the glory. another poetic astronomy term.

our house. in the middle of our street.

05 August 2004 - 3:26 pm

yeek! i forgot to write about settlement!

tuesday was settlement day. we showed up for a pre-settlement walk-through with our realtor, turned on the heat and hot water, looked one more time for the missing pieces of trim that had been in the house until the overzealous cleaners came through and took them, and counted only one working smoke detector.

proceded to the realtor's office, where karl signed his name about 25 times (including one paper that said karl understood everything he was signing and another saying that if the papers got lost, he'd sign them all again), we got shown a check made out to him (and the mortgage company) for more money than i can think straight about, and met the seller (well, the seller's sister). she was really nice, and said she'd have her sister send us anything else she had about the house, and that we were really nice people, and she was glad we were getting the house.

after all that and a hug from the realtor, we were homeowners! ack!

and to celebrate, we put a blanket down on the dining room floor and had a good fuck to christen the house.

then, to celebrate some more, we smashed up a wall. there's this wall, between the kitchen and dining room, that is horrible. it is about 3 feet thick (it incorporates a dishwasher) with an ugly-ass pass-through cut out, and makes the kitchen about 3'x5'. not kidding. you couldn't open the dishwasher door and the fridge door at the same time. so, we invited some friends with sledgehammers over, and we all took a few whacks at the drywall. after several hours of this, we got the drywall off only to discover that there's a lot of brick and stone underneath. we were expecting some, but were hoping for less than there is. so, next on the agenda: get a contractor out to finish taking down that (load-bearing) wall and put up a support beam instead.

meanwhile, we've moved some stuff into the basement (stuff that we don't mind being down there in the damp).

other immediate tasks: clean the bathroom (it is dis-GUST-ing), clear out some of the jungle that calls itself a back garden, and fix the caulking around the bathtub.

but tuesday was exciting for more than just our settlement.

there were two big trees that fell down within a block of our new house. it's been a rainy summer here, and tuesday it rained twice more, complete with heavy wind, and it was just too much for these trees. they both came down, each on a car, totalling it. luckily, no one was hurt.

meanwhile, at our apartment, water was gushing into the basement, flooding the place. the owner was running around all crazy-like, trying to fix it.

and later that night, the steeple on a 120 year-old stone church in the area collapsed (free registration may be required), for no particular reason at all (to keep the trees company?).