Monday, May 2, 2011

It Didn't Sell ... But it rented!

I think.

Only 2 parties looked at my house in the 5 months it was for sale and I was beginning to get a little desperate.  All the doom and gloom articles about the terrible housing market didn't help.  The long, cold winter depleted my cash reserves and I was beginning to worry about how tight I'd have to budget in order to continue paying for multiple houses.  (Like, I'd have to be more disciplined about always bringing my lunch to work and never going out to dinner - something I've never been good at. No vacations, rice and beans for dinner, etc, etc. You get the picture.)

Then 2 weeks ago, some friends of mine from the country fire department called to see if they could rent it.  Um, ... of course!  The rent will mostly cover the loan payment, and they'll put the utilities in their name, saving me another few hundred a month.  Whew!  I had mixed feelings about selling the house, and I'm happy to have friends renting it. I'll still be able to pick blueberries, elderberries, and apples and I'm uber happy to have some breathing room between my paycheck coming in and bills going out.

Then last weekend, these folks moved all my stuff from the other house to this one.  Can you say, "thrilled?"  Of course, I've lived for so long with most of my furniture at the other house, that my current place feels crowded now.  I missed my sofa, but I'd forgotten about most of the other stuff.  It's a little embarrassing that when the men were unloading the truck they'd say, "Where do you want this?" and I'd say, "I have no idea. I forgot I even owned it!"  Hee hee.  I'd been trying to be less of a control freak, and not have every little detail planned out - but I don't think those big burly men appreciated that the same way I did.

I've made a promise to myself that I'm not going to make any (big) changes to the lot this year, like building raised beds or planting any fruit trees.  It's almost painful to hold back, but only 2 years ago, I did major stuff at the other house and regretted it.  So I'm going to wait, impatiently. 

Here's some pictures of the new place.  It's sortof a panorama.  I'm standing on the porch on top of the garage, looking down the driveway, then taking pictures rightward. 

One good reason to wait is that I've never seen how sunny or shady parts of the yard are.  In fact, the leaves fell off the trees about a week after I moved in.  Smart people plant things in sunny areas. There are so many trees, if only I knew where the sun will land in the summer...
I'd love to put beds along the edge of the driveway where it curves here.  Probably not raised beds though.  It wasn't too long ago that there was about 4 feet of snow piled up on the sides of the driveway.  Plowing would really damage anything I put there.
I totally want to use those inside-the-loop areas to plant yummy stuff (there are 4 tree stumps in the right-er space.  It'd be cool to have a mini-orchard there).  And I'd love to plant berry bushes along the outside edge of the driveway. Just gotta account for the fact that snow has to go somewhere, and gotta see if there's any sun over there.


And finally, I took an EVOC (Emergency Vehicle Operations) course over the weekend.  Saturday was  classroom training and Sunday was driving on an obstacle course that included a serpentine forwards and backwards.  (Yes, it was an extremely busy weekend, what with this class and moving all in one weekend.)  Chief was only going to let me drive the small vehicle, but I asked nicely and got to drive the big truck! (It was a smaller one than this ladder truck, but still big!  I think they got a little calmer when I told them I had had a 3/4 ton pickup truck and was totally comfortable doing the backwards serpentine in that.) I did pretty good, considering that my very first time behind the wheel of that fire truck was to do this course!  Every day I spend in bunker pants earns cred with these guys and helps me fit in.  This weekend was hard, but it was a big step forward.