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Moving, mortgages, and renovations


Cerina
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We bought a dishwasher!!! 

I've never been so excited about an appliance. This place doesn't have a dishwasher and it's slowly killing me. I actually took a tote of dirty dishes to my sister's house the other day to use her dishwasher. 

We also bought the first 2 kitchen cabinets. I'm so excited. 

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3 hours ago, D-Ray Kenobi said:

I hope I'm wrong, but I really suspect the overall market is headed for another 2008 style crash.  There's no way that the continued pace of housing prices can be sustainable.

The outside investor angle is what really concerns me.  I know this is the same story from many other towns, but there's entire neighborhoods in Huntsville that now are basically owned by those oligarchies.  A group of investors buys out an industrial site, turns it into a yuppie mixed use playground, then buys up all of the housing nearby so the Whole Foods crowd can continue to patronize it and drive up property value.

I'm largely a centrist these days, but stuff like this makes me just want to entirely go to Socialism and make you all my comrades. 

Isn't that what Zillow is doing?  They know who is moving where, how much money they have, and then buying up all the properties in the area and inflating the cost.

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Nothing would shock me at this point.  The lack of regulation is going to end up biting us all before too long.

Back on our front, I have been starting to get some stuff done at our place to either stay here for a long while or get it market ready in a few years.  The house we're in is a little over twenty years old, so it's about that time for a number of things.  Last year I painted and sealed the garage floor and we had professional painters do a few rooms. 

The latest project was getting some foundational supports installed.  My home office / dude room extends a little out from the house, and it had started to sink around a quarter of an inch from the rest of the house.  We had some guys literally dig underneath and put in some hydraulic lifts.  Wasn't too cheap, but the warranty paperwork will make any house inspection look at us very favorably when the time comes.

Next up is getting the roof done.  That's probably coming in a year and I don't imagine it'll be that cheap either unless I can get away with just having it reshingled.

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So we went through all that effort to swap out the smart switches and discovered there is no neutral wires at this house except where the guy ran them himself. Fml. Now I have some useless Wemo switches. We ended up getting some switches that use RFID for the kids bedrooms to set a dimmer schedule to help them wake up in the morning. Not that it did much good this morning with standard time in effect where my little heathen was awake early anyway.

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We finally swapped everything to the formal living room and I actually like it. Its a little cozy and everyone likely can't recline at the same time, but it feels nice. I need new end tables, that's literally a filing cabinet we are trying to get rid of.

Second picture is the "game room". Its a total disaster right now. We literally played cornhole in here Saturday night because it will not stop raining. My husband has decided he cannot live without a pool table and darts. We're going to add a bar where all the boxes are (far left) because there is a stupid step down with a railing that is completely useless. Right now it is holding all the boxes that have been half unpacked and are pissing me off because there's no place to put the things.

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  • 1 month later...

We finally ordered the pool table. Ny husband has been extra anxious lately so I decided let's pull the trigger on some of the things we want to do so that he has some outlets and we have some good family winter activities. Its somewhat basic looking but its actually really nice quality, and we wanted something more modern and less ornate. We also had some crazy ideas for lights in there. They look cool but the reviews say installation is tricky because of either bad instructions or hardware not provided.

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  • 4 weeks later...

We are in the middle of getting all of the carpet in the house replaced with vinyl flooring that looks just like hardwood.  Originally, my wife suggested we should do this ourselves or have her father, who is a mechanical engineer who likes working with his hands, help us when he is able to visit from China again. So many guides online talk about how "easy" it is to install these types of floors, but that would have been such a horrible idea for us.

It was such a huge pain getting all my books and movies boxed up (and they really are almost entirely mine).  I have gone through tons of books, especially trade paperbacks and graphic novels, and sold a lot of them, but I still have so many more.  This is really making me realize how much shit I have that I really don't need.  There's no way I could read all of these or watch everything, even without Comixology or our various streaming services.

Fortunately, our spare bedrooms were already finished yesterday because we got enough snow that the university closed for the day, so I am at home.  My wife decided to still go to the office, so I am just camped out.  I think this gives me a pretty good excuse to not do much work today, though.

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This isn’t the old type of vinyl.  I think they actually call this luxury vinyl to distinguish it.  It comes in planks, not sheets or tile, where each plank looks and feels like wood.  It’s definitely cheaper than wood and requires far less maintenance to the point that wood was never an option.
 

We were originally planning to go with laminate floors, but the material we got was better.  It definitely isn’t the thin crap that was in sheets.  I’m sure I’ll post a photo once the rooms either aren’t empty or have shit piled all over them.

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We're going LVP when its time to replace floors. One, we have a dog. Two, we have kids. Three, it looks really nice. And its pretty affordable. I still like carpet in bedrooms, though. But we are going to do some renovating in the next few years, and while the wood is technically nice, I hate the grain and the dog is scratching them to hell. Also there are some areas that don't match anything else, so we will just replace that while we are at it.

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We put LVP in our new place. It's nice. We went with the super cheap stuff and had Trevor do the install because we still plan to do a major reno in the future anyway. My sister has much higher quality LVP in her house, it's super nice, not cold like tile. One thing that makes hers pricier than ours is how much padding the underlayment has. You can walk around her house barefoot all day and not feel it. We opted for a bit more padding in the underlayment, but downstairs especially, you can really feel it after a while. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

We finally got the wall bed built. We had a custom one done in our old house and I am ashamed how much we paid for it. My husband bitched a lot about lousy tolerances but it looks fine from here. My MIL arrives Wednesday so we had to get it put together. This kind of completes the den so now the pool table room is really the only room left to finish. And put pictures on the wall. My husband has been avoiding it because we put all the pictures on the stairs and that means he has to get the ladder on the stairs and he hates doing it.

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  • 6 months later...

Oh hey my husband did the pictures on the staircase. He has also gotten into woodworking, so he has built a few things like these wall tables and his own work bench with a vice. The latest project has been organizing the garage. Currently I'm out of state helping my dad move (more on that in a bit), so he took the week off work and is getting the garage redone. Currently it's a mess but I think by Thursday he will have it put together.

So if your parents are Boomers, do yourself a favor and just light their house on fire when they die. I have filled almost the entire dumpster at his townhouse complex and it would kill him to see what I've thrown out. And yet, I'm concerned about getting the last few things in the truck tomorrow. The good news is he fits in a 15 ft truck (barely). But I'm telling you 20% is paperwork alone. He has spent 2 weeks going through nothing but papers, and I don't think he got through half of it. I think 2 boxes were packed when I showed up 30 hours ago. I opened up a cooler and it was literally full of paperwork from 2010. I've found boxes of unopened mail. He is so obsessed with looking at every piece of paper and making sure he pulls his address off of it. I told him identity theft happens through thr internet now, not going through trash. I've dumped 5 boxes of magazines and several boxes of old optometry catalogs and resignation letters from staff from the 1980s. The one thing I feel kind of bad about is my dad used to have cool hobbies like stained glass. I found a very large box of half-finished projects from before I was born. I threw them in the dumpster but saved his tools. All his boxes are also in terrible condition because they are 20 years old and absolutely falling apart. So far the only thing he has caught me on is throwing out a printout of statutes for his new state dated 2019. He said he needs that to apply for a new license in his state. He's retiring, in theory. I told him that he can just look them up on the internet again when he gets there.

So like I'm saying, start planning arson now.

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My mom has literally ONE box of "sentimental" saved items. It's old schoolwork, pictures, and report cards from her 3 kids. She keeps trying to get us to go through it and take our own stuff home, but we keep dodging this. Other than that, my mom throws things out pretty darn regularly. When she dies, it's going to be soooo easy. 

My grandparents on the other hand...eesh. But we can't just set the place on fire because there is literally tens of thousands of dollars in jewelry and cash hidden in their house. One time my grandma gave me a bunch of purses to put in a garage sale, and I found like $2000 in cash tucked in their pockets. And my grandpa told me like 10 years ago that he's hidden $10,000 in a lockbox in the air return so to be sure we look there after they die. 

My husband's grandparents were the same way, except they were hoarders on top of that. It took over 2 years for my mother-in-law to fully go through this house to get out everything of value. She found something like $5,000 cash hidden in the couch, no bills newer than 1992. We're still pretty sure that she had to have missed a bunch anyway. We'll never know what was actually in here as we finally gave in and hired some junkers to come clear it out. It took them 4 days, 8 dump trucks and cost $8,000. 

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Don't dodge it. I guarantee when you're mom passes the LAST thing you want to do is go through old stuff and clean out. I was so overwhelmed and exhausted through the emotion wringer after clearing out my Nan's/Mom's house within a two year period and regret putting off taking stuff they wanted me to take because I couldn't deal with it when each of them passed because of a time schedule issue and now regret not getting Nan's dining table and some pieces of furniture of Mom's. I so wanted a white and coral king blanket Nan had for years and it had to go in the dumpster. Now going through old photo albums I am conflicted on. It's a time drainer but you learn so much. I took my Nan's albums to family houses and learned so much about my Nan and her history.

On another topic. I bought a fridge in February. It was an upgrade fridge and had to be made in China. Then China went on covid lockdown and I may get my new fridge delivered in OCTOBER!  I paid cash for it. I own an appliance that is not even in my house.

Renovation work will be starting soon. Since I don't have to move all that money I saved to buy a house will be going towards making my hobbit hole a nice house. 

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