web analytics

JerseySmarts.com

6 Reasons Why I’m Glad I Live In A House I Call My Own

Posted on by

On April 30th of this year – 4 month ago already – I purchased a house. In another post at another time I’ll write why I bought a house. Today, however, the purpose of this update is to provide some commentary on the very real, tangible benefits that I’m enjoying now that I live in a home I call my own.

saratoga-interior
  1. The Overall Setting. More than anything else, I like the setting of my new home and the layout of the structure. In truth, the “setting” of the new house isn’t that much different than the old house. It’s still a townhouse and it’s still in the same development. However, where my old rental used to be an end unit right on the major road going through this development, my new home is the second to last unit in the building and I like that better. In addition, the new place is situated far off of the main road and at the end of a cul-de-sac. It’s much quieter than my previous place, which brings me to my next point.

    2.  

  2. Kids… Kids All Over! Look, I’m a fan of kids getting up off their butts, getting out of the house, and running around outside playing. How many more studies do we have to read talking about childhood obesity dooming future generations? When it comes to kids and their health, I think that video games have generally done us wrong as a society. And you might be reading these comments thinking, “What’s the point here, Joe?” Well, the point is that the kids who used to live on my old block were not obese because they were constantly outside playing! And it was annoying!
     
    Let me be clear, though – I’m not contradicting myself with this statement. Yes, the kids who lived on my old block were outside playing and getting their energy out in a healthy and productive way. The issue was that they were always outside and they had that weird thing that kids have in their heads that tells them it’s okay to scream at the top of their lungs any time they’re outside of their houses. That includes the minute that the step off of the bus in the afternoon and, more importantly, the few minutes that they spend waiting for the bus every morning. I don’t have any kids, but I can tell you that the school bus stops on my old street (directly in front of my old end unit, by the way) at 7:57am every morning. I know that time because that’s when the morning screaming would end (and, presumably, start up again on the school bus, but who knows). Suffice to say that one of the best parts of the new house is that there aren’t that many screeching kids running around on my end of the block. It’s… peaceful.

    3.  

  3. Arrogant, Entitled People. Everyone has a version of this story. You know how the story goes: you live in a small neighborhood or on a block where the neighbors all know each other and there’s always that one neighbor. The one who thinks that they are entitled to something a little bit more than the rest. On the block where my old rental unit is located that person lived on the other end of the street. How did her entitlement manifest itself? In general, she believed that she was more important than anyone else. The best example I can give was during one of the major snowstorms that we had a few years ago. Everyone who lived on our side of the block moved their cars to visitor parking so that the snow plows could come through and clear out our spots. That process worked well until Madam Entitlement moved her car into our spots (I write “our” spots because at the time I had roommates)! We left a note on her car asking her not to do that because we needed our spots cleared out as much as she needed hers cleared out. Of course, like the Empress of the Street that she believed herself to be, she left a note back to us explaining that we don’t own those spots and that she has important work to do and needs access to the main road.
     
    I was waiting to read the line in her note saying, “And in case you were wondering, the answer is yes – my feces do smell like the Queen’s roses.” That’s how full of it that woman was – and still is, I’m sure. Getting away from a self-absorbed, self-obsessed fool like that was an added bonus for my move.

    4.  

  4. People With Too Much Free Time.

    5. A closely related type of neighbor to the entitled kind is the neighbor who just has a little bit too much free time on their hands. Granted, I didn’t have many of these folks living on the old block. There was one person, though, who seemed to fit this bill. Whenever there was a bad snowstorm or whenever we had the parking area repaved and had to park on the main road for a few days, she would stand outside of her house and encourage people to call the homeowners’ association to complain. I don’t have a great deal of angst or anger towards someone like that, but I do think that they need to understand reality a little bit better. What constitutes a major crisis in their eyes may just be a minor inconvenience in my eyes. In fact, it may not be a problem at all in the eyes of someone else. It’s all a matter of perspective and people with too much time on their hands have a very bizarre perspective sometimes.
     

  5. The New Place Is Newer! This may seem a little obvious, but the new place is newer than my old rental. It was built almost 20 years after the townhouse that I was renting was built. That means that I have different, better perks over here than I had in the old place. For example, while the old place had one assigned parking spot, my new house has a garage with a driveway that I park in. Another example – the old place had a standard, wood burning fireplace that worked relatively well, but was a filthy mess to clean up. The new place has a gas fireplace. It’s incredible.

    6.  

  6. It’s Mine! It’s pretty cool that I own this place. And yes, I understand that I own everything on the inside of the townhouse and my homeowners’ association owns everything outside of the walls. I’m cool with that arrangement because I get to customize the inside of this place and make it my own. And that’s just what I’ve been doing since I moved in. For example, I’m writing this blog entry from my new home office and I’m putting this office together the way that I want. Before I came upstairs to write in this office, I was downstairs in my living room that is furnished with brand new furniture that I bought and sits in a room with walls that I painted with colors that I chose (okay, my designer chose the colors – I just approved them). When you’ve rented for the better part of the last 15 years, having the freedom and mobility to do whatever you want inside of your own home is pretty great.

There you have it – 6 reasons why I’m glad to live in a house I call my own. In the future I’ll write about the financial impact of the purchase and why last spring was the right time to buy for me. Stay tuned!

Moving From a Dorm-Like Lifestyle to a “Grown-Up” Lifestyle

Posted on by

Even though I may be closer in age to 35 than 30 years old, I don’t feel like a grizzly old man yet. In fact, most of the folks that I know who are in their late 50s, 60s, and 70s, still suggest that to me that people my age (I’m 33, by the way) are still “babies” or just “young kids” getting started in life. And I tend to agree with their assessment, but not because it helps me feel young! No, I tend to agree with their assessment because when I look at the maturity levels and “grown-up” like abilities that some of my contemporaries possess, there’s no way you would ever want to consider these people adults!

A typical dorm room picture that I pulled off of the interwebs

A typical dorm room picture that I pulled off of the interwebs

I bring up this discrepancy in age versus real-life experiences because of my recent purchase of a new home. I have yet to write about the purchase, though I’m working on a blog entry that describes much of my reasoning for buying a home. More on that to come. In the meantime, though, I didn’t want to miss out on sharing some of the great experiences that I’ve had getting used to my new place. Take this post, for example. I’ve noticed that since I now own and live in a three bedroom, two-and-a-half bath townhouse (complete with a living room, dining area, kitchen, another eat-in dining area, and garage), that I’ve been living a very dormitory lifestyle up until this move. In other words, my prior apartments – and pretty much my living arrangements since I moved from home to go to college back in Fall 1999 – have been either directly in dormitories or closely resembling dormitories.

And that got me to thinking whether or not that was actually a true statement/thought and – for better or worse – it really is true. Just thinking about the last place I lived before I bought this place, I lived much of my life in my bedroom. This was easy to accomplish because my bedroom had a large walk-in closet where I could put all of my stuff and a master bathroom where I could use the facilities if necessary. I never spent any time in the living room because it was filthy (the rug was a disaster and the landlord refused to change it, plus the furniture wasn’t mine or my roommates’ so we didn’t have any connection to anything in there) and I never spent any time in the kitchen because it was an extremely dated room with a dated feel to it. The interior of the place I just moved out of was pale and drab – my roommates and I didn’t really paint the place because we didn’t own the house. The carpets were old and cruddy throughout the house, but I was able to salvage some semblance of normalcy by restricting my “living space” to my bedroom alone. I had a small office area set up in one part of the room, all of my clothes crammed into the closet, and a small entertainment center area next to the office area.

It worked.

I didn’t realize until I moved into my new home and started to make the new place my own that I had been restricting myself to living in a dorm-like lifestyle by staying in the old townhouse as long as I stayed there. Just to help provide some substance to the time I spent as a renter in the old townhouse – I moved in there in July 2008 and I moved out in May 2014. That’s nearly 6 years living as a de facto prisoner in my own bedroom!

Now that I’m in my new place, I’ve painted every room in the house except a half-bathroom on the first floor. I’ve started to fill my garage with my belongings with plans to retrieve more of my belongings from my Mother’s house and bring them down here so I have them in my possession. I’ve started growing vegetables and herbs in the area outside of the sliding glass doors in my eat-in kitchen. I’ve purchased brand new furniture and furnished my living room with a brand new coffee table, two new matching end tables, two new lamps, a brand new sofa, and a brand new loveseat. I’ve outfitted my dining room with a brand new dining room table with six chairs (and plans to buy two more dining room chairs). I purchased a brand new bedroom set complete with two end tables and a dresser for my bedroom. In my master bathroom, I’ve laid down new carpet runners along the jacuzzi and outside of the double sink and I also installed a brand new shaving station mirror as well as a deep medicine cabinet. I also installed my television above the gas fireplace in my living room, which sits in front of the new area rug that I bought from IKEA along with a very large piece of art for the wall from the same store.

The point here is that I’m living in the entire house versus living in one room of a house. At the end of the accounting, it is more expensive to buy and live in a house by yourself versus living with roommates in a shared house or townhouse. However, the ability to customize the space you live in to turn a house into a home is priceless.