Past Three Moons

As people have said, it is a terrible market for home buyers. The boom in real estate seems to be piddling out, there is very little inventory and as homes get listed, we are told, a sector of the uber-wealthy are absorbing these properties as quickly as they come on the market. I have not had time to research the veracity of the other thing that gets talked about a lot, corporations and foreign agents are buying U.S. property. and as they are planning to make bank on them, either through airbnb-type rentals, mega-agricultural or mineral extraction, or again, in the case of the homes, after another hundred K gets spent on bathrooms kitchens and curb appeal, raising the tax base by improving our cities. The flip side is that our elders and people of color, those least represented, get pushed out because everyone's taxes go up for being in a "better" neighborhood. This becomes the most regressive tax imaginable because eventually, people can't afford to stay in their own neighborhood! Nancy and I are still confident that we can make ends meet. Not for profitability, but for what we need, a place to call home. We might be idealists, but we are proving that two folks looking for a place to live can "make it", but the experience is and has been fraught with rediculously high prices, set-backs, hidden costs and seemingly unavoidable delays. We are about to celebrate three months of owning the place and the soonest a local plumber can come, to resolve a small issue is Fall, they may be able to get us an estimate by mid-to-late October. I get that people are hard to find right now, but I have been a reliable employee for decades and can honestly say, managers are getting worse, almost by the day. Many are completely incompetent. It is amazing to me that more people don't say take this job and shove it! My wife and I had been looking for a new home the majority of covid. Our ideal would have been move-in ready, but our budget could only afford older, fixer-uppers. We are putting the vast majority of our savings into a new place. In fact, I still have to work while we are doing the rehab. Splitting time between earning a living and continuing to buy materials and update the home bit by bit, but we don't want to wait until Thanksgiving to be in a house we bought in Spring! Long days have allowed us to do a great many things, however, there are plenty of things left to do. The heating system got a small leak fixed and a positive inspection. We have pretty much all new and/or refinished floors. All the walls and cupbords have been washed, and/or painted. We have new toilets and sinks, but the first thing we disconnected, because it was leaking badly and we couldn't rely on the shut off, the water heater, is still not replaced. The next big thing is going to be hot water, then, we can probably move in! The property we have found needs even more work than most, but we take the daily challenges on as tenaciously as possible. We are both bone tired and have taken just four days "off" completely across nearly ninety days. Things are coming together nicely, but we still have not gotten it to a state that we would want to live there, it would still be too much like camping. We are both in our second half-century, so roughing it isn't as romantic as it used to be. I have friends who are encouraging us to move in and shower under one of those camping showers. I suppose we could and then, at least we could drink our morning coffee in the space.