What a Year

Tomorrow is a wonderful anniversary for me and my wife.  Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of being home owners.  Every once in a while when I drive past the house coming home from running errands or coming back from work, I can't help but glance over and smile.  It's our little piece of the American Dream. 

A post shared by Michael Litzner (@melitzner) on Oct 12, 2017 at 1:11pm PDT

When we first looked at the house we knew that there were going to be some projects, but nothing that was a deal breaker.  Obviously.  We bought the house.  There aren't major ones that needed to be addressed right away, but the kitchen and bathroom both need work.  They're functional and 
Here's a few things that we've learned over the year.  We've agreed that the kitchen will be addressed in about five years.

Here's a few things that I think others might find helpful.

Buy a house at the end of a season.  We bought our house in October and didn't have to cut the lawn until the following Spring.  That also meant that we didn't have to invest in things like a lawn mower and weed whacker for a few years.  Sure, we had to buy a rake for leaves and a shovel for the snow, but those aren't nearly as expensive as a lawn mower is.

Tackle small projects early on.  It felt like the day after we moved in, my wife was already making a list of things she wanted to change.  I was like, damn woman give it a minute!  She is a very visual person, so the first things she wanted done was painting.  We got the living room and dining room painted pretty early on in our home ownership.  It makes it feel like it's yours just a little bit more.  

Don't feel like you need to keep up with the Joneses.  Our neighborhood has plenty of small houses and small families.  There aren't extravagant houses or any new houses so there isn't a need to make everything look perfect.  Yes, you need to keep the grass cut and making sure your yard doesn't look like a yard sale, but as long as your yard looks better than the next guy people won't notice.  Right?

Raking leaves is stupid.  We have two large trees in our front yard.  They made it feel like a never ending task.  Especially since one tree lost all it's leaves and the other one waited a couple of weeks after to shed them.  Last fall, this was the limit to our yard work.  We didn't have a lawn mower, plus the grass was pretty short when we moved in.  Raking leaves felt like an on going joke.  Every time you looked out in the yard, even an hour after we finished up, there were leaves on the ground.  It was dumb.  This year we have a lawn mower.  I'm all for mulching the leaves this year. 

Historic Door

The house we bought was built in 1941.  It predates America's involvement in World War II, the atomic bomb, and Reganomics.  There are plenty of stories in this house that we will never know.  That's kind of the beauty of older houses.  They have stories.  Whether you know the stories or not, you know there have been plenty of things that have happened.  One thing that we do have is the door that leads down to the basement.  Someone, at one time, thought that it would be great to document some stuff on it.

Documentation that people lived here.  Families lived here.  The majority of the stuff written on here is kids' names, age, height.  Stuff like that.  It's like stuff you see in Rockwell paintings.  Hash marks and names.  It's cute.  The oldest date that we can find on here is from 1970.  There's marks from every decade since the 1970s.  It would have been awesome if there were dates older than 1970, but who knows, the door could have been replaced.  It doesn't seem as old as the house.  Most of the dates are in pen and will eventually fade over time.  There are some in pencil that are almost gone.  The smart people wrote in permanent marker.  We talked with the previous owners and they said that this door was one of the best features because of all the documentation.  There's another set of numbers of someone's pregnancy.  Weeks along and the circumference of the woman's stomach.  Sorry to use the word circumference, I don't know how to describe a woman's pregnant stomach without it sounding awkward.  

And here is our mark in the house.  I took this picture the day we got the keys to this house.  It was really the first thing we did here.  We added 'our first house' under the date.  We don't have kids to mark their heights.  I suppose we could mark the height of the cat?  It wouldn't change, but we still could.  That would be absolutely terrific for whomever owns this house after us.

This is the last up close of the door.  The last name is personal for me because it is a family name.  It is my mom's maiden name.  The funny thing is, my family is from Michigan.  And who knows, we could be related to this person in some way, shape, or form.  For those who believe in signs or fates or anything like that, if you saw a family name in a house that you were looking at, how could you not buy it?  We were convinced that we were going to buy this house before we saw the names and dates, but if this wasn't a sign from whatever you believe in, I don't know what would be.   

Housing Adventures

In the middle of June, my wife and I were faced with a dilemma.  The same dilemma we faced the year before.  Do we renew our rental lease or do we take the giant leap and look for a house of our own?  After considering the pros and cons, we made the decision to look for a house to buy.  It has been quite the adventure.  Not always in a good way, but an adventure nonetheless.  While we knew going in that it would take a while, and that it was not going to be as nice and tidy as they show on the HGTV network, it might have been just a little bit more than we originally thought.

There were several steps along the way.  The first big one was where we would be looking for a house.  Currently, my wife works about an hour south of the Twin Cities.  I work in the southern central part of the metro.  We live closer to her work than we do mine, but that was just where we moved because that is where we could find a place to live that wasn't the shitty apartment we found when we first moved to Minnesota.  We thought about staying in the city we are in now.  It is small enough that it reminds us of our hometown, but still close enough to the metro that you can get there in half an hour.  The problem is that everyone else is aware of this and the houses on the market are either too expensive or look like flop houses.  So we expanded our search in the hopes of finding somewhere near the middle to make our commutes similar.  We also took into account the fact that we both may not stay at our current jobs forever, more so her than me, that if either of us were looking for new employment, it would be closer to the metro, so to move a little bit further north made the most sense.

After we determined the general area of where we wanted to live, it was just a matter of finding a house.  Not just any house, not even the house.  Just one that would suit us.  It also had to fit into our budget, our wants for the house, you know stuff like that.  In the course of our house search, and after we made an offer on the one we are going to buy, we thought back to all the houses we saw.  To put it into context, we were driving about thirty minutes each way to go look at these houses, so we wanted to see three or four at a time just to make it worth our while.  Including the open houses we went to on weekends, we figured we saw between thirty to thirty five houses.  When we first started looking, we had a decent idea of what type of house we wanted, but weren't sure what we were looking for if that makes any sense.  We knew we wanted a house that pretty much move in ready but we wouldn't turn away from one that had small projects or anything like that.  The more we saw, the better idea of what we were looking for.  Some houses we wanted to see because we were going to be up there.

We found a house finally.  We put in an offer a few days after seeing it and the hard part was waiting.  It had just come on the market a few days before we saw it.  With the sellers waiting a few days to accept or negotiate or offer we figured they were waiting to see if they got any other offers.  Either they didn't or they thought our offer was good enough to deal with.  We negotiated a few times on the price and they accepted our second offer.  I figured negotiating the price was going to be the hardest part.  After our offer was accepted, the house inspection came next and of course there were many thing that came up.  We compiled a list of things that needed to be fixed.  What our realtor told us was to ask for them to fix as much as possible, they'll come back with what they'll fix, and you compromise on the list.  This was the most annoying part of the purchase, I thought.  We finally came to an agreement on what they would fix and what we would eventually take on.

After we came to an agreement, it was just a waiting game.  We had a closing date.  We had a last walk through date selected.  Our mortgage went to underwriting which was the worst part.  It was the worst because we weren't really involved in it.  We sent all our paperwork in and all the work was being done by people we hadn't ever met.  It was all very distant.  We'd get random emails from our mortgage person saying they needed a piece of paper from this or that.  Or we'd need to send them something else.  It was all repetitive and tedious.  And downright annoying.  They would need every single page, even if it was a line that just said one thing on it.

And finally, we were homeowners!  The grand adventure was over.  At least the first chapter was over and another was just beginning.   

Separation of Chore and State

I was talking with a co-worker last week about chores around the house.  The subject came up because her fiancee is going to be moving back to Minnesota after being out of state for a couple of years for work.  I don't know, don't ask.  She was talking about how he's got those years worth of chores to make up because she has been doing all the cleaning, cooking, dish washing, etc.  I thought it was a weird line of logic, but whatever.  Has she been keeping track of how many meals she has cooked that he will have to cook.  How many times she has done laundry, or the dishes, or cleaned the bathroom?  Does she have a spreadsheet of these events?  The more I think about it, the creepier it seems.  I mentioned that ever since my wife and I started living together back in college, we have done our best to do specific chores.  And with rare exceptions, we stick to those chores.

For example, my wife does the majority of the cooking.  Whether it is dinner, breakfast on the random weekend, or baking cookies, she does it.  To counter that, I wash the dishes.  She dirties them, I clean them.  Fair play, right?  My wife does the laundry.  Is it because way back in the day I accidentally shrunk a wool sweater of hers?  Mayhaps.  I take out the trash and recycling.  So things like that.  Whenever it is that we move into a house, I'll end up doing the snow blowing and grass cutting.  Now, are these chores that we do gender stereotypical?  Yes.  It's not like we sat down and said, 'well, you're the woman so you are going to cook and clean.  I am a man so I'm going to take care of all the physical stuff.'  It's just that she's a great cook.  I'm okay at it.  There are days when I cook dinner (but somehow still end up cleaning the dishes....) and there are times she has taken out the recycling or trash.  We do our best to split the chores evenly.  Do I slack on how quickly I get my chores done?  Yes.  Yes I do.  But they get done. 

My co-worker was blown away by this and I don't understand why.   She wasn't taken aback by it, she just didn't understand the thought behind each of us having specific chores.  Maybe she didn't grow up in a house where the chores were split up?  Maybe one person did all the work?  I don't know.  Splitting the chores is just how our household growing up functioned.  Everyone had their work to do.  I think that is what makes a house a home.  Everyone putting forth an effort to keep it up and going.  If just one person does all the work, not everyone is invested in the house. 

Is this a common thing?  Does everyone else split the chores up or is it kind of a 'it's your turn to do the dishes because I did them last time' system?  I think either way works.  As long as it is doled out fairly, I think whichever method works for you and your household is best.

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