New House

Written By:  Andrew Eide

This is a photograph of our new home. It is “new” for us but the house was built in 1991 so it is actually turning 27 years of age in 2018. As of January 3, 2018, we have owned the home for 60 days since we went to Closing on November 3, 2017. On January 8, 2018, it marks the 60 day period of when we moved our furniture into the home and slept in our home overnight for the first time.

Due to purchasing an existing home, that has been purchased and sold numerous times since 1991, you can imagine that we have some repairs that needed to be made, and some still needing to be made, but overall this home was in very good condition since the owners we purchased from took care of the home inside and out, and the repairs we needed to make were minor.

A few disadvantages of this home include the following. It is a two-story home with a two-story living room. This causes the heat from the heating system to rise so that the upstairs area is often 10 degrees warmer than downstairs. Nothing we can do about it when the living room is completely open until the top of the stairs. The other item is that we wish the kitchen was larger with more storage space available but since we don’t use the garage, and we installed three large storage shelves in the garage, we have enough storage overall to suit our needs. The other item is that the actual dining room is carpeted and since we hate to eat on the carpet we put our dining table in the kitchen, near the patio door, and we eat there on the vinyl flooring. We turned the dining room into a “den” where Keira has her television on the wall where she can play video games, Wii games, and watch movies.

The advantages of purchasing this home include the following:  Compared to other homes we looked at this one required the least amount of repairs to fix things. The heating and air conditioning units were replaced recently. The heating system in the attic was replaced about a year ago and the air conditioning unit, a 3-ton unit, was newly installed in August 2017 just before we purchased the home. The size of the home is 1,964 square feet which is larger than we expected to be able to purchase. We viewed a lot of homes, before viewing this one, and most of the others were under 1,600 square feet and they cost from $20,000 to $40,000 more than this one. Our back yard is larger than most of the other homes we viewed before deciding on this one. My rough estimate is that from the back of the house to the back of the fence it is from 60 to 75 feet and the width is from 50 to 70 feet.

We have lots of work to do in the Spring to get the backyard ready for a vegetable garden. The only problem we have is there are lots of Squirrels and they love to eat vegetables we will grow. We will do our best and whatever the Squirrels don’t eat we will enjoy.