What to write? “Pains of owning a sweet home”

With my change in Job, I now have some time to write more frequently on my memories blog… too many topics on my mind. Kids, Family, Work, my lazy life style, workout’s, getting back to swim, pains of owning a home… I will stop here. I guess I have a topic now – “Pains of owning a home”

When I started job back in 2004, it added extra income to family.. My crazy brain started thinking about options to invest that extra income. Like any other desi, Investing in a home seemed to be the best option as the housing market is in rocket raise. With no knowledge in financial sector and not viewing big picture with over enthusiasm, we started looking for a home. first home we saw, we signed up a new construction, thinking you can select all the options and customize to your own needs, not knowing the pains of selection and cost associated with it.

Everything went fine, construction started and we both lost jobs at same time, knowing that, it added lot of pressure and we said we will back-out from buying home, Done, we are out of buying this home. After 2 months we both are back in jobs and we went back to buying the same home, feeling very emotionally attached to that home 🙂 Again, the same childhood un matured status of brains. We paid $15k extra to the initial amount we signed earlier and finally became home owners for our Dream home. Then the crocodile festival started 🙂

I was pregnant with Ani when we moved into our new home, it’s very big home for just 2 of us. Maintenance increased, time spent on cleaning inside, yard work, filling it up with furniture.. Baby stuff.. Don’t know when all our time flew by. So many memories attached to this home, both Ani & Rishi were born here and the precious fist years of them are all around here.

Ani started his Kindergarten and then we slowly realized that the school district matters in raising kids. Again a blunder we made, on buying a new home with no knowledge. Many people advised about school district, but we are not ready to accept at that time 🙂

We planned to buy a different home in good school district and thinking we can sell this, but the housing market came on its knees, since we bought it, no way we will get what we paid for, so we decided to rent this house.

After so much of research and shopping around, settled for a home in chesterfield. This time we took consideration of location, schools etc… it’s a good buy. We got the basement finished to our taste. Still the joy of maintenance exists with a bonus of big trees in the yard 🙂

When fall starts, leaves fill in, when spring starts Pollen fill in – plus the fun of mowing about half acre yard in summer. SV loves his yard time, I am an outdoor person too, but not a motivated yard worker 🙁

I think all the time spent on these is waste. I would rather pay someone to do these jobs and spend my time on my own interests. I already have a maid to help with inside. But it’s hard to have my sweet husband convince to this idea when it comes to yard work.

I already planned to move out of this maintenance business, when kids go to college :-). I will sure move to a maintenance free home, definitely with no yard work. I definitely agree that kids have a blast in big homes and big yards. Once they move out, no point of still keeping them.

6-8 more years to get that point, until then I will try to convince my sweet heart to outsource yard work 🙂

All these sweet struggles gives me the joy of raising my wonderful family, so no complaints here!