Feature
June, 29 2008
Home Sweet Home - Finally
by The XY Files
I am happy to announce, with a pleasing panoply of prose, that coming soon, "The XY Files" will no longer be originating from my tiny apartment. Instead, every week I will sit down to type my wonderful words to you from the comfort of my very own home (pending attorney review and home inspection)! For those of you not in the know, this will be my very first home and I am very excited to be finally moving my family into a place of our own.
Located in beautiful western New Jersey, by a lake, our starter home is a lake house and thus is rather small. There is a nice front room with a closet, a decently sized living room, four bedrooms and a nice kitchen. In the back yard there is a deck and a small yard that our dog will be patiently waiting for us to erect a fence around. There is a basement more for storage than for finishing, and I can probably set up a nice workshop down there and pretend to know my way around various tools. Although really, now that I will be an official man of the house, I suppose I should set to learning some things. Like sharpening lawn mower blades.
Upstairs in our new house is an attic which we have plans to renovate, either as a playroom for our kids, or as a bedroom. Really, I do not know what to make of that room. After all, we only made our offer on Friday afternoon. And the owner only accepted about an hour later. So things are moving at breakneck speed right now. You are all finding out about this before my landlord! But to hell with him. We pay him tons of money each month and the guy doesn't even come to mow the lawn. Or shovel the driveway when it snows. And it's like, dude, the driveway slopes up, how can I get in if you don't clear that off?
The person who is probably the happiest about our recent purchase - after my wife and me, of course - would have to be our realtor. This man has shown us about 30 to 40 houses, if not more, over the past year and a half, knowing that based on our price range, his commission would not be lights out. I almost feel like we owe him a dinner or something for all the work he has done for us. I want to invite him over for dinner and shots of whiskey because he looks like a man that enjoys his whiskey. And I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean that simply to say that he looks like a guy who enjoys some Glenlivet or Glenfidditch.
Anyway, the house we finally ended up choosing was not even a house we considered when we first looked inside. There were a couple of other houses that we really liked, one with a nice fenced-in yard but with an absolutely awful basement and one that was really nice, spacious but with radon removal equipment in the basement and yearly taxes that were astronomical. By the way, I know the equipment says "Radon removal" in nice big yellow letters, but radon is invisible, odorless and tasteless. So how do you know if the equipment is broken? Or if there is a blocked pipe and the gas is backing up? But the one we chose actually has some great benefits for my family.
For starters, the property is located about a mile away from my wife's BFF. This is good because they will get to see more of each other and my kids can play with her son, with whom they get on extremely well. We will also be ten minutes away from my wife's cousin and her children, and about 20 minutes away from my wife's sister, who lives just over the border in Pennsylvania.
And since I was a kid, I have always liked western New Jersey, now even moreso because there is not so much population congestion as there is here outside of New York City. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of people out there. But things are a little less noisome than they are around here, and I will definitely appreciate that. Not to mention the fact that when the sun goes down you will actually be able to see lots of stars without the bothersome light pollution that currently besets our house.
We will have access to the beach at the lake, where they also have family film nights, movies under the stars, night swims and swimming classes. You can have private parties there and they sometimes have dances hosted by a magic witch, where all the boy adults stand on one side of a gymnasium and all the girl adults stand on the other and every now and then someone gets the guts to ask someone to dance. Okay, the witch isn't real but the dances are real.
As for some of the detriments, well.. I will still be working in a section of New York City that is not really commuter friendly. Especially since I'd have a two-mile walk to my office, across some areas notorious for drugs and prostitution. Needless to say the drive will be a bit of a haul (over an hour) which would be fine except for the ridiculous price of gasoline. My wife, likewise, will have a bit of a drive to work and to school. My parents and my grandmother are apprehensive about the distance, but I (don't care) want to make sure they know that I'm not moving to another planet, only to the other side of a reasonably small state. Imagine how they would have reacted if we followed through with our original plan to move to North Carolina! For the kids, it will mean starting to find a new set of friends, as they will no longer be returning to the ones they know and love from their daycare.
That is the hardest part for me, I think. Not the address changes and all the work that goes along with moving. I've done that before and yeah that will be a pain but for me, the massive change that my kids are about to face scares me. How will they react to sleeping by themselves in their own rooms? Right now, my son wants a yellow room and my daughter wants a Disney princess room, but once their doors are shut and the night is pressed against the window, how will they really react? What happens when my little girl asks where her friends from school are and the reality sets in that the last time she got to see them was at a birthday party we went to this afternoon?
Things like that worry me because you just don't know how change will effect your children in the long term. Granted, I am applying adult emotions to children, who see and react to the world in an entirely different manner. Walking that fine line between the two sets of emotions - adult and child - can be precarious. I mean, this is not a divorce, which is a much more difficult change for a child, but... well, I love my children and my family with all my heart and I want to provide for them and give them the best that I can always. What parent doesn't?
So, MommyTalkers, the time has come to put down my checkbook and stop renting. And then pick up my checkbook and write my mortgage company's name after "Pay to the order of" instead of my landlord. And you're all invited to the housewarming party! No, I'm just kidding. There's not enough room for all of you! Although can see about getting you into that witch's dance. I hear she serves some mean punch and if you really want, she can whip up some love potions for you. Out in west Jersey we call it alcohol. My realtor loves it.
