Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 41016 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 41016 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
“Let’s see what the loan agent says. I’ll do whatever we need.” Aaron cocked his head and studied me for a moment. “So…what do you think? Are we doing this?”
I grinned. “Yeah, we’re doing this. Let’s buy a house.”
5
We bought a house.
I wished I could report that it was a seamless experience, but it was more like jumping a series of hurdles over an almost two-month period. We had to sell our condo and apply for a loan. The condo was the easy part. It sold within two weeks and the new owners, a super-fabulous gay couple in their forties with a Westie named Michelangelo, agreed to rent it back to us for a month, which meant we didn’t have to move twice.
We closed in early August and moved in the following weekend.
That was when things got tricky, ’cause in its current condition, the house wasn’t anywhere near Aaron’s standard of habitable. Or mine. However, we didn’t want to waste any money that could go toward basic renovations, so we sucked it up and lived in the middle of a remodel war zone for weeks.
We stored most of our furniture in the garage and hired a team of professionals to do things outside of our DIY capabilities, like refinish the hardwood floors and retile the bathrooms and kitchen. We couldn’t afford a full kitchen redo, but we decided living in a time warp for a few years wasn’t for us, so we refaced cabinets and bought new appliances too.
We were bleeding money, which sucked. It forced us to tighten our budget and reexamine the list of things we could do ourselves. I sanded the deck with my father-in-law, agreed to help Aaron paint and weed the garden…and plant roses and whatever else he threw into our cart at the local garden store. Soil, fertilizer, tools, a hose, seedlings, railroad ties, and flowers.
Did I mention we were bleeding money?
We bribed our friends with beer and pizza to pull weeds once we realized the scope of the manual labor involved. It would have taken us weeks to wrestle dead shrubs from the ground, and we still had to paint the interior of the house. There was no way to do it all without asking for help or going broke.
Between the guys Jack brought from his garage and the rest of our basketball crew and their partners and spouses, we had the garden cleared over Labor Day weekend. Jay and Peter felt guilty they couldn’t join us, so they had lunch delivered instead.
We sat with a dozen or so friends on the newly sanded deck, admiring the newly-visible flower bed as we chowed pizza and sipped iced teas and beers. They joked about commuting for weekend basketball games and offered ideas on planting vegetables and an herb garden.
Curt pointed at a square patch of dirt beyond the tall copse of trees. “That’s where the eggplants should go. Eggplants galore.”
“This man is a dirty pervert.” Jack nipped his boyfriend’s ear. “Don’t go changin’, baby.”
“Speaking of babies, I think I need to get home and rest,” Chelsea announced, pushing herself laboriously to stand from one of the chairs we’d dragged outside for her.
Aaron set his hand gently over her belly. “Shouldn’t this baby be here now?”
“Yes. He’s taking his sweet time.” She winked as she added, “Just like his dad.”
We howled and laughed even harder when Jason turned five shades of red.
“Yeah, yeah. You guys are hysterical,” he huffed, scooping up the blue cooler he’d used as a bench. “I’m taking my cooler home. And my wife. C’mon, babe.”
She shuffled awkwardly, looking so unsteady that I grabbed her elbow and escorted her outside. When we reached the short set of steps leading to the street, I wrapped my arm around her waist. The last thing we wanted was for our very pregnant friend to eat it on the sidewalk in front of our house.
Chelsea paused on the bottom step, leaning into me as she shaded her eyes from the afternoon glare. She grinned, waving at Jason as he closed the hatch on their SUV.
Which also happened to be when our new neighbor slowed his minivan in front of our house. He rolled the window down and yelled, “Congratulations! Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Chelsea tore her eyes from her husband to the van and waved at him too. “That’s nice. Looks like you and Aar landed in a nice ’hood.”
I smiled. I thought so too.
And just as we were getting into the swing of tackling our endless DIY list, my mom came to visit.
Hanging out with my mother was like flying low in a propeller plane over a mountain range—you knew there’d be turbulence, but you never knew quite how much to expect. Sometimes, she was our biggest cheerleader and other times, it felt like dodging a constant barrage of verbal shrapnel.