Moving to Clinton
Chris and I have lived in the South Slope of Burnaby for six years. I decided I wanted to live on one of two streets: Clinton or Portland. And on those two streets, I only wanted to live on two specific blocks. Why? Because they were pretty and they were still a 10 minute walk to the skytrain. As for the names, I liked Clinton because I thought he was a good president and I’m all for Hillary. Portland because my best friend grew up in Portland, OR. I figured both streets had good juju for me.
We looked around at houses casually for several years, stepping up our efforts to “a bit more than casual” in the last six months. Our townhouse landscaping was so nice in the spring and our interior was well done, so it was easy to continue to live there and difficult to buy a fixer-upper.
We had a specific price range, specific two blocks, wanted a south facing back yard. Good luck finding it! In our price range we saw a lot of junk, stuff that made me so made that someone else wanted me to give them how-much-money-for-that-piece-of-sh**? As a consumer, I felt disrespected (yeah, it was a tough search). Chris made me stay focused on the 10 minute walk to the skytrain because we have one car and don’t want another. He drives to work, but I’m a regular transit user.
We finally found a house on the street we wanted with a south facing backyard. The upstairs had been nicely renovated and the downstairs was still unfinished. An unfinished basement was good because we had seen a lot of finished ones with terrible workmanship and we didn’t want to pay for that only to have to tear it out later. When I walked into the house, I knew I wanted to buy it. I kept my mouth shut until we left and I said to Chris and the realtor in a whisper, “I think we should buy this house.”
We made an offer and they countered at what we thought was too high, so we didn’t counter. We waited two weeks, made the same offer, their counter was better, so we countered and they countered and we accepted. After that ensued one of the busiest work and personal times for both me and Chris.
Since we were soooo busy, we had to put Chris’ parents to work. We enslaved them at very little cost to ourselves, barely fed and watered them, and forced them to do back-to-back late night and early morning shifts. I comfort myself with the fact that they liked it.
In the end, we managed to move.
July 6th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
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