The Housening

Closed on the new house. It would honestly have taken ten minutes had we not been sitting around chatting before and after. Both agents said it had been the easiest sale they’d had in quite some time. Which makes me feel bad, I should have made a pain of myself.

At any rate, that’s one hurdle cleared. Coming sharply into view are several dozen new ones, like moving, dealing with utilities, school changes, etc. Oh, and we have to get the normal improvements done. Blinds started going up (until the drill ran out of juice). We also had to get new garage door openers. That’s been a pain, I can’t get the new pin code panel to connect to the damn thing. Whatever.

So, utilities. This has turned out to be annoying, though not for the reason you’d think. The power and county water are the only options so it’s easy to sign up for them. And I’ve ranted incessantly about Comcast being the only option for decent internet at the new place so I won’t cover that now. Garbage… oh, forgot that one, hang on.

Ok, signed up there too. Anyway, natural gas. This one annoys the hell out of me. There’s ONE provider with ONE set of gas lines and ONE product. So why the hell am I required to choose a middleman to act between me and the provider? How does this help me? It doesn’t, because the fees I’m paying here are only going to be jacked up a bit to cover the cost of the company’s advertising, administrative overhead, etc. This annoys the hell out of me. I can see instances where de-regulation are good but this is just giving a sort of illusion of choice to decide which go-between is going to fleece me least. Luckily the power provider at the new house also does gas servicing, so maybe I’ll luck out and find they do a dual deal discount kinda thing.

Otherwise, it’s going ok. I’m really damn tired though. And of course puttering around the new place is odd, it still feels like I’m hanging out in someone else’s house. But it’s a very big hurdle and a load of paperwork handled. And a great deal of pride in moving my family to a nicer, more stable, safer place. It should be a great place to live.