Building Barry, Day 15

All has been quiet on the home building front while we wait for our plans to be drawn up and for mortgage paperwork to be processed.  In a couple weeks we'll need to sign off on our plans and start making all of our "Design Center Selections," otherwise known as picking out flooring and cabinetry and faucets and such.  It's good to have a mental break from all the stressful decisions, even if it is only a week or two.

Our brains may be resting, but our hands and bodies have been busy getting our current house ready to sell.  We needed to move out a bunch of clutter and make a few cosmetic updates.  It doesn't sound like much, but it's exhausting, both mentally and physically.  At least all of the work is worth it when we see the rooms come together:

Master bedroom

Main bathroom

Kitchen

Second bedroom

Basement bathroom

Third bedroom

Family room

Building Barry, Day 8

So, after a week of emails and phone calls and visits to model houses and Excel spreadsheets and Long Serious Discussions, Wednesday was the day we had to submit our final architectural choices for our house. Anything that's going to show up on the plans for the house had to be nailed down, unless we fancy paying through the nose to change it later on. So unless it's worth $1500 PLUS the cost of whatever option we're changing, what we've got is what we're getting. (Cue the sad, regretful glances at the description of the tray ceilings we gave up in favor of more windows)

(A suspiciously fisheye-looking shot of the interior of the model home in our plan, which is like what we ordered only ours will have a morning room to the right of the dining area, white railings, and no fireplace.  And we won't have cherry cabinets in the kitchen.  And we've only got one window behind the dining area.  And the back wall won't be baby shit brown.)

Wednesday was also the deadline for submitting our loan application, a fact which was somewhat complicated by my trip to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival last weekend. Nothing like going out of town for three days to move the process right along! But, on the positive side of things, there were sheep.

And alpacas.

And angora rabbits.

So yesterday and today Jason and I scrambled to make copies of paperwork and sign paperwork and meet with loan officers and all that fun stuff. Our rate isn't spectacular because we needed to lock it in for almost 8 months, but it's still way better than our current loan.

    One of these is our loan agent, and one of them is Jon Cryer. I'll leave it up to you to decide who is who.

This week we also rented a storage locker, and we started the process of staging the rooms so they will show better. This basically means that anything that isn't absolutely necessary for our lives in the next six months, or necessary to make the house look lived in, goes in the big metal box. Toys that live in the basement? Storage. Cookie cutters and jello molds and the giant roasting pan for Turkeyzilla? Storage. Jason's unused 40K armies? Storage. There's going to be a lot of trips to that big metal box ... Let's just hope I remember to pay for it each month so I don't end up starring in the worst episode of Storage Wars in recorded history.

(Imagine how easy it would be to keep the house "show-ready" if I put her in storage, too)

(just kidding)

(mostly)

Monday we moved around some furniture to make the house look more "normal." TV is in the big family room now, and my craft stuff is in the smaller room we had relegated the tv to some years ago. Jason's craft stuff is being relegated to the basement, once we get the floor down there repainted so it doesn't look like it was attacked by a herd of wolverines. And the paint throughout the house needs to be touched up, or in some cases completely redone, to cover up picture hanger holes and Unfortunate Shower Curtain Rod Incidents.  Looks like it's going to smell of ammonia and desperation around here for the next week or two ...

Building Barry, Day 1

I'm sitting in the sunroom, a pleasant breeze coming in through the window and sun streaming over my shoulder.  I dig my toes into the extra-plush carpeting, and watch the squirrels and chipmunks playing in the yard.  The apple tree in the back yard is about to bloom, and many of the native plants and trees we've put in the back corner have poked their heads above the leaves I still haven't found time to rake out of the back beds.

Six months from now, I'll probably be looking back on this day with longing.  Because six months from now, we'll be moving into our new house.

Because what I didn't mention in that first paragraph is that it takes a carefully orchestrated ballet to get all three of us through the one main bathroom every morning, and we have so much stuff (despite frequent purges) that it overflows whatever storage schemes we devise.  The sump pump runs every 10 minutes to remove the water that collects around our foundation, regardless of the weather.  The stove takes 15 minutes to get water to boil.  The room our tv is in averages about 15 degrees colder than the rest of the house, year-round, and it's 10'x10' if you're generous with the measuring tape.  We have projects scattered everywhere - photos to scan, things to knit, minis to paint, art to hang, mushrooms to grow, science kits to explore - and no where to add extra storage for any of it without another $20,000 investment to finish the basement and/or knock out walls.

This was supposed to be our last house.  Moving every few years kind of stinks, even if you have a professional relocation team there to support you.  Been there, done that, have the moving boxes to prove it. But after six years, it's become obvious that this house is not going to meet our long-term needs without a LOT of work.  And frankly, every time I look at my to-do list, I feel the need to go have a nice lie-down somewhere instead.  I've lived in houses that "needed work" since 1997, with a brief 18-month break of apartment living in Japan thrown in there for fun.  I've hired contractors, hauled mulch, cursed voluminously, injured myself on more than one occasion, accidentally electrocuted our electrician, and spent hundreds of hours with a paintbrush in my hand.  Don't get me started on how many hours of landscaping I've planned/installed/maintained.  And in the end, NONE of the houses has been right.  They've been fine, okay, acceptable, livable - but not right.

What started a few weeks ago as a whim has turned into a consuming obsession, and after one last-ditch round of "Days of Our Potential Relocation" soap opera fun yesterday* we have finally decided to build a house.

*Look, our friend says these people want to sell their house soon, and it's in the same neighborhood we wanted to move to!  Let's call them and see if they want to sell it to us directly!  Let's go look at the house!  Let's spend hours with a spreadsheet and comps to figure out what the maximum we would offer for the house would be, without even going inside it!  Let's hear the price the homeowner wants to get for his okay-but-I'd-still-have-a-long-to-do-list house!  Wow, that's $60,000 higher than we would be willing to pay ... and $10,000 more than we would pay to get a brand-new house a mile away.  Let's wish them luck and run the other way!  

Our new house will have many - most, actually - of the things that each of us want in a house, plus when we're done, the to-do list will have zero entries on it, other than "buy some extra furniture that doesn't look so tacky in our awesome new house."  Among its finer points:

• A front porch 
• A stone facade 
• A three-car garage 
• A huge bedroom for Liza (seriously, it's 16x20, you could hold a hoedown in there with room for the band and everything)
• A lot with a few trees at the back to screen us from the neighbors on the next street
• Lots of windows
• A finished basement that has "craft and game room" written all over it
• An actual, honest to god coat closet that's near the door - two of them, as a matter of fact
• A first-floor laundry room
• A loft area on the second floor that overlooks the great room
• A first-floor master bedroom so we won't have to climb stairs when we get decrepit
• No neighbor with 19 mature oak trees in her backyard that shed their leaves all over our yard
• Underground utilities, so no tacky power lines or telephone poles in our backyard
• The town has busing to Liza's school, so I won't have to start driving her there every day
• Sidewalks and a path that go to a large park, which is located halfway between the new house and our friends' house a mile south of us

We've spent late nights going through the options we think we want, weighing pros and cons (and costs - always the costs) and trying to figure out how much this sucker is going to cost us.  Our current house was at the low end of our price range at the time we bought it - we could pay off our current mortgage out of our savings if we didn't need the cash for a downpayment on the new place - and the new one is comfortably in the upper end of the middle of our price range.  We could afford a lot more house - but then we'd have to decorate and furnish it, and maintain it, and deal with the sorts of neighbors we'd get along with The Giant McMansion of Doom.  Instead, we're sticking with a more affordable neighborhood, one where we see lots of Fords and Toyotas in the driveways and playground sets in backyards.  We're still going to have to carefully check out our financing options to find one that will give us the payment we want but not have us in hock until we retire, but at least we have options.  We're so fortunate to be able to say that.

We're excited about the idea of building a house, but there have also been some sleepless nights and gut-clenching fear thrown into the mix, as well.  Liza likes the idea of the giant bedroom, and she enjoys climbing on the dirt mounds in the empty lots in the neighborhood, but she's scared spitless of moving away from her best friend, who lives four houses down from our current house. They've been buddies since preschool, and I know Liza is going to be lost for a bit without her.  But it's not like we're moving to Minnesota - we're going to be a 20-minute drive away - so hopefully they'll still be able to keep up their friendship.  And since the house won't be done for six months, they'll still have this summer to exploit their closeness.

Jason and I will be moving closer to where most of our friends are.  We'll be leaving behind some "hi how are you" neighbors, and some of our friends will be a slightly longer drive away (I'm looking at you, Tab!), but our best "couple" friends will be a mile away from our new house.  It's convenient for commuting to work for both of us, and to school for Liza.  It's nearer to the beach on Lake Erie, and the science and art classes Liza sometimes takes.  And it's not right under one of the approach paths to the Cleveland airport, so hopefully we'll be able to have the windows open and still have conversations at normal volumes.  I think the biggest thing I'll miss about our current house is the yard.  Yes, it's a swamp for the entire spring, but I'm proud of all that we've done to make it "ours."  I'll miss the shade - there will be precious little of that in the new house for years to come - and the size of the yard.  I'll miss our edible front yard, and our native back yard.  Our new place has a less-deep lot, which we were going to get no matter where we bought or built - our current lot is really, really deep, if you count the swampy part we won't be able to mow until July.  If you leave out the swamp, I think the lots are about the same size :)  And, of course, until we hire a landscaper to come do his magic, our new yard is going to be a giant muddy plain of hopefully-sprouting grass and nothing else.  Yay!

I'm hoping to chronicle our new-home-building project here over the next few months.  I'm excited to see how it all comes together, and to have - get this - an actual blueprint to the house I live in!  Which should tell me where all the pipes and stuff are so I don't screw up and drill into one when I try to hang a picture!  Imagine that!  So check back often for photos, stories, complaints, and way more detail than you probably wanted about counter heights and low-flow toilet options.  Wish me  luck - I'm off to sign the contract now!

P.S. - I'm calling the house "Barry," since it's the Barrington plan.  And here are some pics of the lot and the model house that's built using a similar plan:

(Our lot is the next one to the left - it looks the same, though)

(This isn't the model house, it's somebody's house in that other development that has the same model and elevation we're getting, only ours will have stone on the bottom half)

(The kitchen in the model, looking over the eating area and great room.  We're not getting a fireplace.)

(The loft, seen from the door to what will be Liza's room.  We're planning to put our family games/puzzles and a table and stuff up there, we think.  Probably.)

Waffling

There have been many times in the past few weeks that I wished life came with a set of instructions, or at least a map sketched on the back of a napkin.  Signposts would be nice - this way to long-term stability, pitfalls of unending debt that way, no seriously just go this way and you'll be fine.  But since I seem to be driving in an unmarked area - or, like in Japan I can't read the street signs anyway - I've been left to flounder around a bit.

Oh, we're thinking of moving.  Did I forget to mention that?

It's not a huge move - just one or two towns over, mainly to get a slightly larger house that we can grow into as Liza turns into a teenager with a big personality and long arms and legs.  Our current house could be made to work, of course, but none of us are sure we want to invest the time and energy that would take.  After years and years of to-do lists that are a mile long, we all just sort of want a house that's DONE, you know?

The last time Jason and I have had to make this decision on our own, it was 1996 and 1997.  We had just gotten married, and we wanted to buy our first house.  We saved diligently, found a buyers' agent to help us find good house possibilities, and we toured a lot of houses in the shag-carpet-and-waterbed price range.  Ah, the good old days of gold-flecked formica vanities and finding "secret" stashes of porn magazines on a closet shelf!  We took our time because we were able to renew our apartment lease for a few months at a time, if we needed, and eventually we found a great property.  We had to do a lot of work to get it to look the way we wanted, but the bones of the house were pretty sound.

We got to live in it for 11 months before we moved to Japan.

Ever since then, every move we have made has been a corporate relocation.  They were, by and large, very simple to pull off - Jason decided to take the job, and almost everything else was handled by the company.  They suggested real estate agents, hired appraisers, scheduled moving companies, arranged for mortgages and title searches ... everything.  All we had to do was pick a town to live in, and narrow down what we wanted in a house.  With a radically compressed time schedule (Let's buy a house during a one-week trip to the States!  Let's look at houses during the two weekends I can drive down to Kentucky in between classes!), stakes were both higher and lower.  Yes, it was possible that we'd miss the "perfect" house because we couldn't wait that long to buy, but we also were forced to make a decision, rather than letting the process drag on for months and months.  No, we probably wouldn't get our perfect house, but we weren't all that picky and there were plenty of decent options in our price range.

We didn't need a map - we just floated along like a chip in the river of Corporate Relocation Services.

But now we don't have that crutch to fall back on, we're doing it all ourselves.  What started as a whim - Wouldn't it be fun to live in the same neighborhood as our friends we visit all the time; oh look, there's a house for sale on the next street over from them! - has turned into a time-sucking search for The House.  We've got time, we've got (some) money, we've got a list of things we want ... and it's killing me.  Over the course of the weekend, we have pretty much firmly decided:
- to wait until a better house becomes available in our desired neighborhood
- to build a new house in the next neighborhood north of our friends'
- to not move at all, just renovate this house
- to keep looking at houses in other areas of our friends' town
- to only look at houses in our desired neighborhood
- to not look at any houses, just plans for new construction
- to build the Barrington model
- to build the Kensington model
- to wait to make a decision until we can walk through the Rothchild model
- to not move at all, we can call the electrician and carpenter on Monday about finishing the basement
- to pay off the remaining balance on the mortgage on this house
- to check and see whether our favorite lots are still available in the new construction neighborhood
- to reserve the last remaining desired lot in the new construction neighborhood
- to get in touch with the friend-of-a-friend who might be selling their house (in our friends' development)
- to see if my mother would be willing to loan us money if our current house doesn't sell before we close on the new house we might be building
- to call mortgage companies to learn about new construction vs. existing stock mortgages
- to write a check and sign paperwork - seriously, go call the realtor now - and reserve the lot we think we want before someone else snatches it up (never mind that we didn't even think about locations in the neighborhood until, um, Friday - that's OUR lot, dammit)
- to stop looking at Zillow and realtor.com because they just get our hopes up and then we find out the perfect house we found is already under contract
- to obsessively check Zillow and realtor.com so if anything new gets posted we can jump on it before it gets snatched out of our grasp again
- to drink, early and often
- to agree that the traffic in that town is worse than where we are now
- to agree that the traffic in that town is fine - we lived with it before, we can do it again
- to not plant anything new this year because we don't know if we'll be here to enjoy it
- to plant stuff early so the outside of the house will have curb appeal
- to put in a footbridge over the mini-stream in our backyard, because footbridges are awesome and I want a damn footbridge and I'm going to paint it bright periwinkle and it will be awesome and make me grin every time I see it
- that we like house A but the lot socks, and we like lot B but the house sucks, so if we could just swap the houses we'd be perfectly happy, but that's not really feasible, right?
- that we want to build the Barrington, with these "optional features," and, Holy Christ, is that really going to add close to $80,000 to the base price of the house, and that doesn't even include any landscaping or a playground for Liza or even freaking CURTAINS?
- to stay in our house
- to go to bed and not worry about it
- to not be able to sleep because we keep worrying that someone is stealing our lot

Meanwhile, Liza doesn't want to move away from her best friend, who lives four doors down from our current house but would be a 20-minute drive away from the new town.  She's communicating this fact by being surly, uncooperative, and frankly awful any time we attempt to discuss houses in front of her or have to take her with us to go see one.  She touches things she's been told not to touch, won't stay with us, makes inappropriate comments about the awfulness of the house/yard/bathroom/basement/decorating.  The only thing she has enjoyed out of the whole process so far was climbing on the big pile of dirt that was in the lot next to the one we took a look at in the new construction development.  Talking to her grandmother afterwards, yeah, her bedroom in the new house would be twice as big as her current one, but OMG LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS PILE OF DIRT I GOT TO CLIMB IT WAS THE BEST THING EVER.

I'm sure I have more fun things to say about this process, but I don't have time.  After all, I have to call loan officers to talk about possibly getting a mortgage on a house that we might possibly build, assuming we can get the lot that I have to call and reserve and drive out to give them a check.  Then we have a week to make all the decisions on EVERY ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL on the new house, including whether we want all of those $80K in bay windows, tray ceilings, and hardwood floors.  First World Problems, I have a whole bouquet of them.

Also, do you think I'll be allowed to trap some of the squirrels in my backyard and bring them with me to the new neighborhood?  The lot we want has a line of scrubby trees at the back of it - they could totally live there, right?  Anyone have a havahart trap I can borrow in October?

My name is Gretchen, and I am scared spitless

I am a writer.

I write all the time (not that you'd know from this blog over the past year or so).  I write Facebook updates, and captions for my photo albums.  I write the school newsletter, and I helped write the content for the school website.  I'm helping write the expanded content for the website of the store where I work.  I journal.  I write notes to my daughter, notes to school, notes to myself so I don't forget to write notes to my daughter or to her school.

And even when I'm not writing, I'm thinking of what I'm going to write about when I get the time.  I'm brainstorming photo captions even as I press the shutter button.  I'm making note of funny conversations to use as fodder for future blog posts.  I get up in the middle of the night and write two full pages of ideas for a story, then stuff it in a drawer until I have time to work on it.

"I am not a fiction writer.  I write essays on my blog, and while they may stray a bit from the strict truth sometimes, they're still non-fiction.  I don't write stories."

That's what I told my mother every time she would encourage me to write a book.  I don't have time, I don't have any story ideas, I can't write dialogue to save my life, and I really don't have any desire to get rejected over and over by strangers who hold my future career in their hands.

Then in January I decided to take a writing class.  I hoped it would light a fire under me to actually write some blog posts.  But it turned out that it wasn't that sort of writing class ... but it was exactly the class I needed.  Because somewhere during the first week or so of class, A Story appeared in my brain, and it wouldn't go away.

It was all there - plot, characters, setting, format - and after about an hour of roughly outlining the story and the characters, I knew it was something I wanted to work on.  I started writing The Story in addition to the work assigned for the class, and I loved it.  I wrote longhand, and by the end of January I had most of the rough draft of The Story finished.  I typed it into the computer, made some edits, and set it aside for a while so I could forget it enough to edit it properly.

I did a major edit around Valentine's Day, then shoved it back in a drawer to stew for a bit.  Things had changed massively in the format of the story, and some valuable early feedback made me completely rework the opening and closing chapters of The Book (for by now, at almost 50 pages and 14,000 words long, it would indeed be considered A Book in the children's market I'd be selling into).

My class was over, but I tried my best to keep up the schedule I had started as part of it.  I read books on writing, I worked through exercises in some of them.  I reworked some parts of The Book to meet some of the suggestion I'd found in the writing books, and I was happy with how they had turned out.  But there were still big sections that said things like ******INSERT SOME KIND OF ACTION-Y SEQUENCE HERE TO DRAW OUT THE TENSION*******,  so it was by no means a "finished" manuscript.  I didn't have to do anything with it.  Nobody had to read it.  It was just a draft, in a drawer.

Today I finished the third round of revisions.  I work on paper to make the edits, then type them into the document, page after page, and it sucks big sweaty donkey balls, especially when you realize that out of a 50-page document, you have exactly ONE page with no changes.  One.  But it's done, and I'm happy with The Manuscript - because it is a manuscript now, it's got all the parts I think it needs to be "done."

But today is the day I have been dreading, because today is the day I admit to the world that The Manuscript is as good as I can make it on my own, and am going to need help to make it the best it can be.  I hate asking for help, I hate putting things that aren't what I consider "perfect" out where people can see them.  I hate being unsure that what I've written is good, or worthy, or whatever.

I have a cadre of wonderful friends who have volunteered their children to be my test readers, and I need to send my manuscript out into the world.  I feel a sense of accomplishment at having "finished" it, and an overwhelming sense of dread at having anyone other than me, Jason, and Liza read the thing.  The thought of people I know reading it makes me want to build a blanket fort and hide there until it's all over.

But I can't tell my test readers that.  If I come off as too fragile, they won't tell me the whole truth, they'll tell me pretty lies and reserve the truth for when they make fun of me behind my back.  And that doesn't do me any good.  If I'm going to expose my precious darling to the scrutiny of chest-high strangers, I want to at least get honest feedback when they're done.

So I procrastinate.  I write a rambling blog post.  I make turkey broth.  I hit Facebook like a crack pipe, as Ze would say.  I watch Ze's invocation.  I do laundry.  I wash the freaking basement floor (it really needed it, but still - really?).  I watch Ze's invocation again with snot running down my face and a huge ball of horror in the pit of my stomach.  I tell myself that I can't send it out until I have a questionnaire to go with it, and then I procrastinate about making that, because really, when that's done, I'm out of excuses.  I have to send The Manuscript then.

And that thought scares me spitless.

ETA:  I just sent it.  Excuse me while I go throw up.

Today was the bee's knees

That is, it was slow, clumsy, and covered in fluffy yellow crocus pollen :)

Six-word book reviews

Liza's been working on her Mensa For Kids reading list, and early this year I decided I would start reading the books on the high school list. After all, most of them were books I hadn't read since high school (or junior high, or EVER, in a lot of cases), and they would add a bit of depth to my reading. Because, you know, "vampire porn" is a pretty shallow pool - more of a puddle, really - and it's wicked difficult to discuss at the dinner table.

So I decided I would read at least one of the Mensa list books a month this year. So far, I'm kicking butt and taking names, and I've found that I'm actually enjoying the books more than I expected. Of course, the fact that I don't have a deadline or anyone telling me which book I have to read next helps a lot. When, for example, I started listening to The Odyssey on audiobook, and in the first 5 minutes there were 45 different random characters listed and I couldn't keep ANY of them straight ... well, that sucker just went back to the library, and I moved on to something else. Since many of the books on the list are "classics" which have also sort of run out of copyright protection, I've got plenty of them on-demand from the e-book section of the library. Awesome! You never know when you're going to want to start reading War and Peace at midnight on a Sunday, after all.

And now I've decided that just READING the books isn't enough. I'm going to write a book review for each one as a way to keep track of what I've read (and brag about it online, of course). But since I have, like, no time for or interest in writing substantive literary criticism, I'm going to do them all in the Six Word Story format. Yep, Six Word Reviews, here I come!

Jane Eyre: Never realized this was a comedy... Thumbs up!
The Moonstone: Multiple narrators, achieved in style. Bravo! Thumbs up!
Walden: Treehugger waxes lyrical about being poor. Thumbs up!
The Turn of the Screw: What the hell was that about? Confused thumbs down!

Watch this space for more reviews soon - I think I'm on a roll! And feel free to chime in with your own reviews of these or any other books. I can't wait to see what you come up with!


ps: link to the book lists: http://www.mensaforkids.org/content/school_readeraward.cfm