving a down payment. (Now every dollar will be dedicated to saving a maintenance/repair fund!) For the last three years or so--since I started actively looking at houses--every spare clock cycle of my brain has been dedicated to either thinking about a house, thinking about what I need to do to make a purchase possible, and thinking about what I really want/need/etc. in a house and what I would have to compromise on.
All those clock cycles will be freed up soon. Well, not all of them, but a lot of them. DAMN, but that feels good. I'll get some of my life back.
It's funny--even a house in good condition (as mine is) needs work before you can move into it. I suppose one can buy a completely move-in ready house--I guess buying new construction can be like that--but I'm so glad I budgeted to be able to do some work. I figured I would refinish floors, since I wanted hardwood floors and the easiest time to poly them is when there's nothing in the place. (I cannot imagine how one does it when one already occupies a home. Do you just move all your stuff into storage for a week?)
Similarly with painting. I can better conceive that one could move all the furniture to the middle of the room and put dropcloths on it, and in a decade or so I might do that. But in the meanwhile, all I can think is that bookcases are a pain in the ass to move, and how good it will be do to the painting before I bring in all the bookcases and start bolting them to the walls.
The contractor starts on Thursday tomorrow! (He had a schedule change!) There's a bit of demo, in pulling out wall-to-wall upstairs (downstairs is, thankfully, uncarpeted), taking down 50's-era valances that made malkatsheva cringe, and knocking out three closets. Yes, yes, I am removing closets. They're just stuck in the corners of the rooms, not built into the wall. I hate having those corners jut out at me. I would rather have a piece of furniture--my family have enough wardrobes and armoires from my grandparents that it will work out easily. (Also, the house has lampposts in the front and back yard. It needs wardrobes for the full Narnia feeling.)
I've got an electrician to bring the wiring into the 21st century. It would be nice if there's a three-prong socket somewhere in the house, since the computer prefers that. Also, a grounding wire. Getting electrocuted is not in my plans, natch.
I admit, somehow going in and doing this work--particularly the painting and floor finishing--feels a good deal like going in and pissing in all the corners to mark my territory. The house will feel much more like MINE MINE MINE when I've had the work done.
The only down side is that, sadly, I will not be getting to WFC this year. The timing and the money is just blown. This stinks because WFC is overseas next year, and I'm sure I won't be able to foot that. So there will be three consecutive years that I don't get to go to one of my favorite conventions. And that's without even talking about how sorry I will be to miss seeing the Toronto Contingent of my Canuckistanian friends. Perhaps I will make it to Ad Astra next year.