On homeownership

We own a home now.

I'm not really sure what I expected to be different.  We've never really felt held back by renting, but there is something quite different about being in your place.  For starters- it is WAY nicer than any place we've ever rented.  And of course ownership means we can do whatever we want with it.  If it weren't for the fact that it is a lot of work, I might have repainted all the rooms just because they are mine. 

And there are some adjustments to make too.  We have hardwood floors in the kitchen (I know, right?) and it turns out, that unlike linoleum, you can scratch that. I discovered this by dragging heavy boxes on the floor. Nice.

We've gotten quite used to living in homes with... character.  And usually you just learn to cope with or work around the fact that the space heater upstairs and the microwave can't run at the same time, or you trip the beaker that has all that PLUS the alarm clocks PLUS the computers.  No big, just run back upstairs before you microwave anything.  But in our house, we don't have to work around that stuff.  It can be fixed.  The first day in the new house Matt tripped a GFCI outlet (the kind with the "Test/ Reset" buttons) running the bathroom fan.  He quickly figured out this was a problem with the outlet, and we went to the hardware store, bought a new one and replaced it.  Boom.

And the first time we ran the shower the tub filled up.  Matt ran to the hardware store (McLendon's is clearly going to be our new weekend hang out spot for a while) and picked up a drain snake.  We are fearless about fixing.  However, he had a really hard time getting the snake into the drain.  Weirdly hard.  Until he realized that the drain wasn't clogged, it was shut.  That's right, a bathtub with a drain  plug that actually works. I thought it was a myth.

Although it feels like we might never be done unpacking, Matt put up our boxes and packing materials on Craigslist tonight.  I'm looking forward to getting all that cardboard out of our living room, it will feel much more like we've accomplished something.

The move itself went fine.  Mom and Dad brought an extra truck so we could haul huge quantities of things quite quickly- we moved in about 5 hours (with one pizza break).  Mom and Dad also helped us get so on top of our packing that we went back Sunday to finish cleaning, not finishing moving like I'd expected.  And Jeffery's whole family turned up to help, and Shaoshu even went back for another truck load of garage related detritus that would have take a year to pack out in our cars.  Hooray for help!

It is exhausting, and a little stressful to have all my things in boxes (and wonder why I have so many boxes).  But we are trying to take our time settling in, get it right this time.  I don't know if we'll be in this house forever, but we will probably be here a while.  No reason to put up with our usual poor organization.