When I was a kid, I loved the Percy Jackson book series. It’s a great introduction to Greek Mythology with all of the action and intrigue to keep a middle school boy interested. In the first installment, The Lightning Thief, Percy Jackson and his companions end up stuck in the Lotus Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Here, the characters are convinced by the casino staff to eat a lotus flower. The lotus flower causes them…
Encountering some mishap while getting the new house ready was inevitable. It just came from an unexpected source- the alarm system. Our new house has a robust alarm system. There are motion sensors in every room and a panic button in our bedroom. It even has its own little box next to the circuit breaker in the basement. I think it’s overkill considering how nice the neighborhood is. There’s even a light switch in the…
An exciting feature of our new house is in the basement. The previous owners left an unfinished workshop, laundry, and boiler spaces around the perimeter of the basement. But in the center of it, they built out a finished room, complete with heat for the colder months. The stairs divide the finished area in two. One side is a hang out area that Marisa has already claimed as a crafting and puzzle zone. The other…
My dad and I ripped the last wood paneling off the walls of our new house’s master bedroom. Each sheet that came down revealed the wallpaper underneath- blue, with white and gold leaves. As I hauled the last panel into the backyard, Marisa smiled and excitedly said “our house is coming together!” I thought about all the paneling that still needed to come down and replied “it’s not coming together- it’s coming apart.” Glue from…
The single most important thing that we did in order to afford a house was to live below our means. Owning a house was always a goal that my wife and I shared. And about a year ago, I realized that we needed to start diligently saving for one. For a while, saving for a house wasn’t the top priority. We put our tax returns in a house fund, but we were primarily focused on…