Tag: homeownership

Not a day goes by

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m still subscribed to my former home’s community on NextDoor.  Partially, because it slipped through the cracks and I neglected to address it after I had moved out, but also in part because it’s turned into this inadvertent source of amusement, fascination and a constant reminder of how glad I am to not live in the community anymore. 

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the shit out of my old house.  The house itself was great, and if it were remotely possible to uproot homes, and plop them down onto other places like Sim City, I totally would.  It’s just that it just happened to exist in a community that went in completely the wrong direction from where I had hoped it would.

Needless to say, based on shit I read on NextDoor on nearly a daily basis, the neighborhood has progressively been getting worse since I moved out.  And after every single I read about disgruntled residents of my old community, and all the neighboring communities dealing with some unfortunate issues on too often of a basis, all I can do is shake my head and take a huge sigh of relief.

Like, the first few weeks of life after the move, I was admittedly in a state of unease at the general change in life.  But as the transition eased, and the NextDoor notifications continued to trickle in, with stories of break-ins, shared security cam recordings of suspicious activity, and oh yeah a shooting incident, all melancholy feelings were gone and completely replaced with pure, unadulterated relief.

Residents airing out their grievances, passively-aggressively shaming behaviors they don’t agree with, and my favorite, the rant featured above, are daily occurrences on NextDoor now, and it’s like a trainwreck that I can enjoy even more, now that I’m but a mere bystander, and not a fellow resident.

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So long, southside

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I’m feeling a little blue about having just sold my house, when the day was over, it was still a massive achievement in unloading, and opening up the doors to the various paths that the future has in store for me.  For every melancholy memory that makes me a little depressed that I’ve said goodbye to my old house, there are at two things I did not like about the area in which my house resided, which contributed to the general notion that I really wanted to get out of the obligation of the house.

For a long while, I’ve always thought of the reasons why the area in which my home resided was not a good place, but I often neglected to notate any of them, and eventually I’d forget some of them, inconvenient, for when I wanted to channel my frustrations with long commutes, or the feeling of despair of living in an area that did not have a whole lot of hope for the future.

I started a Google note file on May 28, 2016, simply entitled “reasons south of Atlanta is not a good place,” and told myself to add to it whenever I had something new to add.  The thought was that eventually one day when I successfully succeed in unloading the house and moving forward, I would have some notes to look back onto for my eventual post about saying farewell to my old area.  It’s a little surreal that that time has finally come, and despite the fact that I’m still feeling bummed about unloading my house, I am in a way relieved that it’s an area that I won’t really see myself going back to any time soon if I can help it.

Because of my general paranoia of the world, I never was very specific to where I lived.  Even now, I won’t get too specific, but I will admit that my old house was on the south side of Atlanta.  The half of the metropolitan Atlanta area south of I-20 that doesn’t get much acknowledgment or credit for anything, and the half of the metropolitan Atlanta area that pretty much has no hope for the future.

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November 22, 2004 – March 15, 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been keeping it quiet since it began snowballing, but me being me, I didn’t want to jinx anything and wanted to wait until it was basically a forgone conclusion before I did any sort of writing or talking about it in any sort of fashion.  It has been no secret that Jen and I worked our asses off a little while back in preparation for putting our house up on the market, and that less than two weeks ago, our house officially went up on the market.

However, just like that, the process has ended as frantically and as quickly as it started.  In the span of barely 13 days, my listed home was given numerous offers, one was selected, the buyer initiated inspections and the closing process, and today, I’m on the cusp of turning over the keys and signing over the title to the house to its new owners.

After 13 years, I will no longer be a homeowner.

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I’m in a bad place right now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not going to sugar coat the fact that over the span of my last posts, things haven’t exactly been going swimmingly for me in my life.  As much as people of the internet bemoaned and stated how much of a dumpster fire that the year 2016 was, I’d have to say that 2017 hasn’t exactly been a drastic improvement over the year removed.  If anything at all, I would say that I’ve been more stressed, more emotionally drained and more taxed this year than I was last.

So to update from the last time I sat down and wrote for a site that’s still down and out of commission, Jen and I finished moving out of the house.  The house is not only empty and completely vacated, it’s up on the market, and doing surprisingly well in terms of buyer interest and awareness that it’s on the market.  Obviously, interest does not equal it actually selling, so only time will tell just what happens with all these people and realtors marching in and out of my house on parade because I can see it happening because I still have security cameras that let me see timestamps of when people come and go.

Getting the house prepared for listing was a tremendously taxing task both physically and emotionally.  Every single day for just under two weeks, weekday and weekend, was spent painting walls, patching up gaps or holes in walls, painting walls, cleaning out belongings, painting walls, cleaning floors and painting walls. 

Painting walls is pretty much the worst activity ever.

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It’s like the ending to a very special episode

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Kind of quiet and without applause or music.  The screen just fades to black and then the credits roll.  Silence.

That’s what it kind of feels like every time I close the door to the garage of my house after setting the alarm, lately.  I sit down in my car, close the garage door, watching is in my rearview mirror as it comes down, always making sure it always goes all the way down and stays there, as if I’m concerned by tech-savvy thieves trying to pilfer the open/close signal and then rob me after I’m gone.  And then I back out of the driveway and I pull away, continuing to look at my house in the rearview mirror.  Often times, I verbalize the words “alarm set, garage closed,” so I can have some degree of self-confirmation that I’ve secured the place, before I often times get hit with a wave of paranoia 500 feet later that I forgot to do one or both.

With each time I do this in recent days, I’m ask myself if this is the last time I’ll be doing it.  The answer has always been “no,” because there’s always been more chores to finish, more walls to paint, more cleaning to do, and more things to haul away, whether it’s to trash, storage, or my new home.

However, today marks the day in which there might not be a “no” at the end of the day’s query.  If everything goes according to plan and schedule, my house for the past 13 years will be empty of all personal effects, and I will have effectively moved out entirely.  When I pull away from the house tonight, and ask if this will be the last time, the answer won’t quite be “yes,” but it’s also not necessarily going to be “no,” either.

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It’s funnier when it’s not applicable

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I make a lot of references to the Jessie Spano caffeine pill freakout from Saved by the Bell.  A lot of people make references to the Jessie Spano caffeine pill freakout from Saved by the Bell. It’s a great pop-cultural reference for when one is super excited about something, almost almost to the point of it being scary, or maybe it actually is scary.  Or maybe the part where she breaks down and talks about being scared is omitted, and it’s just a reference to the part where she sings I’m So Excited, all drugged out and addled that we all laugh at.

But how many people remember the context of the rest of the episode?  Why Jessie Spano was on “caffeine” pills in the first place?  I doubt nearly as many as the people who make references to the signing part actually do.

Jessie was taking speed because she felt that there weren’t enough hours in the day to study and cram for her lofty academic aspirations, and used the extra time not sleeping to hit the books.  Sure, it created a mild addiction and an eventual crash that led to the iconic exciting moment, but the context of it revolved around the perceived feeling that there is not enough time.

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The occasional heartache of moving

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have vague memories of when I was eight years old, moving from my birth home in (then-) rural Virginia to the bustle and civilization of Northern Virginia.  One of the things that stuck with me was that when my family pulled away from the house for the last time in our old Toyota Celica, was seeing a neighborhood girl that was my age standing in her front yard, and she waved at us.  I remember her name was Evan.  I remember being at an age where moving wasn’t that big of a deal, although my sister was pretty miffed at moving from an area where elementary school was K-5 to a place that was K-6, meaning she had to put up with one more year of elementary school and sharing the bus with a little brother.

When my family moved again when I was in the fifth grade, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal then either.  Sure, it kind of stunk knowing I’d have to start over again at another new school, but my family was doing well financially at that time, and we were moving into a huge baller home, and there was something exciting about switching schools mid-year.  It also helped that my new school was slightly behind in curriculum than my former one, so I literally coasted for a while before actually getting back to learning.

It was during my sophomore year of high school that my family moved again.  This one I remember being a little harder to cope with, mostly on account of the fact that I was a moody, broody 15-year old then, and the fact that the circumstances behind the move weren’t necessarily positive or free will; the restaurant business was going downhill, the family’s finances were following, and it was more like being forced to downsize and move to a smaller home, rather than it being a bright and promising change.  I didn’t particularly care for moving back then, but growing up has made me understand and accept why it was necessary.

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