So I’m back in the office after a weekend-bracketing pair of days away, and first thing I do is check my voicemail; for some reason, everyone who’s left a message was laughing when they started talking.
I think it may be because my “away” message was not the one I thought I recorded. It went like this:
“Thanks for calling! You’ve reached the desk of Richard Brandt…ba doop ba doop.”
We stapled down sheet vinyl, laid stick-down vinyl tile, staplegunned carpet remnants to the house, to satisfy the lender.
We bought the house.
We ripped up all of the floor in the house. All of it.
Lots of fun all around, and most of it happened over a four-day weekend. The weekend wasn’t dominated by it, either - Tandy et al. came out for a Friday potluck and Easter egg dyeing, and the Fun Brigade got to see the Hackensaw Boys and eat a roast and I got to have Easter dinner and pick up the flooring we’re putting in the main floor of the house.
Vying with the Hackensaw Boys for main feature of the weekend was a Monday bike ride to the new house (from apartment one) for lunch, and a measured ride back. It looks like about five miles from the house to Emma and Sophia’s daycare, then 8 from there to my office. I’m trying to talk myself into making that the daily ride (and it’ll go along well with my April 1st quit-smoking date).
When Emma was about as old as Sophia is now, we borrowed a bike trailer for the summer. It’s neat to see that Emma’s just as excited about riding in it as she was, and that Sophia is waffling between equal parts excitement and falling asleep with her face against the flexible window of the trailer.
She is much more into Guitar Hero.
In order for the bank underwriters to okay our loan to buy the new house, they require that we “repair” the flooring upstairs and down. “Repair” is in quotes because they don’t really need us to fix anything, they just want the appraisal pictures to look prettier. So after determining that I wasn’t going to be able to match or selectively repair the busted spots on this floor:
…Corey, Evan and I laid down some more stick-on vinyl tile over the existing stick-on vinyl tile throughout the downstairs.
We didn’t bother to mop (or sweep, for that matter) the floor beforehand so that it will be easier to pull these tiles out when we redo the floor three weeks from now. It does, all complaining aside, look much nicer now than it did:
Here it is:
Assuming all goes according to plan, the girls and I will be leaving apartment one in early-to-mid-April. Corey and I are buying a house* together on the North side of Holland, MI, with the intention of living in it for several years and selling it at a ridiculous profit.
It’s a bank-owned home, built in 1911; the roof is a couple of years old, and the house (except for its large four-season porch) has been wrapped in bright blue vinyl siding. It’s a four-bedroom home with a good-sized deck and a large backyard considering the location, and to better serve our tanning needs it is adjacent to a Midnight Sun tanning salon (note: this is a joke). It’s been nicely updated - only found one live cloth wire, and we’re pretty sure we know where it leads, and the plumbing has been redone - and the only immediate necessity is a furnace replacement (currently emitting CO at ~24ppm) and replacement flooring upstairs and down.
We’re also short appliances, as so far we’ve come up with nothing but a fridge (thanks John!) so if anyone’s still reading this after the lack of updates and has a gas stove lying around, let me know.
Also, I will see you at the huge music festival an hour North of here this summer. Sorry, Colorado, ain’t no way I can miss Rothbury.
* pictures of which can be found here, until the MLS page is removed, and here. None of these photos are particularly good (no offense to Corey, who took the second set with his cellphone). Tandy took hi-res shots on Thursday and I’ll link those when I get ‘em.
Here are some pictures of kids, mine and Tandy’s.
I’ve been busy!
Things have been going well here at apartment one; short update is that things with my girlfriend Tandy are going swimmingly, things at work could be better but are stable considering the fact that I work in commercial real estate and that’s a market that has been rather volatile of late, and my friend Corey and I are looking at buying a foreclosed home in the City of Holland and rehabilitating the shit out of it so that we have a cheap place to live.
Now I’m going to go delete about three hundred spam comments.
