13 Housing Stories.

Last week I talked about steps involved in buying a house. Some of the comments inspired me to tell a few stories about buying, owning, and renting.

1. The first place I lived once I moved out on my own was the dorms. I was a transfer student, had just spent a month in China, and chose the dorms because it saved me the hassle of looking for a place from hundreds of miles away when I was short on time. I lasted two whole terms before I got fed up with not being able to eat when I pleased, simi-public bathrooms, and curfews.
2. Over the next five years I moved ten times, culminating in my first home purchase.
3. Renting a place that was already furnished turned out to be easy.
4. Renting one once I got a cat became hard, and forced me into more unfurnished places.
5. The worst of the lot was the landlord who was trying to sell the building. They were supposed to give me 24 hours notice before showings, but typically pinned a note to my door the night before. “Hilarity” ensued.
6. Landlords might talk a hard line, but I never had my deposit deducted for painting a place, even when I picked ghastly colors, and none ever noticed the nail holes I added. I didn’t even have to pay for the scorch marks, though the manager and I had a long talk about fire extinguishers and how to get all the dust from one out. But go more than a month without paying the rent and you’re in serious trouble.
7. Every house I have purchased has been a fixer-upper older than the house my great grandfather built.
8. My first house had a leaky roof. We’re talking the kind that requires the pulling out of buckets to catch the water. It took $10,000 to get it squared away, but we took the opportunity to put in a dormer that increased the houses overall size by 400 square feet. It was worth it.
9. I sold that house in a yard sale. Well, almost. I had a For Sale By Owner sign on the porch and was running a yard sale, and the people who eventually bought it asked if the house was part of the yard sale. We showed it to them right then. Took about three months for the resulting paperwork to complete.
10. It was almost better before we started buying our homes. Then I could get Mr. Al to prune some of his pack-rat additions with each move.
11. Our first move as a couple involved traveling from Montana to Wisconsin. Everything fit into the back of a Toyota pickup.
12. Thirteen years later we moved from Wisconsin to Montana. We literally had eleven tons of belongings packed into a Ryder truck (the biggest they had) towing a trailer. There were boxes in the car on the trailer.
13. The longest, hairiest, most paperwork intensive purchase I’ve ever endured is the one I’m trying to do now.

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