A House of Our Own
On August 15, we sat down with our Realtor, our mortgage banker, and a title representative to sign a thick stack of paperwork. On August 17, they sat down with the representatives of the estate of Cleo Ringhand and signed another thick stack of paperwork. With that, Christine and I officially became home owners. Along with that, we gained a heft mortgage and property tax bill. Ah… the American dream. (We now have the privilege of contributing towards the $5,238 that the Oregon school district spends per student.)
Before we bought the house, we had a home inspector go through it. He confirmed what we already knew: the house was older (probably built in the 60’s or early 70’s), but was structurally sound. There were four big areas of concern: the furnace was around 20 years old and near the end of its usable life. (It started out as an oil burner before being converted to natural gas.) The air conditioner was about the same age and was also near the end of its usable life. The roof is 20+ years old and doesn’t have long to go. Finally, the electrical outlets in the house were all ungrounded, two prong outlets.
Aside from those big ticket items, everything else in the house is in good shape. There’s still a lot of work we can do — the decor just screams “Grandma house” — but it will serve perfectly well even if we don’t change anything else. Still, those big ticket items were going to be expensive. So we did what any good American would do — we got someone else to pay for it. When we wrote the purchasing contract, we stipulated that the seller would put enough money in escrow for us to pay for half of the needed upgrades. They agreed and did.
We moved in on Saturday, August 26th. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been over a month in our new home. On the other hand, we finally have most of our stuff unpacked and arranged so we must have been in the house for a while!
I posted some pictures that we took of the move-in. We’re still planning on shooting a video walk-through of our new property, we just haven’t had time to actually do it yet.