Building A Dream Home

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My $150,000 windfall arrived like a boon from another planet, one wholly intent upon the happiness of a single inhabitant of Earth: me! A Philadelphia native, sunny California still called my name as loudly as it had when I was six years old and I told my father, “I’m moving to California!”

After an exhaustive search, I found foreclosure.com and my dream home. It was a white two-bedroom two-bath built into a Laguna Hills knoll that bordered Irvine. My boyfriend, Justin, who was studying computer science at the local University of California, could finally stop paying rent! It was perfect, with one caveat; it needed a little work!

A scraggly Joshua tree guarded our tiny front yard, swaying heavily in the balmy ocean breeze. Our new home was a short sale, one where the bank assumed a previous owner’s remaining mortgage. The bank’s major design was never to be a landlord, so the entire package only cost $64,900! This totaled $72,688 after closing fees and taxes.

I have Type I Diabetes, and my father had two weeks vacation, so he volunteered to help me move and remodel if I flew him home. No problem! We easily established that I needed my lightweight pickup truck, so we hauled everything. This included my black iron sleigh-bed with pillow top, dishes, furniture, computer, books, clothing, desk, and sixty-five pound scared-of-thunder-backfires-wind-and-big-rigs rescued greyhound, Abel: instant 2,703 mile adventure!

The 4x8’ cargo trailer U-haul cost $420.00. Abel comfortably perched atop my towels behind my truck seats while my dad, a mechanical engineer, ate and slept through the eastern states. We split driving schedules, so we didn’t need a motel room. My red stick shift had a ten gallon ta...

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...with matching blue accents which would match the bathroom. Its primary color was golden with interwoven leaf designs. Beneath our bed, I placed a hardy black version. Justin can’t stand sunlight; I tease him that if he had his way, we’d live in a bat cave. While our new home wasn’t, one of our last actions was to make certain he was comfortable. We bought heavy blinds for every upstairs bedroom window totaling $8,000.00.

Discounting the Joshua tree, which consumed much of our tiny yard, our outside was color barren, so dad and I constructed a circular garden of square quartz sandstones around the tree. We added rosy pebbles for water percolation the day before he flew back to Philadelphia and considered ourselves accomplished home healers and savers. Even with the extreme flooring expenses, we finished with $49,192.92 remaining in our appliance fund.

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