It is really hard to write these posts, concerning 2 months ago, when so much is happening right now. Rooms painted! Basement gutted! Stairs gone! But we'll get to that. For now, let's get on with the inspection.

The inspection/attorney approval period (herein referred to as "the period") was ill timed - my sister's wedding was at the end of that week. Therefore the lawyers agreed to extend it to 7 days instead of 5.

My realtor recommended the inspector, who was fabulous. This is another person that I would be happy to recommend. He went everywhere in the house (including the attic, only accessible by a tiny square hole in a closet). He took pictures of everything. My report ended up being thirty pages.* Thirty pages of old house rickety money-pit wonder. To be fair, it was not unexpected. Old house = issues. I went in hoping for no major structural issues. And there were none.

*I met my neighbor on Tuesday night. She is fantastically nice and has the coolest garage - a brick wonder with a beautiful deck on top. It sounds like my street has a lot of of very friendly, busy body types. This will ultimately be great and annoying. Anyway, I digressed from my original digression. She mentioned that the whole neighborhood was impressed with my inspector/inspection report. They all saw it and feared the magnificence that was my inspector. The seller was amazed by all the things wrong/the thoroughness.

In the end, we (realtor + me + loml) narrowed it down to 22 items that were of concern. Yeah, 22 items was narrowed down from a billion. For your viewing pleasure, I've transcribed my realtors notes below. These are in order that they appeared in the report. This list was sent, on or around day 8 of the period, to the seller's lawyer...

1. Aluminum capping or wood replacement
2. Chimney liner
3. Tuckpoint Chimney
4. Seal at base of north wall along gangway
5. Seal all open areas around exterior
6. Ivy has deteriorated frame walls (rotted) on garage
7. Trees trimmed
8. GFCI's throughout
9. Address all electrical issues
10. Replace cracked vent stack
11. Replace copper to galvanized connections with proper fittings
12. Shower in basement has no waste lines
13. Gas leaks
14. Water pressure
15. Leaking main bathroom cleanout
16. Improper plumbing under kitchen sink & at dishwasher
17. Toilet problems
18. Where are missing storms & screens?
19. Rodent control - mice
20. Smoke & carbon monoxide detectors
21. Asbestos floor tiles
22. Porch construction poor

Here are two lovely, kitschy examples of number 21:

Right before loml and I went back to those two houses, I got pre-approved for a mortgage. Being a single lady with a sizable donation being made by my father, I assumed my dad would need to co-sign. So what I should say is that we got pre-approved. For a mortgage almost twice the size of what I ended up with. Please remember this fact for later posts. It becomes infuriatingly important.

Next step was an offer. I think you should realize that this was all in May. So long ago. My realtor believed the house was way overpriced. The one thing that I want to be clear is that my realtor is awesome - both loml and i are huge fans. I would recommend him to anyone in Chicago. He impressed us on the first outing by somehow owning the building that houses loml's corner store. And it seems like he's lived in every neighborhood or has a sibling in one now. Currently he lives in my sister's hood and his sister lives in my future hood. If you want a recommendation, I'd love to share.

Original offer: 15% less than the listing price. Here's where I lose the full trail of things. I think she came back at 5% less then the listing. That was still too high. We volleyed with a counter-offer of 11% less. And then we didn't hear anything for several days.

I finally heard back, saying that the lady had decided to relist the house at 5% less. The realtor suggested that if we came up just a little, 10% less than her original listing, he thought we'd get the deal. When we discussed the offer from the beginning, the realtor said he thought the house was not worthy of an offer over 10% less than the listing - so we were at the very top of what it was worth. I was already emotionally involved with the house so I said, yes please make the offer.

June 4. One year anniversary with loml. Out to dinner (which turned out to be really bad, foodwise). His phone rings. He says he has to get it. I make a joke about him being a really bad boyfriend for talking during our anniversary meal. It is the realtor. Offer accepted.

I feel like I've set a precedent, so here is a picture of the already trashed/deceased poker room. I think you should know that this poker room kind of sold the house - I loved its kitschy-ness. It was, to my dismay, made of asbestos. More about asbestos later.

It's a little sad and amazing that I have no idea where to start. The beginning of this process was pretty normal. I had a realtor (I had briefly, at the start of 2009, looked at condos and completely chickened out). I asked him to start pulling stuff on MLS. At the start, I knew, because of the dead real estate market and the fact that I would now have a lodger (loml), that I could afford a building instead of a condo. So the listings were single families, two flats and three flats.

Loml accompanied me on all expeditions, even though it would be my mortgage, I wanted us to both like the place we chose.

After the first trip, it was fairly clear that while I could afford a multi-unit building, any building in my price point would need work. While I wasn't against that, I didn't want to buy a place that would require a ton of time, money and annoyance to get it right. At that point, single family seemed the way to go.

So we went out again, this time to a variety of single families. And on this trip, we saw the house for the first time. As we were walking around in it, I remember whispering to loml that I really liked this one. It was the only house that I did that. And it was allll downhill from there.

On our third trip out, we went back to two single families that we had really liked. And I pretty much settled on the fact that I wanted the whisper house. I wanted it even with this on the wall:

Oh man, today I became a woman.

I am officially a homeowner. And wow, it has been a comedy of errors. Except most of the time I didn't find it very funny at all. I definitely cried far more often than I laughed. Over a few posts I'll tell you the whole sordid story. The offer! The never ending inspection/attorney approval period! The "goofy" seller! The contractors! The mortgage broker! And again, the mortgage broker! <shakes fist>THE MORTGAGE BROKER</shakes fist>.

I did not handle the process gracefully. I didn't even handle it all that well. But I came out on the other end with a house that I love completely.

Currently organizing my life. I've been weeding and getting ready to pack (need boxes before I can actually pack) this morning. I will tell you more about the move/process of finding a place to move sometime after Thursday. Let's hope I remember all the gory details. Anyway, two things I'm currently a bit stuck on:

1. DVD collection. I think over the past six years here, I've probably watched only a quarter of them. With Netflix and streaming, I feel like the idea of a collection (especially one so woeful and crappy as mine) is obsolete. I kind of want to be ruthless and get rid of the majority...there's really no reason I'd regret this, right?
2. Old schoolwork. Only grad work, which is relevant to my current occupation. I graduated 2 years ago though. I have, in fact, referenced it on a few occasions. Sometimes it has been helpful to others in the program. But it takes up almost a whole shelf in my fairly wide bookcase. Do I continue to lug it around? Weed it and only lug most of it? Or just trash it all?

Back to it.

I love Netflix. But I'm still pissed about their slow phase out of the friends feature.

I'm currently close to the end of the documentary, No End in Sight. It makes me sad that I really had no idea about the beginnings of this current Iraq war. I like to excuse myself because I was in college - but that's no excuse to be so completely uninformed. It is crazy how decisions were made, how that war was undertaken. And suddenly I feel that much worse for Obama - I think it's almost impossible to fix that situation. I think Bush or maybe Rumsfeld ruined a country. Literally, broke it.

As I'm watching, I really wanted to know who, of my Neflix friends, had watched this and what they had rated it. Before, it was as simple as visiting the movie information page. Now? I don't even know how I'd find that. I wonder if the Netflix API provides friends information and if someone, somewhere is building a "friendly" movie page.

Did you watch it? If so, would love to hear your thoughts.

I recommend this movie to everyone. Fuck you Donald Rumsfeld.

I used to sleep walk. I didn't do it often at all but there is a story that my Mom likes to tell. It was the morning. She was in the kitchen with a friend. I walked into the kitchen and tried to sit on the kitchen trash bin. Apparently I needed to go to the bathroom but was still asleep and thought, in my sleep state, that the kitchen trash was the toilet. She managed to redirect me to the bathroom, no harm done. As far as I know, this was not something I repeated, ever.

But last night, I sleep talked. Not so much sleep talked as woke up loml pointing to the bed side table. In my dream I was excited because I wanted him to take a picture with a logo he had designed and, hooray, there was a camera on the bedside table. In real life, I didn't say any of that, just woke him up pointing at the bedside table. I half woke up myself after he gave me a tissue. He was concerned I had been crying and needed a tissue. Really, I just needed a picture of him with that fantastic logo.

When I woke up this morning, I noticed a tissue next to me. And thought, oh shit...that all actually happened.

It is proof that it was a lovely weekend when you step in cat puke barefooted and don't seem to mind that much; when your stomach is really unhappy and it doesn't matter. A little 409 on the bottom of said foot, doing nothing all day to humor your stomach...and everything is perfect.

I am tempted to do a marathon post here about everything that's been happening in my life for the past few months. I promise it's been more than just knitting and paper craft. I do admit though, ripping up paper and playing with rubber cement has been helping distract me from stress. I'll write more about the stress soon.

***

My grandma has Alzheimer's and it has slowly been getting worse. Yesterday was the first time I really saw her so confused - she was mistaking people for her mother (loml being one of them). She also can't seem to find words for the things she fears she has lost (which she hasn't). We're fairly sure she was trying to find a "lost" key that she was holding. She described it thus:

• the black thing
• the thing that you put in the city
• the part
• the part that looks like a clock
• (pointing to a plate with american flags on it) like this

My Dad and his siblings mostly remember a fairly stern, mean Mom. She believed in whacking children with brushes and as recently as a few years ago did not hesitate to call her son an asshole. But I remember a really involved grandma that would have us over for sleepovers and let us go through her large collections of junk and take stuff. Who painted and would help us paint pictures. Who had big dogs and was kind of awesome to us.

She is a completely different person now. And it's sad and weird to know that the grandma I knew...even though she's alive and well, is no longer with us.

I am not a sports fan. But if I like one sport, its hockey. And being from Chicago, this was a big year for our team. And me:



This is one of the only teams I support and so last Christmas my stocking stuffer bet was Blackhawks/Stanley Cup while my other family members mostly got Cubs/World Series. Bad deal for them really...

I am about to mail this to Vegas to collect my winnings but wanted a copy somewhere. Blog it is.

Journal swap round 3: librarian.

ps. those are her people.

Journal swap round 3: me.

I like the ripping of the paper. Song lyric got stuck in my head and made its way into the journal...

Journal swap round 2: librarian.

I shouldn't even dignify it with words, but I did in fact, just get lady in red stuck in my head....

Journal swap round 2: mine.

I'm not going to editorialize any of these, in this case I ripped up a book and made trees. Apologies about the quality of the pictures. Blurrrry.

Journal swap! Round 1: Librarian.

For some reason I'm giggling at the fact that it sounds a bit like a boxing match. Probably because I'm super tired from a fabulous weekend celebrating my sister's nuptials. Congrats Mr. and Mrs. Sister. Ha. Newlyweds.

Rounds two and three will be posted over the next few days...

I made a hat that fits, I made a hat that fits! It's a miracle. And finished object number 6...

Busy with a blanket for quite some time. May work in another project before I finish that blanket, we'll see....