After I announced (announced! what am I, Beyoncé?) that we were going back to Colorado to settle down, Kristy asked -
Why Colorado? Just because that’s where your stuff is? And where you are familiar with? If I were you, I’d be taking this opportunity to move somewhere that I’ve always wanted to live…which would be someplace warm and near a beach.
Yeah, I know. I kind of thought we’d find someplace better. But we didn’t come across any place that really made us want to settle down.
Colorado IS familiar, and the people I am closest to in real life are there. I miss my best friend and my knitting friends SO MUCH. I guess I didn’t realize how deep our roots are in Colorado until we left. I understand the politics and the weather and the geography and the cost of living…. Somehow, after all this, familiar sounds pretty good. I don’t want to start over somewhere new.
We loved The Adventure. Now that we know we can travel while Jim works and we do schoolwork AND that we can do it less expensively than a traditional vacation, we are still planning on visiting new places – just with a home base to come back to when we are done.
I am a little nervous about renting a house, though. (Did I tell you that? We’ve decided to rent for a while, not the least reason being we can’t live in a hotel and look for a house to buy without going completely mad and also broke.)
We haven’t rented in years, and watching too many news stories has me paranoid. What if we get a house infested with fleas? Or bedbugs? Or meth-cooking fumes?
Or what if we rent a house that’s being foreclosed on the the sheriff shows up one day and throws all our stuff out on the lawn?
Or what if all the houses have hideous carpet and mountains of dog poo in the backyard?
Worrying: It’s my superpower.
Luckily, I have an IKEA catalog to distract me.
January 8th, 2013 at 6:41 am
Yeah, I’m a big talker but I’ve always thought that if anything ever happened to my dear, sweet, hard-working husband, I’d be on the first train to Chicago. Because that’s where my family is. And that’s a place that I am familiar with. Forget the beach. I would want to be where I am known and loved.
January 8th, 2013 at 7:10 am
Helpful renting hints:
a) don’t rent a place with hideous carpet
b) Don’t rent a place where the back yard is full of dog poo
c) Look the house up online before you sign the lease and see if there are any liens on it.
d) Ask the landlord, before signing the lease, to do something fairly minor before you move in, like replacing old plugs or something. Their reaction will give you a good idea of how much you’ll need to hassle them to get serious repairs done once you’re living there. Ask me how I kow this one.
e) Breathe deeply and think of IKEA.
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January 8th, 2013 at 7:41 am
May I recommend a cheap apartment with less space to clean….so that you can travel all you want?
It’s really working for me.
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January 8th, 2013 at 5:18 pm
I hate apartments. But if you can find one with a month-to-month lease, it would be perfect, especially if you find your dream home in the next month. You don’t want to be tied down to living a year in a hellhole. :/
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