I have many things to do this week in preparation for the wedding on Saturday. I should be taking care of those things now but, right or wrong, I allocated this time today for writing. Writing eases stress, and I really need to destress. Any posts you see during the next couple of weeks will probably be the products of this day, as I doubt I’ll have time for writing again until after the wedding.
I’m working hard to catch up on my blogging. I just finished a post about late September. I didn’t want to forget about those things, and I hope that the post gives you an idea of how hectic (and yet fun!) my life has been lately. While the post was mostly upbeat, you can probably see that I wasn’t entirely happy with the purchase of my house.
The house was (and still is) an emotional roller coaster. First we had the false radon readings. Then we had the global credit crisis. The final “kick to the head” came on the closing day. Using a comparable sale in the area, we had determined we were getting a 10-15% discount by renovating rather than buying a “perfect” house, but the bank’s appraisal did not agree. They estimated we were paying roughly its market value. By the time we put pen to paper, I didn’t want the house anymore.
How do you recover from that kind of buyer’s remorse? How do you come to love a house that you’ve already started to dislike? And when you discover hidden sump pumps and realize that certain repairs are more expensive than you thought they would be, how do you not cry?
I didn’t cry over it, though I have to admit to some moping. Then, when I got sick of moping, I started looking for reasons to love the house. The most obvious thing to love is the property itself. We’ve got two acres of wooded land, enough that I will be able to create a private rock garden (my “secret garden”) in the back yard. Even better, we can reach state park land from the back yard, so we have miles of woodland trails to explore. Isn’t that worth some love?