It seems the gods of kiln and autoclave have backed off of their north american onslaught for the time being, what with daytime temperatures backing off to a mere sweltering and all. Unlike many unfortunate souls out there, i have air conditioning at all 3 of my residences now. Yes, I have 3 places where i commonly dwell: My dungeon in cousindave’s place, heidi’s towering apartment, and our newly purchased home.
Anyway, to beat the heat i spent the past few days outside demolishing my wooden deck on the back of the house. Yes, that’s right. I chose 2 of the hottest days of the year to muck about with chainsaws, sawzalls, sledge hammers and the manual transporting of several hundred pounds of rotting lumber. Oh yes, and there was also digging in the rock garden-eque earth that passes for poughkeepsie top-soil. Mensa-inductee I am not. Then again, 2 Doctorate-holding friends of mine, the latest members of the local ODA (Otter Defilers Anonymous) chapter were right there with us. Wasted student loans or great friends? I’ll let you be the judge.
Unfortunately, my camera containing the recent snapshots is MIA (i suspect it took refuge in heidi’s apartment, as i kept using it in the hellfires known as NY weather recently), you’ll have to wait for the post-deck-removal photos and the totally hot action shots of me with a chainsaw (don’t worry, i’m sure your imagination will fill in the blanks enough to get you through the night, you cad). For now just rest happily in the knowledge that you were most-likely much smarter than I with respect to hot to deal with the heat. I hope so, for your sake. Think of the children.
Congratulate me (or pitty me, depending on your POV) folks, I’m a homeowner. The closing yestery went just swimmingly. So swimmingly that between the two of us, heidi and I wrote a total of 2 checks. And one of those was a cashier’s check, all i had to sdow as sign it. I dunno if it was the bank or my lawyer or my title company or what, but we signed a bunch of papers, handed over 2 checks, and the bank did all of the dispersal of funds to the appropriate places. To make matters even better, we walked out of there with a check for $2004.00. Through their continuing ineptitude with numbers and inability to “get it”, in addition to our tossing in $2000 for the Deck Debacle, the bank added $2000 onto our mortgage so to fun our portion of the deck debacle. It doesn’t net us any money, of course, but i’m quite happy to pay $13 more on my mortgage payment and have this $2000 to use for appliances and rennovations. I know it doens’t work out financially in the long run, but i also don’t plan on staying here forever, so i’ll deal with it.
At any rate, the weight of responsability of the whole thing is remarkably less than the weight if making sure it was all getting done. I’m feeling much better now that the closing is over and we have they keys to our place.
Having orchestrated the whole thing, I’m not sure if I would use a mortgage broker next time. On one hand, i learned the process and have neither the curiosity of how it all works nor the desire for all of that stress again. On the other, being somewhat of a control freak i think i’d have a hard time entrusting all of that craziness to someone else.
woohoo!!
Passing this one along cause it’s… wow.
Permission (via Kristin (via Jef))