Now it can be told

So, I bought a house.

I purposely didn’t say much about it; I was still in the option period, so I could still change my mind (up until today), so I figured, let’s not jinx things here. And it was right down to today, sorting things out (stuff on the inspection report, asking the sellers for money for it, blah blah typical buying an 80 year old house stuff). But… we’re done with that, the option period is over. So barring some major catastrophe… I bought a house.

So, the house – it’s a cute little bungalow in Norhill Heights, the section of the Heights just east of the central part, very pretty, deed restricted. The house is very nice, a little bungalow, plus attached to the garage is a finished room with HVAC and a full bath – guest quarters!

The thing that sold me on it was the street. I saw a house that I liked better, but it was in a slightly sketchy spot near Airline Drive. And I kept driving past one then the other thinking, “This neighborhood makes me sad and leaves me wishing some of these houses would get sold to people who’d fix them up” whereas the other just was rows of well-maintained bungalows with people sitting on porches and talking to their neighbors and walking their dogs or their loinfruit… and I realized, you can change the house, it’s hard to change the neighborhood.

And I don’t need to change the house, thought I have to put in a little additional fencing, take care of two larger repairs (the subject of the last several days of back and forth), and then do a zillion little things.

But: it’s tranquil, it’s charming, it has an excellent kitchen, it has a good yard for Teddy. There’s a nice park nearby, and a street with a big esplanade – not as nice as Heights Boulevard but good for walks. It’s 3 miles from work. And after driving through all hours of day and night I have yet to hear the thud thud thud of the subwoofer, a big improvement over my current otherwise quite nice street.

Closing is early in July, move in by the end of the month!

(For anyone outside of Houston curious about the location you can read about the neighborhood here. I really enjoyed reading the history of how it was built as one of the city’s first suburban subdivisions, back when this was suburbia and not the inner city – or as MWK and I call it, inside the Peripherique!).