Being Amber Rhea

Against my better judgment, I upgraded to the newest version of Twitter Tools, because Alex King kept saying it was crucial to update. Ever since I did, it’s been going crazy and posting my tweet digest like 50 times - and Alex hasn’t replied to my Twitter @ messages on the topic. I don’t want to disable Twitter Tools but I might have to, because this is stupid.

Anyway, in my zeal to delete the most recent batch of offending posts this morning, I apparently deleted the post I wrote yesterday about house-hunting, Whittier Mill, Ormewood Park, and other things. I can’t remember what all I said - it couldn’t have been that important - but I do remember I posted pictures. So here they are again.

We went to Whittier Mill Village yesterday and I had my camera with me. See the full Flickr set here.

And here are some houses we saw yesterday and liked. The first two pictures (exterior and interior) are of the same house - our favorite, in Ormewood Park.

Unrelated: can anyone tell me, quickly and easily, without telling me to go read some f*%&ng man page, how to restrict virtual directory listings?

Not sure where to start or what to say… but alas most of life isn’t a nice consistent narrative. But then, when I was going through my archives to tag old posts (I gave up ’round about 2004) it reminded me that I used to blog more freely before I didn’t feel the constraints of titles, tags, potential audience, and a million other things. (I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate!)

Been having a weird week so far. Sometimes I have these “lapses”… not sure what else to call ‘em. Oh and first of all, if my mom reads this (which I don’t think she does lately, she’s been so busy with other things) DON’T GET ALL WORRIED ABOUT ME. It’s a characteristic of depression, unfortunately; sometimes, even though I’m taking my meds and doing everything I’m supposed to do to take care of myself, I have bad days or weeks. Often I can’t put my finger on a particular “trigger,” but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

I really need to find a therapist that doesn’t suck. Truthfully, I haven’t had a good therapist since I lived in Texas. She was one of the only good things about living there. Her, and my apartment. And being driving distance from Niki. That was basically it.

Anyway, one thing that I’ve identified that has been bothering me is that I’m just so ready to find our house and move out of our apartment. For the longest time I was not at all worked up about home-ownership (unlike a lot of other people who just seemed to jump into it because it was “the thing to do,” even though they hadn’t done any proper planning) but I always figured when the time came for it to be right for me, I would know. And now it’s here, and I know. I’m not living paycheck-to-paycheck anymore (fingers crossed that it stays that way!), Rusty and I are together, I don’t want to leave Atlanta, etc. - it all makes sense. I think being mentally ready to move on - mentally already having moved on, in some ways - heightens my frustration. I feel like things are breaking all the time. Like this week, our garbage disposal broke twice (and as of now isn’t fixed for good yet). I try not to complain because I know about having it better than a lot of people, blah blah. But this is my blog so deal.

It’s very important to me to have a “home base” where I truly feel at home, and where things are clean, organized, in their place, and feel comfortable. For a long time that place was our apartment, but increasingly I don’t feel that way about it - I just feel annoyed. I want furniture that isn’t made out of particle board. I’m tired of concrete floors. I hate that there are marks on our walls from where the movers banged shit around when we moved in. All these things didn’t used to bother me (well, the marks on the walls always did), but now they do, and I can only conclude it’s because I’m ready to move on to the next stage. I’m annoyed with nothing feeling “settled.”

I’m sick of: strange noises coming from the upstairs neighbors’ apartment, as if they’re running a wood shop (seriously, we’ve heard sawing noises); the kid in some apartment somewhere that I can always hear from my bathroom, who screams and wails all the freaking time; weird smells in the hallway because apparently some of our neighbors are disgusting; the Phantom Pooper.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no sparkly illusions about home-ownership being the solution to all problems oh except for the part where if anything breaks you have to fix it yourself and buy your own HVAC unit etc. etc. But I am ready.

I felt a little better last night after talking to Rusty about some of this. But I still feel kind of out of whack (<– correct spelling?).

Here are some photos of houses I like:

(as seen here)

(as seen here)

More later.

We did more of the “driving around looking at houses” routine today. One of the places we visited was Kirkwood - and I absolutely loved it! Kirkwood has definitely been catapulted to the top of the list of places we’re considering, no question. I like the little downtown/village area (even the new condo development thing they built isn’t as obnoxious as in some other places) and I just had a good gut feeling from it overall.

East Atlanta is currently second on our list of preferred places, although some of the people who live there are annoying, and I prefer to minimize drama in my life, so I there’s that to consider. It’s the same reason, albeit on a much smaller scale, that we’re not worked up about Midtown. (Rusty mentioned this in his post a few days ago, and Joeventures touched on it in a comment.) Living in Midtown would be nice because it’s close to work and is very walkable, Piedmont Park is right there, it’s centrally located… but so many of the people just suck! For example, here’s their latest trick. Part of me feels like we should move there and infiltrate the MNA, start a counter-revolution, and get Steve Gower thrown out in a coup; but realistically, I don’t know if my blood pressure could handle it. So, I’m torn. I would like to live in Midtown for the location, and if we found a really awesome deal we would definitely consider it; but being surrounded by a bunch of assholes is certainly a huge deterrent.

We’ve ruled out Grant Park and a lot of the North Decatur area, like the area around Northlake Mall and other stuff off of Clairmont and Lavista. We still like Westview and Adair Park, but Kirkwood and EAV win for walkability. Another place we discovered today, that we like and is surprisingly affordable, is the Medlock Park/University Heights area. One downside to it, though, is that a lot of the houses have only one bathroom (that was a trend in the early 1950s, apparently!), and that’s pretty much a deal-breaker for us.

Other areas still to explore: Home Park; Historic West End; Brookwood; Castleberry Hill; northwest/Bolton/Howell Mill area.

Here are some photos of one of our favorite houses that we saw today (which is moot, of course, since it won’t be on the market come January), a renovated 3bd/2ba built in 1928…

(I sized them down to fit my layout, which made them look a little distorted. My bad.)

Aside: the Georgia MLS site uses Ajax in a way that doesn’t suck. There should be an award for that.

I have several posts on particular topics saved as drafts, but since I’ll probably never actually write them all, I decided I’ll just do one post addressing all or most of them. Besides, reading my archives (which I’ve been doing periodically over the past week or so, as I slowly go through and tag the old pre-WP entries and update old URLs) made me remember that that’s how I used to write my blog all the time, that’s what comes naturally to me, and that’s why and how I started blogging in the first place. So, back to basics!
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This morning, Rusty and I went to look at some houses on the west side of town. Before this we had looked in East Atlanta, Kirkwood, Edgewood, Grant Park, Midway (an area just south of Decatur), and some other parts of unincorporated Dekalb County, such as near where Avondale Mall used to be. We want to see and consider as many parts of town as possible, so that we can make an informed decision about where we want to live. We were interested in particular in Westview after reading this blog, and because a friend of mine from SPARK bought a house there last year.

We drove through Cascade Heights, Adams Park, Adair Park, Westview, and a little bit of West End. And probably some other places too - those are just what I remember from sign toppers. Turns out Westview is very cute, just like the blog had said; sure there are some ramshackle houses and foreclosures ready to be auctioned, but hey, it’s a neighborhood “in transition” (I really hate that term). The little village center reminds me of East Atlanta, and I bet it’s only a matter of time before a coffee shop opens there.

We also liked Adair Park. Initially we planned to go there to see if it was the ghetto, because we’d found what looked like the perfect house, at least from its online ad, and that’s where it is. We had been to Adair Park once before, in December, when we went to photograph the historic and sadly decaying Adair Park Elementary School; but we didn’t see much of the area at that time, as we just went to the school and then straight back home.

It was funny because you always hear people talk so badly about the “west side” and make comments about it being “rough” and, well, the ghetto - which is exactly why we went to check it out! As I mentioned on Twitter, driving around these neighborhoods made us realize (not that it was a surprise; so I guess I should say remember instead of realize) that a lot of the time when people say somewhere is “the ghetto” it’s just not-so-thinly-veiled racism. What I think of as “the ghetto” is an area that doesn’t seem to have a sense of permanence - lots of vacant houses, rental houses with revolving tenants, and people wandering around as if they have nowhere to be, for example. We’ve gotten that feeling from some parts of Grant Park and other “east side” intown neighborhoods. Whereas in Adair Park and Westview, there were active neighborhood organizations (signs everywhere for meetings), not many people just wandering around aimlessly, and it felt like the place was more stable and well-maintained and that a lot of the people living there had been there a while.

I know it’s tough to really make any coherent statements about this at all in Atlanta, because the reality is that a lot of places, one street is fine and the next street is sketchy. But just from this morning and our other driving-around jaunts, this is the impression we’ve gotten so far in general.

As for that “perfect house” I mentioned, I know we need to get over it, because it won’t be on the market when we’re actually ready to buy (early next year). Even if we could talk a seller into buying out our lease right now, realistically we need to save up some more money anyway. But here are a few photos of it, from the online ad:

(Yes, the kitchen is painted a shade strikingly close to Vols orange. So maybe it’s not 100% perfect!)

We need to do more research about all the areas of town we’re considering, but just thought I’d share some of our impressions from this morning. All is not always as it seems!

I have a longer post in the works, but I’ve been bust at work today so I haven’t had time to shape it into anything coherent. But since the GDBF and I in the early stages of house-hunting (it’ll be early next year when we actually do this thing) and I’m the type of person who meticulously researches anything new (aside from a few unfortunate exceptions) and tries to be as educated as possible before making important decisions, I’ve basically been interviewing all my coworkers who are homeowners about their houses. So now I’m turning to my blog readers as well. If you own a home in metro ATL, lay it on me: what do you like about your house/condo/whatever, the neighborhood, etc., what do you not like… anything you can think of that you feel like sharing. Thanks in advance!

ETA: Because I’m not a moron, I can figure out things like “lots of electrical outlets” and “nice neighborhood.” This is exactly why I want to hear specifically from people who own homes in Atlanta. I want to hear about things like what you like/dislike about your neighborhood, what your taxes are like, what your HOA (if there is one) is like, etc. Joeventures’ comment is a good example.

This is my initial list. Rusty might have other things to add that are important to him.

• Energy efficient - So our power bill won’t be exorbitant (this is probably my #1 priority)
• Good plumbing, wiring, etc.
• Room for a permanent pole
• Two bathrooms - It’s very important to me to have my own bathroom.
• Inside the Perimeter
• Not too big - I don’t want to accumulate a lot of crap just for the sake of filling up space; and anyway, big houses don’t feel “homey” to me.
• Small/low-maintenance yard (plant a few shrubs, pay somebody to cut the grass every one in a while, and you’re done) OR a patio home
• Hardwood floors - Not a dealbreaker, but a very strong preference. Carpet isn’t as hygienic or as aesthetically pleasing.