My wife loves real estate. I kind of could care less but at the same time, I chose to temporarily love the thought of potential home ownership as much as she did. Key word being did. This is how to quickly, stressfully, and successfully occupy at least a month of your time.
Come to find out, there aren't any isles at Walmart that feature homes for sale. In fact, I can totally see why the government would pay someone almost $4 an hour(that's $160 a week, $640 a month and a total of $8,000 in a year) to buy one. Let's just say you've got a budget. Then let's say you've got your version of what you want in a house (assuming you are not custom building here). Then you venture out into this big world with or without a realtor (although ours saved our rears)! Ok, so far so good. You've seen one, two, and even a third and fourth house. It's pretty easy to differentiate and think about what you did and didn't like right? Let's throw out a few of the ones you weren't just absolutely in love with. Hmm. You might look at your husband or wife if you have one and say, "Well, that one on the corner of 'not-that-awesome' street didn't have a basement." "Yeah," (you've just opened a can here), "The little one in Mediocreville only had one bathroom and it was super tiny!" And on and on. Back to square one. You're pretty sure your realtor hates you and you start to wonder how it is these people actually make any money after spending umpteen evenings accommodating your work schedule and doing research on what the neighboring houses sold for at one point in time. Gee. This is WORK!
Long story short, like most about to not be untold true stories, ours took a magical twist, once again proved that God loves us, and brought us home. A great young couple looking to just be rid of their first home who was moving to Atlanta, GA. Sweet. We looked at 15 homes over 3 weeks and the rest of the time was spent providing endless paper trails proving our existence and justifying every penny we ever spent.
Great, we have a dog, a house, and a yard. Did we just become part of some elite and yet very grown up sect of Americans. I mean, even the Census people came-a-knocking and I stepped out on to our front porch to invite her inside. Welcome to a new bracket in United States statistics, Rogers Family!
In other news, we recently experienced record setting floods in Nashville. Our house smells thanks to the water that seeped into our basement. Truthfully, it's an extremely small price to pay compared to the damage that occurred downtown and other residential areas. I've heard tons of stories from people on the news as well as folks I know that have lost everything. So many Nashville landmarks are submerged in water including music sanctuary, The Opry House. It's been pretty eye opening as far as the power of "nature". It's tough when you see natural disasters on TV or the news and, yeah, you feel sympathetic but you can't really understand the full extent unless you volunteer your time and efforts to offer physical support like people did for 9-11, Katrina, and Haiti. It's all pretty real here. So real that I was able to add to my resume of cancellation explanations. I've had snow days, fog days, rain days, hurricane days, and now, a flood day. Don't break out the cake just yet. There's a lot of work needs done in the kitchen-actually, a lot of kitchens...
