And, I'm back in the game!

Yesterday was a good day! And before noon, which never happens! J

Early in the day, I left work for a bit to meet with the City building inspector. He had to OK the new wiring in the back of the house, and it turns out we passed! Now, we can contact the power company to have them remove the temporary post on the back of the garage, hook up the permanent meter socket, and shine some lights on the house. Now that I’ll be able to stay past 7:00 when the sun starts going down I have no excuse not to be productive!

I can’t tell you, effectively, how big a step this was. Waiting for our original electrical contractor held us up for weeks. Finding another one after the original flaked took a few days, and getting everything ready for the inspection took time as well. Now that we’re over this hump, we can insulate the back half of the house (which we started last night), hang drywall, start ripping up carpet, and more! This is also really exciting because we know everything should go really fast from here. I know, you’re thinking, “Yeah, you’ve said that before,” but I’m serious now! From here forward, we won’t need to wait on contractors, inspections, or anyone but ourselves. The main objective will be making sure everything is at the house and ready when it’s needed.

In other news, I’m getting a driveway today! We had to break up a piece of the original to pour the footings and slab for the new garage. Once that was completed and we were certain we weren’t going to bury anything under the driveway, I called my cement guy and gave him the green light. Really excited to see what this looks like – we’ve been walking around gravel so long, it will be so amazing to have a nice, new, FLAT surface to walk on.

Oooh..excited! J

Waiting...

Well.. where to begin?

The joy of home ownership has already begun. Or, not begun..depending on how you view it. At this point in the game, I’m still waiting for legal issues to be resolved.

Storytime:

The man who lived in the house next door was very ambitious. He had big ideas of taking his older home and restoring it into something beautiful – much the way I do. Working by himself on the weekends, he would dive into home-improvement projects with the best of intentions. As anyone involved in these sorts of things will tell you, once he started one project he would invariably run into another..and another…and another. Before long, he had fixes and repairs started all throughout the house, with very few – if any – actually finished.

About that time, he suffered a severe stroke. By all accounts, he’s doing better, though not well enough to move back into his house. So, what’s left is something of an eyesore…which is putting it delicately. In the years since, his house has become what we in the insurance industry would call an “attractive nuisance.” Teenagers looking for a thrill, critters, and even building material scavengers have been through the house – all the while, breaking windows, spray painting graffitti on the walls… generally up to no good. The house sits there, open and exposed to the elements. With the rain and snow we’ve had this past year, you can bet any attempt to restore the place would be expensive and time consuming if not impossible given budgetary constraints.

And so comes the holdup. As I’ve said, my little house and my neighbor’s big house share a driveway.

When my house was built in the late 1860’s, it sat on a double lot. Presumably, the open lot was used for gardening…maybe even a carriage house at one time as several in the neighborhood had carriage houses or even full barns. Around 1915, the owners of my house sold off the open lot to members of their family who built a big, gorgeous house. It had a large formal living room, a grand paneled staircase in the entryway, leaded glass windows and doors, and a surprisingly spacious kitchen for the time. That said, there was a separate staircase off the kitchen for servants access to the upper and lower floors.

When this house was built, they also built adjoining garages at the end of their shared driveway and, because they were family, everything was hunky dorey. Fast forward a few decades, and the big house is owned by a new family. So, to keep everything on the up and up, the neighbors contact the folks who draw up abstracts and titles and other legalities to formally spell out who owns what. For me, that means my house owns about two or three feet of the driveway and all of my leaning, rotting garage. In order to insure everything stays on the up and up, my realtor, attorney, title company and banker have been working to resolve the issues created by the fact that the original easment inexplicably expired after 50 years.

By the way, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but my house has been in the same family since 1868 – how cool is that?! Which, also adds to the fun: my abstract hadn’t been updated since 1923…

In the meantime, we all wait for the ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ from a judge. I have been repeatedly assured by my banker that this is NOT the way the things normally go. Because of the conservatorship holding the neighboring house, we’re having to jump through hoops that wouldn't ordinarily exist. That said, with foreclosures at their highest levels, professionals in the business are seeing these types of situations play out more and more.

More generally – as we know – with old houses you really never know what you’re going to get.

Mission

Having said all the warm fuzzy stuff in my first post, I should now focus on what will probably be the more interesting challenge of the entire process. How do I buy, update, and live in this house on a razor thin budget?

Story time:
Well kids, we’re in a recession. The trend the last few years has been this: kids go to college, these same kids graduate from college, and get a job… Or so we thought.

Not that it’s impossible, but it’s definitely more challenging to find work than it has been in the recent past. So – if you’re like me – you keep the job you’ve had the last year of school even though you’re underpaid, underutilized, and ready to leave. You spend your evenings searching online job boards, following up on applications, and looking through house magazines..

Until one day you decide to get serious: Time to call in a favor. You talk to a well-connected friend back home in the hopes he or she knows someone (who knows someone) who knows about a job.

My friend says to me, "What are you doing next Wednesday? You should stop by and we can talk about what you’re looking for.”

“Sure, I was planning to come home Wednesday, anyway! See you then!”

OK, the part about me planning to drive 120 miles to be home for the afternoon in the middle of the week may have been a fib. A white lie, really. Harmless. But this sounded like the beginning of a nibble.

Long story short, I’m offered a position with a company that values its people, its customers, and its community and I love my work. Five years ago if you had asked if I would work in insurance, I would have laughed at you. Boring. No chance. Today, I see it through different eyes with a changed perspective. I get to work with small business owners every day – interesting people doing what they want and love to do. These people are in a position to make differences in the communities in which they live, and I get to help them along the way.

An unfortunate side effect of this and any other recession is this phenomenon people in the news media are now calling “Boomerang Children” – the kind that leave only to return after graduation to mess up your basement and eat all of your Dorito’s. Well, in that way, you could also say I am fairly typical for my generation; a boomerang man-child. (That just sounds gross, actually.. I’m sorry you had to read that.) I was fortunate enough to get a job, but rather than rent I decided to live at home for a short while to save up for the down payment I’d been waiting for. I find it to be slightly demoralizing, but financially it’s the right thing to do. Hence, BoomerangBungalow

So. As the boomeranging man-child, hippie insurance specialist that I am, I thought it would be nice to provide some insight to those in similar situations. I’ve never bought a house before, and I would bet many of you haven’t either. So, how do we make the final leap to claim our own independence? And how do we do so in a way that is responsible, practical, and affordable.

The point of this is not to be pessimistic or snarky, or complain in any way. I simply want to provide an honest account of what it takes to buy and renovate a house – and to provide a place for anyone else who knows about such things to teach all of us a thing or two.

For the sake of honesty going forward (and because I believe in full-disclosure), I should tell you I paid $27,000 for that cute little yellow house. If anyone outside of rural America should read this, yes THOUSAND. Even for Iowa, that’s ridiculously cheap. Slightly more expensive when you consider it needed a new roof 40 years ago, the plumbing has issues, the wiring is in need of review, the detached garage is leaning like Michael Jackson in “Smooth Criminal” from all the rot, along with all the typical updating things a person would do to make a home their own.

There is also the matter of the neighbor’s house. Or..lack of neighbor’s house – no one has lived there in five or six years.. and they left mid-renovations. Pictures to follow, though not pretty. It has become a neighborhood nuisance with broken windows and doors and aluminum siding waving in the wind. Lucky me, we share a driveway. However, at some point in the next year (or so) the city has plans to demolish the house to make way for a new home (or my own gigantic vegetable garden...we'll see!) In total I hope to spend less than the $50,000 I have taken out at my local bank.

This, my friends, is where the games begin!

I plan to do most of the work myself – and by "myself" I mean with an army of friends, family, and willing participants looking for free beer and/or pizza. This is (as anyone who has ever moved a sofa will tell you) where you find out who your true friends are J

Enough writing for one day. In the future, this will be much more entertaining – more pictures, videos, etc. but I haven’t taken possession yet, let alone started demolition. Have patience! In the meantime, have a great week!