constance | Note to self: make house post filter.

After agonizing about what to do for three days, viewing both houses a second time, and receiving advice, solicited and unsolicited, from just about everyone I ever met, I made a decision about which house I wanted to make a bid on, and then I bid on it. Yep. I absolutely did, and now my fate sits in the hands of one (1) serviceman off to Iraq, two (2) real estate agents, one (1) lending company, and one (1) house inspector. However we hook up in the next few days will determine the next few years of my life.

Holy shit, dudes. I have just signed a piece of paper that says I am perfectly willing to go into many thousands of dollars' worth of debt in order to have a place to live. And no, I am not anxious at all. Why do you ask?

Which bachelor did I choose?

Well, in the end, I let my head rule, and picked Bachelor No. 2, of the "round room" and pretty neighborhood (the good news, especially for me and

dahlia_777, is that I don't think this neighborhood is quite as snooty as I at first thought, though it does have some snooty bits to it. Mixed neighborhood or no, though, I'd probably have gone for Bachelor No. 1 if I were in this for the long haul and I planned to live in this house for the next twenty years, but as things stand, with the likelihood that in the next five to ten years I will end up moving away, this seemed like the best investment.

Let us sound a rousing cheer for Bachelor No. 2, which I have temporarily (if confusingly) named Mary Agnes:

HIP HIP HURRAH!

And now I would like to take you on a tour. This tour will consist solely of pictures taken from inside my car or the house, as there was a hairstyle-obliterating heavy mist floating about while we were there. We will do the outside tour later, if you like. Well, who am I kidding. We will do the outside tour later, regardless of whether you like it or not. You are welcome to skip it, though.

First up: the front hall.

This picture is taken from the front door. We're standing in what the seller thinks is a living room but I say is a study, just because it's pretty small. (I forgot to take a picture, but it has a fireplace and three windows, and not too much room for anything else.) To the left, there's a set of double French doors which opens onto a closetless bedroom that would make a perfect living room. Straight ahead are the double French doors to the dining room, and the hall leads to the bedrooms and bath (on the left) and the kitchen and the gutted room which I am guessing was intended to be a sort of breakfast/family room when it was done (on the right).

I may have forgotten to document what the room actually looks like, but I did take pictures of the ceiling bits in this room that need to be patched:

and

This is the "living room:"

looking out onto the street, and

looking to the back. There are five windows in the room.

Next up, the dining room fireplace, because it's the best thing about the room, and the silliest; I was so enamored, I forgot to take extra pictures of the rest of the room:

But I will say that it has a door to the side bit of the wraparound front porch, and also a swinging door that still swings (in my experience, this is an astonishing novelty), and of course the lovely French doors leading to the front room.

If you walk through the swinging door, you walk into the family room:

and

If you remember, this was the room that had once been a butler's pantry and another room. The floors are worse than I remembered, but you can see the boxes of tile under the quadruple-windows on the far wall. I'm not sure if those tiles would work without stripping everything down to the subflooring, but. The laundry room and extra bath (with the house's only shower) open off this room. They are very poky and uninteresting, and there are no pictures.

I think I forgot to mention that at least one of the original cabinets survives in this room. It needs a lot of TLC, but I like it very much.

And with that, let us adjourn to the kitchen:

It's an okay kitchen. I love the triple window--I don't have a picture because the realtor was writing up the contracts in here and surprisingly did not want me to take a picture of her butt to post on the internet--and the high extra shelf, and the beadboard. There really isn't anything wrong with this kitchen. But I can't help feeling sad that the original kitchen is gone. I bet it was excellent.

From the kitchen, you walk out onto a deck. This picture of the back yard was taken from the deck:

There's nothing recognizable in this picture to give you a sense of scale, and everything's so overgrown that it's hard to judge size and distance and configuration. But this is taken from a story up, and that mysterious rusty iron thing that looks a bit like an ancient push-mower is about eight feet tall (and I have absolutely no idea what it is! Any guesses? ETA: maybe part of an old portable basketball goal?). There are three terraces to the yard, each about three feet lower than the last. The first two terraces are each about thirty feet deep, and the third, which is behind that chain-link fence, is about sixty. It's a pretty big back yard. But God, does it need shaping up.

Back inside the house, you exit the kitchen into that center hall. The hall widens out a bit at this end, and is separated from the front part by another French door. Off this wider bit of hall is a door to the back bedroom:

This is the biggest bedroom, but it's oddly shaped because two closets have been added in opposite corners of the room. Plus it is painted a dark greyish lavender. Which is a color that I kind of like on me, but not so much on walls. Ah well, though; paint's easy.

The bedroom opens up to a bathroom:

and

The tub is a bit bigger than I remembered, but the fixtures are undeniably pink. The same pink as my PINK SHOES, in fact. Which is a different pink from the wall tile. There are yet more shades of pink and green on the floor tile. But okay, yes, this is a bathroom to make you laugh; man, what else is there to do but laugh in a room like this, until you can just tear it all out?

I like the big cabinet. It's almost as tall as I am. The window is above eye level for me; I can't see out of it unless I stand on my tiptoes.

From the bathroom, there's another connecting door into the middle bedroom:

This one's smaller, but regular and square. It has a fireplace, one I'd forgotten about, so that there are four fireplaces altogether. The closet is tiny, but then, closets in old houses always are. And there's a door that leads back out to the center hall, which leads us back to the study, which concludes our tour.

Now, feel free to roam about on your own, but I will ask you to note that there are multiple phone jacks! And more than one outlet in each room! And tons of ceiling fans! And I also ask you to remember to look for the big magnolia in the front yard:

(There's also a pecan, but it's already lost most of its leaves and isn't very pleasing right now.)

And also, isn't the detailing on the chimneys very pretty?