vituperation

Years ago, before the spud was in high school, Robyn and I wanted to move out of the suburbs and to the country. We wanted some space, away from the all the hubbub, noise, and little kids running pell-mell through the neighborhood. Our desire was a country house and some land, for a whole lot less money than our cookie cutter suburb house.

What we ended up with — thanks to me and my rigid tastes in homes — was a smaller, more expensive suburban house on less land with more neighbors. And more kids, only now they were playing in our yard and flowerbeds instead of just running around the neighborhood. We settled in where we are now and vowed to move to the country as soon as the spud graduated high school.

I’m good at screwing things up, you might say.

After a year in our current house, we started having a little belated buyer’s remorse. Screaming kids, loud traffic, and daily gridlock on the roads got old quickly. Thus began the talking again about “moving to the country.” Not Green Acres country, but a place with some room, no traffic, and no neighbors all up in our business. A spot for a pond, a nice garden, and a rambly old house with some character that we could mold into exactly what we wanted:

Our own little heaven on earth.

Fast forward to this year. The talk began again over the summer, because this is the spud’s last year in high school and we’ll no longer be shackled to Madison. Don’t get me wrong — Madison was and is a great town, but it’s getting overgrown by white flight or whatever they’re calling it this week. All the yuppies are moving out here. The houses are getting bigger and bigger and property (and taxes) costs more and more. A quarter of an acre here costs $40,000. In the five years we’ve lived in this house, its value has gone up by a third.

Talk really ramped up about a month ago, after our next door neighbor yelled at me for driving 20 mph while he was pushing his daughter down the middle of the road. I bought some books on living in the country and what’s entailed, because I’m a big believer in that book learnin’ stuff. I checked the MLS listings daily to see what was available, and sent links to Robyn so we could talk about exactly what we wanted and where we wanted it. Not, mind you, that our neighbor was running us off because he yelled at me, but because that was the straw that made us say, “we really want to get out of the suburbs and into the country. Fuck this.”

I went so far as to call the school board to see about what could be done to let the spud live outside the school district and still finish out her senior year in Madison’t high school. No problem, the woman there said. The superintendent has to approve it, but since she’s not trying to transfer in I don’t see any reason why he wouldn’t.

I talked to our realtor.

We started driving around, looking at locations, to see what there was to be seen. Saturday afternoon, we drove over to Smallville (a pseudonym), a tiny burg that’s convenient to Huntsville, Decatur, Athens, and Madison, because I’d found a little house on five acres that looked promising. As it turned out, the house was several miles beyond my self-imposed “house must be 30 minutes or less from work” area. But it was too small, anyway.

On the way back to a main road, we passed a house with a For Sale By Owner (FSBO) sign in the front yard, which I pointed out to Robyn. We turned around, drove back by slowly, and decided we liked the looks of the house, but that it wasn’t on enough land. Still, Robyn wrote down the numbers because it can never hurt to check and see what they want.

I called when we got home, and set off a string of life-changing firecrackers. The current owner emailed me a lot of pictures, and we loved what we saw:

We wanted an old country farmhouse. The FSBO house was built in 1935, and had one owner until 2000. The current owners bought it from the estate, and began work. They replaced all the electrical stuff, all the plumbing, added insulation, sheetrocked a few rooms, added / converted a couple of rooms in the back, replaced all the windows with double-pane windows, put in a modern dishwasher and stove, built a 2-car garage with a big bonus room above, and put in new counters and cabinets.

We wanted a decent amount of space. The house is 2200 square feet, and sits on 4.5 acres.

We wanted a pond. It has a pond, although it’s small and almost dried up because of the current drought. It even has a duck already.

We wanted big trees, not crappy little Bradford Pear trees that snap like twigs if you breathe on them too hard. Remember how our neighbor’s tree split and fell across our driveway a few weeks back? A week later, the other half snapped in a windstorm and fell. Our other neighbor, Shrieky McSlowdown? Their Bradford Pear snapped and fell this past weekend. The FSBO house’s yard is loaded with MASSIVE trees, 75 feet or taller, including two very Poltergeist-y pecan trees out back.

We wanted a house with a little character, not another same-as-all-the-others subdivision house. All the floors in the FSBO house are hardwood (but two of the upstairs bedrooms have carpet over the wood), and most of the walls are either beadboard or stained pine planking. The nine-foot ceilings are also all wood. Everything about this house has character. There’s a well under the house, waiting for a pump to pull out water for the yard.

Smitten. That’s what we were, before we’d even seen it.

I called the owners back and tried to make an appointment with them to see it on Sunday, but they weren’t able to until yesterday. I spent the morning trying to get the superintendent of the Madison Board of Education on the phone, to get his verbal approval in case we loved the house as much in person and wanted to make an offer. When he called back I explained the situation.

“I don’t know who told you that,” he said. “But we have a very strict policy against that. It’s all about the money. If you don’t live in Madison, you’re not paying taxes here. She would have to transfer to Smallville High.”

I offered to make a donation to the school, but they don’t have any way to accept something like that. Policies, and laws, and all that. He finally agreed that if we went ahead and sold our house, I should call him back, and he might be able to do something if it was close enough to the end of the school year. There’s no way we could risk that, though. We tease the spud, and she probably thinks we’re mean, but we wouldn’t do something as unspeakably evil as transfer her out of the school system she’s been in for seven years just a few months before graduation.

We were crestfallen, for about three minutes. Then I started playing with numbers, and figured out that we could probably swing two house payments for a few months if need be, especially since the FSBO house is a good chunk less than our current home. I worked out scenarios, and things looked better and better until we were back to our previous exuberance.

Eternal optimism over life has its benefits. We tend to see the bright side of every situation life puts us in.

I called the FSBO owner in the early afternoon to ask a couple of questions. She answered them, then said:

“Someone brought us a contract yesterday. We haven’t accepted it, because it’s too low, but I thought you should know. We’re probably going to make them a counteroffer.”

And elation turned back to despair. We fumed, we fretted, we worried that we were going to have the house we’d fallen in love with from afar sold out from under us.

I left work a little early yesterday, picked up Robyn, and we drove to Smallville to look at the house. Worried about hating it. Worried about it getting sold. Worried that it would suck in person. Worried, worried, worried.

And. We. Fucking. Loved. It.

Sure it needs work, and sure some things could be changed (like the paint, first thing). But it’s got character. And space. And it even has a chicken coop, for those chickens we talked about raising for eggs.

Perfect for us.

I believe in letting my ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and my ‘no’ be ‘no’, and not dickering around with haggling and negotiating and all those games people play when trying to buy something. I told the woman that we really liked the house, and that we didn’t want to play the negotiation game so if she’d just give us the bottom-line number of what they wanted, we’d talk and make a decision quickly.

She did. We did. And now we have a signed contract and a second house. In the country. With character. Land. A pond. A garden. Trees.

We’re closing at the end of next month, and will have the whole fall, winter, and spring to reshape it into what we want, while still living in Madison. An empty house is far easier to work on than a full one. Our mortgage will be cut almost in half, while our square footage stays nearly the same and our land increases to thirteen times what we have now. A new chapter begins.

Probably you’d like to see it, wouldn’t you? Here you go, a full walkthrough, with descriptive text by Robyn.

We can’t wait to find out if Green Acres really is the place to be.