Frumpy Mom: Amazingly, I bought a house

If you are reading this, you have probably at some time in your life owned a home because newspaper readers are just that sort of people.

In fact, there’s been research showing that many people don’t start reading the newspaper until after they buy a house, presumably to keep track of whether or not they made a good investment.

Generally, purchasing your own home is the best investment that most of us will ever make unless you bought it in 2008 in a speculative market that crashed two weeks later.

If so, I’m sorry. I was underwater too in those days, but it all worked out OK.

I bought my first house in 1999 when I was already middle-aged because I foolishly thought that no one would ever lend me enough money to buy one.

Newspaper reporters can be surprisingly clueless about money (unless they’re business reporters) because none of us would ever get into this poorly paid profession if we cared about earning a decent wage.

I mean, hello. A house costs a lot of money, even back then. I had never owned anything more expensive than a shelter cat, which, I agree, can be darned costly, especially if you’re ever crazy enough to actually take it to the veterinarian.

But when you get to a certain age, you’re suddenly overtaken by a longing that has nothing to do with chocolate: To be rid of landlords.

You just want your own house, where you can paint the walls black and put flamingo lawn ornaments out front and no one can stop you, unless, of course, you have a homeowners’ association.

Those people will never put up with that sort of crap. I once wrote a story about a woman who was in trouble because she planted flowers in her entryway that were not in the “approved color palate” for her neighborhood.

As people said about Hilary Clinton, “Lock ‘er up!”

Happily, our street does not have a homeowners’ association, and somehow we have all survived.

The only reason I even own a house today is because I happened to be talking on the phone to my friend Liz Weston, who’s a financial guru, while I was watching people go into an open house across the street for a shabby little bungalow I couldn’t afford.

“I wish I could buy a house,” I told Liz wistfully, even though I liked my rental bungalow.

“You can buy a house,” she told me. “How much money do you make?”

I told her, and she got out her trusty calculator. Liz always has a calculator at hand, even in the bathroom. “You can borrow $200,000,” she told me.

My head started reeling and I hyperventilated. Who would be crazy enough to lend me $200,000? I thought to myself. Well, I subsequently went to a few banks and discovered that lots of places would. This was almost more than my small brain could process, but I went ahead and started looking.

Back then, you could buy a house for $200,000 – just not one anywhere you actually wanted to live.

So I started spending every waking moment searching the more disreputable neighborhoods, looking for my dream home.

Surprise, surprise. I didn’t find it. So, I lowered my sights and started looking for a place that I could at least stand to occupy, even if it wasn’t my dream home.

If I found a possibility, I would stand outside it at night, seeing how actually scary the street was. If at least three people walked by with guns or stab wounds, I took it off the list.

I love historic homes, so I eventually ended up with a 1914 shingle bungalow that had been converted into a duplex and also had a tiny back house.

It was located in a “senseless-killing neighborhood,” as Joan Didion used to say. Still, I’d been a crime reporter for years, so a few random gunshots here and there didn’t bother me much. They weren’t shooting at me.  And I loved the big front porch that was a perfect stage for holiday decorations.

I paid $191,000 for that gem, and I was able to rent out the extra space which helped pay my mortgage. That was the first place I brought my adoptive kids when they came to live with me as foster children.

One thing I liked about living there was that no one had any money, so my kids were relatively affluent, meaning their backyard swing set was always full of neighborhood kids, and they never had snits over needing to own $200 sneakers.

But when there was a fatal gang shooting across the street, I decided maybe that wasn’t the best neighborhood for families – at least those who could escape. We did.

We moved into an ugly 1952 tract home in bland suburbia, where we still live today, into a house that seemed ridiculously expensive at the time. Today, I couldn’t even afford to buy the garage. The most fabulous cultural attraction of our neighborhood is that there are three grocery stores within spitting distance. But the schools are good.

When I moved in here as a single mom with two little kids, the move was so exhausting that I swore to myself that I would never move again.

“The next time I move, it will be when the kids put me in a home,” I told myself, as I made yet another call to hook up some utility or another while trying to ascertain if my leg muscles were still frozen up.

And, so here I am. Counting my blessings.

Source: Orange County Register