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davidnWe own a house. This hasn't really sunk in yet, perhaps because we're not actually moving in until the middle of next month - but there's a townhouse in Watertown that I now have the keys to, dangling from my keyring via a classy paperclip. If you want a summary of the entire process since March, there's a very rare Whitney post that went up today, and that goes over it all again.
We spent the whole afternoon and evening there after the closing, wandering around The Village and trying to understand how to work the air conditioner - in fact, we did a lot more than I thought we were going to do, and ended up painting an entire room. I had never done any DIY-related work like that before, but trying it together felt like claiming the house as our own.
I wonder if it would appear classist of me to suggest that America's B&Q Warehouse under a different name, the Home Depot, is staffed by shambling, semi-aware zombies. They're nice zombies like in Earthbound, though, and even though they can't understand me and I can't understand them, sometimes a message gets through. One of them, whose name was Koskov when he was alive, made sure to give us $5 rebates on the massive amount of paint that we bought, and we also got a contractor's discount which the ex-woman at the checkout completely failed to understand. After doing that, I can tell you that the paint roller is one of the greatest inventions ever - the last time I'd seen a room in my parents' house being painted, my dad was in there over a period of about five weeks using a brush on the walls.
The event that the last few months had led up to was the closing, where we finally met our lawyer face to face - she said that she always tried to imagine what people looked like from their phone conversations, and that I looked a lot younger than my voice had led her to believe. The sellers weren't there, but their lawyer was, and over the next hour we set up a sort of production line of signing a three inch thick stack of pieces of paper confirming different regulations and amounts of money that are going to bind us over the next number of years. My hand still hurts a bit - I think it was in all seriousness the greatest amount of handwriting I've done at once since the fourth year exams. Our lawyer was terribly apologetic for charging us more than she had quoted because of having to make calls to the bank to sort out their mistakes, but we said that we thought that she had been well worth it. She also announced that - even though this is thankfully out of our hands and not our direct problem - before we got our copies of the documents, she was going to get a new total loan amount quoted from the bank, because unsurprisingly the woman cocked that up as well.
It feels like we're once again moving on to a slightly more grown up phase of life. Especially seeing as dealing with our loan handler has prematurely aged us both about twenty years.
We spent the whole afternoon and evening there after the closing, wandering around The Village and trying to understand how to work the air conditioner - in fact, we did a lot more than I thought we were going to do, and ended up painting an entire room. I had never done any DIY-related work like that before, but trying it together felt like claiming the house as our own.
I wonder if it would appear classist of me to suggest that America's B&Q Warehouse under a different name, the Home Depot, is staffed by shambling, semi-aware zombies. They're nice zombies like in Earthbound, though, and even though they can't understand me and I can't understand them, sometimes a message gets through. One of them, whose name was Koskov when he was alive, made sure to give us $5 rebates on the massive amount of paint that we bought, and we also got a contractor's discount which the ex-woman at the checkout completely failed to understand. After doing that, I can tell you that the paint roller is one of the greatest inventions ever - the last time I'd seen a room in my parents' house being painted, my dad was in there over a period of about five weeks using a brush on the walls.
The event that the last few months had led up to was the closing, where we finally met our lawyer face to face - she said that she always tried to imagine what people looked like from their phone conversations, and that I looked a lot younger than my voice had led her to believe. The sellers weren't there, but their lawyer was, and over the next hour we set up a sort of production line of signing a three inch thick stack of pieces of paper confirming different regulations and amounts of money that are going to bind us over the next number of years. My hand still hurts a bit - I think it was in all seriousness the greatest amount of handwriting I've done at once since the fourth year exams. Our lawyer was terribly apologetic for charging us more than she had quoted because of having to make calls to the bank to sort out their mistakes, but we said that we thought that she had been well worth it. She also announced that - even though this is thankfully out of our hands and not our direct problem - before we got our copies of the documents, she was going to get a new total loan amount quoted from the bank, because unsurprisingly the woman cocked that up as well.
It feels like we're once again moving on to a slightly more grown up phase of life. Especially seeing as dealing with our loan handler has prematurely aged us both about twenty years.
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Date: 2010-05-28 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 10:39 am (UTC)It also sounds a lot harder to buy somewhere over there than it is over here.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 01:48 pm (UTC)I've only been very loosely related to any buying process in Britain, but from what I remember it was roughly the same (offer, inspection, negotiations, mortgage, closing) - just that one person managed to make it horribly difficult. Here, there's the advantage that you can put in a 24-hour offer and not be taking part in a blind auction against an unknown number of other people...
no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 08:09 pm (UTC)D.F.