Where I've Lived - Part VI

[vakkotaur]

This is probably not last in the series, but it is where I live now, so any Part VII won't be along very soon.

While living at the place on North Park, I'd visited and had visits from jmaynard. Without going into detail, we eventually decided it'd be easier all around if we happened to live in the same house. Things worked out such that he could move more easily than I could, and the place on North Park was too small for two people and all of their stuff.

We looked at a few places, to buy, not rent. The house had to be big enough. There had to be a two car garage. And the place had to be close enough to the telco CO for DSL to work. The place on Oakwood was the one that met all the conditions, though a little work was needed. This was mainly getting a working phone and LAN network set up through the place. The original phone wiring was a useless mess, so we didn't even bother trying to use it.

The house on Oakwood is on a corner lot, but there are no sidewalks in the neighborhood which is good and bad. What's bad is that just going out for a walk means walking on the street and the one street that isn't a dead end or link between dead ends has fairly heavy (for Fairmont) traffic. On the good side, no sidewalks means no sidewalks to shovel in the Winter. Just the short driveway, which is too short to park on and close the garage door, and the walk to the house.

The place is on a bit of a hill, or perhaps just about the start of a valley. Down in the valley is Hall Lake. It's not lakefront property, though the lake can be seen from there. It's up enough that flooding seems not to be a problem - we moved in right after a rather wet year and there was no issue. The houses closer to the lake might have had problems. There are couple trees in the front yard, a bit of odd brickwork in the lawn, like a place for a small (square yard?) garden. There's a bit more brickwork at the corner of the lot where some plants grow. I haven't bothered trying to identify them.

The garage is big enough, and actually has an attic rather than bare beams and such. A previous owner had done some auto work and so had insulated the garage and installed a furnace. This furnace eventually gave out with a failure that meant it would be better to replace than repair, but even replacement would be rather costly. As far as I was concerned, we could do without. The place would still shelter the cars, and it holds heat fairly well.

The house itself is a two story, or rather, a basement, two floors for living, and an attic. Half of the basement is finished or mostly so. There's a desk and a bed here, which makes things a bit easier if one of is going to be up late or leaving really early. That way the other can sleep on a different level of the house and not be too affected by any moving around. The other half of the basement holds the furnace and water heater and is more workshop like, as I tend to expect a basement to like. The stairway divides the sections.

Walking in the front door, one sees the stair way to the second floor. To the right is a large living room, and to the left is a smaller dining room. Beyond that is the kitchen. Near the back door is the access to the stairway to the basement. All the stairways are stacked one over the other. There is a half-bathroom near the head of the stairs, some room for a coat rack, and a small space for washer-dryer stack. We wound up getting all new appliances, save for the dishwasher which was built into the kitchen. This is the first place where I've lived where the dishwasher was a machine.

Going upstairs, there's a bit of a landing and a door to the outside. There's a small porch of sorts over the back door through that door. To the left is the main bathroom, and a bit behind and to the left is the office where Jay & I seem to spend most of time when at home. To the right is the machine room where most of the computers are kept. Back and to the right is the main bedroom, with a large closet. The closet has a built-in dresser and a hole in the wall to the bedroom so a TV can be (and is) put there without taking up bedroom space. From this room (not the closet), there is access to the attic. There is both the normal door to the stairway and a horizontal door at the top of the stairway. One nice touch is that the attic light switch controls an indicator light on the bedroom wall, to remind you if you left the attic lights on.

Something else new for me is the central air conditioning. I think everywhere I've lived has had air conditioning, though by a window unit. This place has central air conditioning, though it was not built with it in mind. The ductwork was clearly installed with only heating in mind, which is to be expected for a place built in 1949 in Minnesota. Seeing the central air conditioning, we figured the window unit I had at North Park would not be needed, so I gave that to my sister. She and her housemate (and all their pets) make good use of it in the Summer. It turned out that the machine room got rather hot, so we wound up getting another window unit just for that. It was an expense, but not a big one, and we got a new unit, and the remote control that it has actually works out to be a really good idea the way the room is arranged.

One part of moving in together was the merging our computer networks. Jay names his machines for Animaniacs characters, and when I started out I very nearly did as well. But I decided not to as I knew a few folks who did that and it could get confusing. "I'm having trouble with Pinky." "Which Pinky?" Eventually I settled on naming machines after breeds of horses. It worked out, there was no question of whose machine was percheron. So when Jay and I put all our machines on the same network, there was no problem with conflicting names.

The neighborhood is generally quiet. The neighbor that does occasionally play loud music doesn't do it often and only does so at reasonable hours. There are some things new to me, not that I hadn't known of them, just hadn't had them before: Central air conditioning, the dishwasher, the garbage disposal (which is why I tend to put knives and forks and such in one sink basin and not the other), the electric garage door opener. Cue Flanders and Swan... Of course, I have the easier time adjusting. Jay is finding out what real Winters can be like.