home sweet home

Funny thing happened just before we left for Peru...we bought a house. And by "just before", I mean we got the keys and flew out the next day. It wasn't planned that way. Buying the house wasn't planned at all actually. Let me rewind...

So it's January last year and we're starting to wonder where we're going to live once our lease is up downtown. We had actually moved downtown to test the waters and see if we'd want to invest in a condo down there. There were dreams of being those cool urbanite home-owners, pushing around some little hipster kids in some $1500 stroller while sipping $20 lattes at that new organic coffee shop that just opened after taking over that other organic coffee shop that just went out of business. But these guys are safe because they have imported japanese water on the menu, so they got it figured out. Anyway, fuck that. High-rise living is not the way to go. Unless you're on the top floor, everybody's problem is your problem. Every building downtown is under litigation, which means the people managing the place will be harassing you about something they need to check so that everything is kosher with building codes. And that "something" they need to check is, oh by the way, the pipes in your wall of your ONLY bathroom, but no worries, they'll be done in a couple of days.

We cross downtown off the list, but we're still not certain we want to buy. Then from nowhere, this banked-owned listing pops up in Encinitas, just a couple miles from the beach for way below what it's worth. Encinitas works. Jennie's lived there before, it's close to both our jobs. And suddenly we've got a real estate agent and loan officer and we're putting down an offer before we even see the place in person. Unfortunately, that one goes nowhere for us, we never see it and it sells for closer to it's value, meaning way out of our budget. In any case, it gets the ball rolling and we start looking.

Now we've settled on Encinitas. Maaaaybe we'll look at some places in the La Costa/Cbad area, but we're really just wasting our time. The first house we officially look at is just bleh. Overgrown yards, old cabinets, old appliances, dirty carpets, dirty walls, dirty fucking everything. But what do you expect from a short sale? And short sales seem to be the only way we could afford a house in Enci. Well, maybe there's potential. If we can knock down this wall, tear all this out, replace this, replace that... Ugh, sounds like a headache. But like I said, there's potential. We put down an offer and keep looking. And keep looking. And keep...you get the idea.

Fast forward to February. Oh wait, that was only a month that passed. It damn sure felt a lot longer than that because by this time we've seen a ton of houses and already put down a few more offers. One of which actually got accepted, but they countered over some details about dates, not money. Being the anal, researching junkies we are, we decided to do a little leg work since this property converted the garage into this casita type thing and we wanted to make sure it was all legal. Turns out it wasn't, but got some exemption back in the day with the provision that it had to be brought back up to code in a few years which meant that we'd have to make it so we could park a couple of cars back in that cute little casita. At this point, we learned that building an attached code-compliant garage costs a minimum of $30K. A room that's mainly there to keep bird shit off your car. We declined the counter offer. In the meantime, that first place we saw, the dirty one with the potential, gets back to us. Two buyers before us fell through and we're up next.

Let's skip ahead, this has gotten too long already. Drama, headaches, more drama, inspections, termites, dead termites, more drama and - dun-dada-duuuuun - it's ours! Yay homeowners! Off to Peru!

And we're back. Before we left, we hired contractors to realize that potential we were still clinging on to. Six weeks they told us. I was skeptical at that time frame, but when we returned, the flooring and cabinets were all tore out, weeds were cleared, some major wall repairs were done. Optimism was at an all time high.

Three months later it was an all time low.

Five months, nowhere to be found.

Six months, all the hard work paid off...

Along the way, we learned how to do (and did!) crown molding, window casings, entryway framing, closet headers, load bearing calculations, electrical wiring, outlet boxes, hole patching, drywall, joint compound, wall texturing and a whole bunch of other things that'll make me feel confident while I stand outside Home Depot looking for some side work.