We didn’t have Dad’s funeral until the 2nd week of January.
Two of my sisters live in Los Angeles and the youngest of us lives in Madison.
It took some juggling of schedules with so that’s why it needed to be delayed.
Not going into too much detail here but it all turned out beautifully.
We have a large extended family on both sides as well as many family friends who all showed up to celebrate our Dad’s life.
And then it was done.
Roy and I were living in the family home with my Dad from 2021.
It was weird walking around the house when my Dad was in the hospital but we were of the belief that he was going to go through rehab and come back home.
After Dad passed away it felt really weird.
We had a routine with him, which included him visiting my sister in Madison, sometimes for a week or ten days. So, we kept feeling like he was just visiting with my sister and her son and we’d be meeting her halfway to pick him up like we had been doing over the last few years.
At the luncheon after the funeral, we had people asking us if we were going to stay living in the house. In those moments we were saying yes at least for the time being. I mean we knew that we wanted a place of our own at some point but we needed time to get our ducks in a row with finances, etc. At one point we considered just staying in the family home and making it ours but the more we thought about it we knew that the layout, etc. just wasn’t going to work for us. We wanted a home that would be ours.
We lost a home in Illinois to foreclosure a little over ten years before that.
We moved back to Kenosha to be close to be closer to my parents and a contract job that Roy had been hired for in the summer of 2013 that was an hour and 15 minutes from the house in Illinois that we were losing anyway. His daughter was staying there till the foreclosure happened. We rented an apartment that was pretty reasonable and five minutes away from my parents.
In January of this year and after the funeral we briefly looked into renting again. The apartment we moved out of to live with Dad was pretty spacious. 1500 sq. feet on one floor, neighbors on on one side, a good sized garage right below us. When we moved in it was aroud $1150 a month. When we were moving out it was going to go to $1700 a month and by the time we were looking again this year that same apartment was $2000 a month. No Way!
We looked more closely at our finances and figured out that buying a house was even more attractive and sensible for us. We knew that we could get a mortgage for around 500 a month which would be affordable for the way we live. So, we started looking more seriously by the end of January. The first thing we did was to contact the real estate agent who helped us when we bought our town house and the house we lost in Illinois. We knew she wasn’t licensed in Wisconsin but she recommended an agent for us who is licensed here.
We gave her our wish list and our budget after speaking with her on the phone. Anything with a Homeowners Association attached was our big deal breaker. We dealt with that in Illinois. Not happening again EVER. Our feeling about that is you might as well rent. We don’t want anyone telling us what we can or can not do with property we own.
Our focus was a ranch house with a basement. We saw one we wanted to look at on the other side of town but by the time we tried to arrange a walk through it was already under contract. We walked through a couple of homes that were in our budget but not exactly what we were looking for. One was a brand new home that was just a few blocks from us. It was so new it wasn’t even on Google Maps. It was part of a neighborhood revitalization and we would have to fill in paperwork to prove we qualified financially. They were looking for lower income people and we knew that, thankfully, we weren’t in that category.
And this is where I am stopping for today.