28 July, 2011

I’m Trying To Write a Blog . . .

. . . It’s working.

Mr Crow and I just took a bath. Feeling refreshed. Listening to Penguin cafĂ© Orchestra (Perpetuum Mobile). The Parakeet seems to like it and tries to sing along. I’ve stopped washing my face with soap. I’m recovering from a dozen mosquito bites. No joke.

We biked to the Relator's office to go over some paperwork, then we went a little further to the North Market:

Namaste beer

personal watermelon

white peach

3 avocadoes

a dozen eggs: 10 brown, 1 white, 1 blue

rhubarb, lime, cardamom ice cream

 

We found the recycling bins closest to our new house. . . .

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On the house-front we’re having the appraisal next week. Assuming all goes well, we’ll be in by September. We’re nervous but I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about (as if that makes sense).

I’m already mentally placing the chicken coop to the left of the back porch. I’m reading three books right now:

Chick Days

The Quarter Acre Farm

The Girl With Curious Hair

. . . too bad Mr. Crow isn’t keen on chickens. he’s worried that they’re going to be too noisy. . . I think he’ll live. (He’ll have to!)

 

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Neil is in the hospital. He hadn’t been quite himself since Sunday. The doctor thinks it may be his liver but we won’t know for sure until later. Sadness.

20 July, 2011

Home Inspection Etc.

The “Etc.” up there is for the two new headbands I bought!

So, the home inspection was yesterday. It went as expected. It’s an old house. It needs some work. Some of it is more important than other bits.

okey doke. Let’s get started:

So, the basement is damp. It’s damp, apparently, because it’s stone and stone is “like a sponge”. Which means, really, that there’s nothing to do here but level out the floor a bit. . .and kill all the spiders.

The roof over the porch is leaking a small bit so we’ll need to fix that. It’s just a little patch on one side so it shouldn’t be too hard.

The gutters need replacing. This issue is what’s causing a lot of the dampness in the basement. Fix that and it’s two problems for the price of one. I’d really like the kind that you don't have to muck out every season but we’ll see.

The forth thing that it really needs is a new coat of paint. To get that done we’ll need to replace some of the broken shingles around the house. Easy enough, I suppose, but what’s on there right now is asbestos. bummer. Fortunately, Home Depot sells a similar looking product called “concrete fiber” that we’ll use to fix what we need to. This is the big papa project. There are some places in back of the house where it looks like they put in a shorter window and just put a big board over the hole instead of reshingling. *sigh*. Also, there’s a door to the kitchen RIGHT NEXT TO the door to the living room. This looks stupid and we want to cover it over. Of course we need to do all this at the same time:

-take out the door

- rip off the boards

- replace all the damaged shingles

Only then can we paint. Good thing we’re young-ish. . .

So, maybe we’ll get all of this done by winter. . . maybe not. We at least want to get the porch and gutters done for sure. . .paint can wait until spring if it has to. . . but the blue is SO UGLY.

AAAAnyway. Now we wait. The underwriter is working on stuff and then it’s go go go until it’s ours.

15 July, 2011

Adventures are Time-Consuming!

Who knew?

So, I’m married now. That was great! You can check out the details here.

Now we’re in the process of buying a house! HOLY COW! It’s been a kind of whirlwind, really. On Monday, July 11th, I was browsing Zillow.com on my phone. None of the pictures were loading. The map said there was a house in Clintonville that just happened to be in our price range! I got a “feeling”, you know. . . so I sent an email to Mr. Crow to have him check it out. He immediately sent a message to our realtor who, being amazing, was able to show us the house Tuesday at noon. . . we signed our papers at the Taco Bell down the street immediately after that.

Offer, counter offer and here we are, 4 days later waiting for an inspector to check the house out for us (This upcoming Tuesday) and then, barring any major issues, we’ll sign and the house is OURS!

That’s an adventure if ever I heard one.

The current pictures online don’t really do the old girl justice so I’m just going to wait and take my own. We’re also planning on doing a little work to the house right off the bat so there’ll be pictures of that coming up at the same time.

Banzai!