W. O. W.

It occurs to me that it's kind of odd, the way we buy houses. We go and see a place once, maybe twice, for probably, usually, less than an hour each time, and base our decision to spend thousands of dollars and the next thirty years of our life on those brief moments. It's really not much time to get to know much about a place.

It'd be kind of like agreeing to marry someone after one brief blind date.

I was having some mild angst about the new house over the last week or two, concern about a few issues, things I thought I wasn't going to like or were going to be a pain.

Well. We got the keys yesterday afternoon, and spent several hours in the house, just hanging out, exploring. And it was totally amazing. I had forgotten how big the place was, because it doesn't look that big from the outside. We just kept walking around from room to room, amazed. (Although I admit we spent most of our time in the pub, where we went first to have a celebratory drink).

Things I'd been concerned about seemed not to be an issue at all. One biggie - I was concerned my truck wasn't going to fit in the garage (it's a tiny garage, and my truck is not unlarge). Good news - my truck fits in the garage. It's snug, but then it always was here as well, and it does fit - that's the important part.

There were a couple of other things, but once in the house walking around for a period of time, they didn't seem to be any concern at all. I wondered what I'd been thinking.

I'm totally enamored with the place, and it was so hard to leave last night! I just wanted to stay, but we hadn't planned to do that, because there's still so much to do at the old house to get ready for the move today. But today I get to go back, to stay. Tonight will be our first night there, and the band is having practice, so we'll be hanging out in the pub, with our first fire in the fireplace. (And yes, there will be pictures!).

And since all new house experiences have to have their amusing moments, here's ours - we had to break out of our own house at one point.

The back door had a door knob (obviously) with a very old-fashioned lock, a skeleton-key type. There was also a deadbolt which was keyed on both sides - so once locked, you needed the key to unlock it even from the inside.

The previous owners showed up shortly after we'd gotten the keys, just to answer any questions we might have and explain a few quirks of the home to us (which I thought was enormously decent of them!). They told us that one of the prior real estate agents had misplaced the key to the back door deadbolt, so they didn't have one for it.

We knew we needed to get the backdoor unlocked and open, because we were going to need to use it to move things down to the basement. So Greg removed the deadbolt cover with a screwdriver (since we were inside breaking out, we could do that), and he was then able to turn the mechanism from the inside to unlock it. But it still wouldn't open. We thought it was stuck, so Greg was going to go outside and push it from that direction.

Then we discovered that the storm door was locked - which we couldn't get to unless we could get the inside door open. Greg hunted around and found a wire coat hanger, which we ran through the lock to try to unfasten the storm door. After a bit of trying, we managed that trick, and got the storm door open. But the door still wouldn't open.

We finally discovered that the lower knob had in fact been locked when we thought it hadn't, but we found the key for it, openened it, and succeeded in breaking out of our own house. Situation solved.

Okay - it's 6:45 a.m. and I have got to get cracking - I have 15 years worth of accumulated life to transfer to a new home today!