House: The First Chapter

[morgan_dhu]

glaurung and I are buying a house.

Gibber.

He looked at the house on Wednesday, we had a house inspection done Thursday morning, offers were due Thursday evening at 7:00pm, and by 8:00pm our real estate broker called to inform us that our offer had been accepted and we were committed to buying a house.

We are terrified.

Neither of us has ever assumed such a massive financial responsibility in our lives (we live in Toronto, where "starter houses" on tiny lots sell for a quarter mil).

We will have to do some remodelling in order to accommodate my mobility issues and there's some other things that have to be upgraded, from insulation to some of the wiring and we want to replace some of the HVAC system with more energy-efficient equipment.

But it's affordable (barely) and it's nice and it's in a decent location for people who do not and never will own a car and best of all, there will be no people using perfume or other chemical crap that makes us sick living in the basement or on the floor above us.

Out of consideration, I will identify all subsequent posts about this becoming a homeowner thing as House posts, so you can skip over them if this kind of thing makes your eyes glaze over.

Comments

[windsea.livejournal.com]

Oh, lovely. It DOES make a difference when the place where you eat and sleep and love and read and shower and all that jazz ... is yours.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

That's part of what we're looking forward to, certainly, although in some ways it's not as improtant to us as the idea that we will be able to control our environment.

We will be able to create safe spaces where we can put items that need detoxifying, and create other safe spaces where there will be nothing either inside or coming in from outside that can make us sick.

Right now, when we buy books or electronics, we have to do most of the detoxifying inside our living space, in a room that we have to keep aired out - but there's always some leakage. Our washing machine is in the kitchen, so when we wash new clothes or sheets or towels the five or six times that are necessary to get out the perfumes and chemicals picked up from being in warehouses or stores, the fumes get into the rest of the house. And so on.

In the new place, we can set up a detoxification space outside for large items like new furniture. We can make a room in the basement for detoxifying smaller things, and make it and the laundry room air-tight and install fans that would vent the air outside. We can keep our windows shut on smoggy days, or when the neighbours are doing laundry, without toxic fumes from other apartments seeping into our living space. We can seal off the furnace room so it only vents outside.

All of these things that will make it possible for me to be able to breathe more easily - and just maybe, if my exposures are dramatically reduced, I might stop getting sicker all the time - and maybe even get a little better, once my system isn't being stressed by so many chemicals every day.