Even Better Than a New House

Even Better Than a New House

Posted by Trevor

A few months ago, Kristy and I got the crazy idea that we should buy a house here in Bellevue.  Once we came to the realization that my job would likely keep us here for some time and we finally got over the fact that we live in a city of Subaru-driving hippies and beatnik poets, plopping a few hundred G's down for our own place seemed like the natural thing to do.

What they don't tell you is that buying a house is hard.  OK, maybe that's exactly what they tell you, but that's surely not what you hear when you're skipping arm-in-arm singing, "La la la! We're buying house!"  And it turns out that when you cram 150,000 high-tech professionals into a 10-mile radius, affordable housing takes an ugly turn towards the treacherous and dodgy.

Scenic view, spacious wooded property, corpses under the patio

Considering I still subconsiously translate every major purchase into how many big-screen TVs I could buy with the same money, every house we toured inevitably left me thinking how sweet it would be to have a room full of TVs.  And let's be honest: If you're going to go into serious multi-decade debt, it had better be for something as awesome as 1,250,000 square inches of Burn Notice and Modern Family.  So with that impeccable logic as our guide, we flipped the birdie to the housing market and decided to instead spend our life savings on more Gushers and Pop-Tarts.

But it's awfully hard to go back once you've decided you want to move.  You convince yourself how great it would be to choose your own carpet and paint job and how it would finally give you a perfect excuse to replace that $20 craigslist couch with something more comfortable and less likely to have been murdered in.  But when buying a house means sacrificing financial security and such basic human needs as buying name-brand Q-Tips, premium grade gasoline, and shopping at Albertson's, then that's a line I'm not willing to cross.

So we didn't.  Instead, we just bought a new couch and a rug and called it a day.

Worth only 3/4 of a big-screen TV

Before the new couch arrived, we had to figure out how to dispose of the old one.  I wanted to torch it and throw it over a cliff like I usually do with my old furniture, but Kristy objected.  Instead, I put it up for free on craigslist, and it was gone within the hour.  That was both unfortunate and unexpected because the new couch wasn't going to come for another week.  Usually, I consider myself a pretty smart guy, but I knew Kristy wouldn't be impressed this time.  However, after some quick thinking, I realized that if you prop up a flimsy old sofa mattress against a wall, it kind of looks like a couch for junkies.  Maybe she wouldn't notice the difference?  It wasn't pretty, but it got us through a season and a half of Castle.

If I had to choose between passing out here or in the gutter behind a bar, I guess it doesn't look so bad.

In other random news, I just got accepted into grad school at University of Washington to get a Master's degree in Computer Science Engineering, so "Go Huskies!"