The picture above is the first house I ever owned. I would never have even thought of buying a house if I hadn't been with my girlfriend, now my wife. She decided we should buy a house. I made enough money, I had good credit, it seemed like a good idea. The process of searching for a house was difficult, not the least because we had a terrible realtor. She seemed to think we hired her to get the best price so she tried to negotiate but she lost one house we really wanted because of her dumb, bad-card-player tactics. I was actually out of town when this house came up for sale, but my girlfriend loved it, called me, & put a bid on it. We were initially out-bid but, as would happen later, the potential buyers couldn't secure credit, & we were second in line. I had to beg our realtor to please tell them we would offer what we offered initially; she seemed to sense weakness & wanted to underbid. It's because she listened to me that we got the house*.
In a very real sense I thought I'd live in this house for the rest of my life. I was incredibly involved with KOOP radio at the time, I worked forty plus hours a week at the University of Texas, & of course I owed lots of money on the thing. It was cheaper than Austin rents & it was bound to be more valuable over time. Why would I ever want to move?
It turns out that the girlfriend - who became my wife while we were living here - was a PhD student at the University & once she got that degree, she would look for jobs elsewhere. It was the way of academia. This was not made clear to me at the time - I might not have gone through the difficulty of house-hunting if I thought I'd only there three & a half years. Or maybe it was made clear to me, & I just didn't get it. I don't know. I don't remember.
But I truly loved this house. We adopted Bolan & Winston while we lived here, & we lost Buster. I started this blog while I lived in this house, & had many friends over for parties & what-not. I quit smoking for the first time while I lived here, & used to stand in that little doorway area (the front door was to the left, where the mailbox is) & smoke through the screen door while watching television. So many mornings I left, walked down that driveway, & made my way to the bus I took to work. If I had been with anyone else, I would probably live there still - but then, I also wouldn't have bought the house in the first place, had I been with someone else. Or alone.
As you might recall, the economy crashed in 2008. I had refused, when I bought the house, to accept anything but a fixed-term mortgage. It wasn't that I am any sort of financial wizard, or even smarter than the average homebuyer - I literally had never even thought of buying a home until my girlfriend started to talk about it - it's just that I preferred to stay with my credit union & they would have had to sell my loan to a different institution if I wanted the sort of mortgage that would backfire three years later. They of course sold my loan anyway but I watched as two of my co-workers struggled to stay financially afloat when the economy went down the drain because they chose different interest rates. See, I don't even know what it's called. Suddenly they had to be exorbitant rates, & I made sure I paid the same straight through. I was lucky I was a little dumb, is all.
& because it was Austin, it was pretty easy to sell the place. It won't surprise you that it's changed owners a couple of times since then, & the last time it sold, it went for three times what we got for it. The new owners have zero-scaped the front & they got rid of the bush that guards the kitchen windows. I'd like to see what they did with the back but I'll probably never return to Austin again. The picture above was taken by me a couple months before we moved in the summer of 2009. I'm glad I have that snapshot - Google maps doesn't go back that far.
What a nice house to have been the first one I ever owned. As it turns out, it wasn't the last.
*Later, she represented a couple who wanted to buy the house when we were selling it. They made an offer, we countered, & she countered with a lower offer than their original. We of course passed. I so wanted to tell her clients that she fucked them on the deal but, you know, you're not allowed to contact them. Someone else paid what we asked for soon enough. What a terrible realtor she was.
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