consider the following:
1. if you OWN a home, you become the landlord. although this title sounds elegant, it's nothing but exhausting. when something goes wrong, you just send a text to yourself reminding yourself to a) try and fix it, and succeed. b) try and fix it and make it worse. c) call someone who really knows what they're doing. before you know it you've got 15 messages from yourself.
2. reasons you might call your landlord:
a) large quantities of spiders apparently also inhabit your home. i.e. black widows (DEADLY), wolf spiders (LETHAL), jumping spiders (UNPREDICTABLE), etc.
b) the toilet doesn't like to be flushed in the early morning hours, resulting in an "old faithful" type wake up call. (i myself have experienced this and it was very confusing to find sam crying, soaking wet with his pants still down. i truly thought "holy smokes, how bad did you have to pee????" but i also didn't have my contacts in yet... so....)
c) your gas might get shut off. apparently this happens when people don't pay their gas bill. we also experienced this first hand on night 2 in the new place. as the previous owners didn't pay the bill in the month leading up to us moving in (totally get it, just wish we knew about it...). so that resulted in 2 nights of Scandinavian type temperatures. i kept rolling over wondering if i was going to wake up to that scene from star wars where Han Solo is... ya know.... frozen... !!! (i still remember that terrifying scene from my childhood. haven't seen the movie since.)
d) you have a gas leak. fear not, you might be very worried about spontaneous explosions. i absolutely was also, but the gas guy (?) was very cool about it, so i pretended to be, too.
e) you will go to tear out some old linoleum in a closet (wondering why it's there in the first place..) only to learn that there is asbestos under there!! what a surprising delight! isn't homeownership so full of wonderful twists and turns?? i've never met a hazmat team before, what a treat!
3. there are weird noises. like did you know that radiators from 1921 sound exactly like someone using a crowbar to break open the side door? the noise is identical. but don't worry because after a few nights of slapping your roommate/spouse/co-landlord, you'll get used to this terrifying noise and realize that just the right amount of melatonin can drown it all out.
4. now that you have a yard that you're supposed to take care of (because we all have judgy neighbors who give you that side eye when your "english garden" gets a little out of hand...), you'll find it infuriating when people let their dog poop in your yard. now i understand almost everything my parents have ever complained about. and honestly, aj says it best "i don't hate dogs. i hate their owners." so i haven't figured out how to handle this as a landlord yet, but i'm thinking it'll involve some sort of "poop detection alarm" and a slingshot.
ANYWAY. i hope you find this helpful. if you decide to move into an actual home, you might want to reflect on how bad you really want it. thankfully, it was due time for us and we really wanted it. so these things are all just little "haha's" in our day, but still boy do we feel like babies.
i will say though, that when the kids run outside at the butt-crack of dawn and want to eat breakfast in their playhouse, i'm delighted to say "YEAH!!" mostly cause that means i get to eat breakfast alone in a quiet warm kitchen, but it sure does make life easier to have more space and say yes more.
and i do want to give a shout out to our village for all the support. seriously, we've got some cool people in our village and we're grateful for every one of you.
all the love!
-amanda
ALSO. house pics in the next post. we're doing some reno work now, so it'll be much more fun to see when it's all finished. but seriously appreciate all the enthusiasm!! we kinda love it:)
