Be vewy vewy quite, I’m hunting houses.

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Before I start this, I think I should address something that’s been bothering me. I realise that me whining on here about how we can’t build a house and own a house is laughably privileged of me. Many people can’t even afford shelter, and here I am whining about how we own a chunk of land and can’t build on it, and we’re not sure we have enough money to buy a house. It’s crazy.

And it is incredibly privileged of me, but this position came at a very high price. The vast majority of that money came from my dad’s death. And frankly, I’d deal with rented accommodation and slowly saving cash up for years rather than have lost my dad to a painful, horrendous death from cancer. That also is part of the reason I end up so frustrated by it. When anything bad happens involving ‘that money’ then I feel like I’ve let him, and my mother down. She gave me the money from my dad’s life insurance with the intention that I would be able to get a house and not worry near so much about money.

And here I am near tears fairly frequently because we’re engaged in a battle to the death with the county, who (it seems to me) are just trying to make as much money out of the planning process as they can. Perhaps that’s not what they’re trying to do, but it certainly doesn’t feel like they’re actually trying to protect the land. If they were, the process would more based around what’s actually on the land.

Anyhow. That rant (which everyone’s heard before) over with, let’s talk about the dismal house situation. So the ant situation in the rental continues unabated (although there is bait). Our landlord’s arranged for a pest control person to inject the walls with poison, which is good because it turns out we now have three varieties of ant in the house. Working down in size, we have carpenter ants, what I think are possibly yellow ants, and little black ants. Hopefully this situation will resolve soon – and I’m hoping the injected poison will kill them quicker than the stuff the pest guy put down – which has left drunken, wandery ants that make me feel very guilty.

And while that can’t be said to be the main driving force for us wanting to move, it’s certainly an encouragement. Having our own stuff out of storage – given that we’re now looking at it being at least another year before we might be able to build – is something we’d both like. Both of us are missing the ability to do anything hobby-like to reduce stress. It’s not like we can’t here, we could, but storing any more stuff here is hard, and we can’t leave anything out without it becoming very oppressive in here.

So, yes, we’re looking. The problem is, everyone seems to have realised that living in Thurston County is a frigging nightmare. This I am presuming based on the fact that one street to the next, similar houses, similar looking streets, the houses on county land will be waaaay cheaper. I’m guessing the hassle of trying to get permits to renovate, fix, improve those houses from Thurston County puts off people – like us – who enjoy the challenge of renovation. There may be other reasons; I don’t know if there’s some cultural or civic difference between ‘county’ and ‘city’ land. It’s not like you can easily tell from the address (although I suppose if you look at google maps, you can see the boundary).

It is insane though. It’s also insane how the boundary will wiggle to exclude or include one development, or one street, or something random. I really don’t understand how it works – how that distinction is made – it doesn’t seem to have any relation to the density of housing.

But it means that I look at the list of posted houses and go “oh yay, some new ones we might consider” (because the one we were debating sold…the weekend we looked at it) and then click through them an conclude that they’re all in the f’kin county. Which instantly excludes them. So yay for that. Hopefully we can (a) get a mortgage and (b) get a house and (c) our financial adviser won’t tell us this is an act of deep insanity. Which it might be.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.