Age Bell Curve

It seems that life goes by resembling somewhat of a bell curve of what is considered successful...
At age 4...success is...not peeing in your pants.
At age 10...success is...making your own meals.
At age 12...success is...having friends.
At age 16...success is...having a drivers license.
At age 20...success is...having sex.
At age 35...success is...having money.
At age 50...success is...having money.
At age 60...success is...having sex.
At age 70...success is...having a drivers license.
At age 75...success is...having friends.
At age 80...success is...making your own meals.
At age 85...success is...not peeing in your pants.

Buying a House

So when the houses here had gone up to a ridiculous $600,000 and up I was calculating how much time it would take for the market to crash. Sure enough it did right when I thought it would so I planned on buying a house as soon as the crash hit. So in March of this year I started looking, wow I was amazed at what I saw.

In 1999 I bought a HUD home. Most homes that I looked at had been gutted. There was a few pissed people who did weird things like filling the house with sand, or punching giant wholes through the wall.

What I saw on my search this year was way different. People had taken the appliances and cabinets out and sold them, the air conditioning units had been stolen out of almost every house, tons of broken windows, and tons of added rooms. In most of the houses I saw people had added rooms (rooms in garages, rooms out back, rooms on rooms. In the particular house that I bought they had turned a house into 3 apartments (A studio, A 1bed, and a 2bed).

So when it came down to my choice there were 2 the perfect one that only needed an A/C unit, or a house that had flamingo pink on every wall and had too many walls and 2 kitchens but it had an A/C. The first one cost $210,000 4 bd/2.5 bth 1700 sq ft, the second one cost $188,000 5 bd/3 bth 2500 sq ft. Witch one would you buy? Of course I bought #2 after I'm done fixing it (10 years from now) it will be worth way more than #1.

So so far I've de-apartment it (tore down some walls), painted every wall, put the 5th bedroom back were it should have been, modernized the fireplace mantel, put carpet in the living room, fixed the plumbing, took out the kitchen in the garage, capped off all the extra pipes for the laundry on the back patio, built a dog run, fixed some of the whacked wiring, and way too many other little things. Thank God for my brother and my friends at R & D Waterproofing or else I would have never been able to move in before my lease was up.

The thing that sucked the most besides paying for utilities at 2 different places was the getting off work, working on the house till 11:00 p.m. driving to the apartment, sleeping a couple of hours, going to work and doing it all over and over again. It felt like working 2 jobs and still being a single mother of 3. Very tiring. Then there's the moving in. So now we just need to unpack.

Washer and Dryer Drama

So my Mother made me buy a washer and dryer today. Man what a pain in the butt. So I bought a house in May and my Mom told me that she would give me $800 towards the purchase of a washer and dryer. So every week she has bugged me about getting one.

I have had to put sooooo much money into this house to fix it up paint, plumbing, walls, flooring, electric, etc. the thought of adding the cost of a washer and dryer is scary. I know that they cost way more than $800 so I've been putting it off. Well apparently you can only wear clothes so many times before you need a washer and dryer so off to the store went $1200 later I have a freaking washer and dryer. I hope the plumbing doesn't break hooking them up (knock on wood). The sales guy actually wanted to charge me $350 more for a 3 year extended warranty. Wow talk about desperate to add onto a commission it comes with a 10 year warranty why would I want to give a store $350 just in case, who can afford to do that these days.