The House-Hunting Saga - pt 1
Created | Updated Jun 22, 2003
Its known - to the ego-centric Americans at least - as the American Dream. There is little doubt in my mind that it is also the English Dream, the Australian Dream, the Egyptian Dream, etc. So, for the purposes of universal understanding, I'll just call it the Earthling Dream.
It began for me when I was young. Throughout my childhood, even though my family moved many times, we always had a certain control over our living space: we had pets, we could remodel or paint, we could plant what we wanted outside. Responsibilities naturally came with this - mowing the lawn, weeding, fixing the plumbing - but they were worth it for one simple reason: it was our *home*.
Since leaving for college many more years ago than I like to think, I have done without that freedom. In college proper we were not allowed to make any permanent changes to the dorm walls (to the point that thumb tacks were not allowed because they would leave holes) or to keep pets that "could not survive at least 24 hours submerged under water". Needless to say, this cramped my style.
Then we moved into an apartment just off campus. Sadly, although holes in the walls were allowed there, the other restrictions were just as strenuous. Keep the TV turned down, no visitors and don't even think about a pet of any kind.
Hope sprung briefly to life when we moved to Denver. Surely now we would be able to find a place to live with less draconian pet and remodelling policies. Perhaps we could even purchase our own place. (Ah, dream of my heart!) This, of course was not to be. Sadly, we found that apartment policies world wide - or at least through out the state of Colorado - were fairly universal on these points. Besides, the jobs that we managed to find were just barely enough to keep us from starving.
New jobs with substantial raises had us searching again for new living quarters just two years later. This search led us to the place we currently live: a nice, quiet apartment complex with many of the same problems of any other, but comfortable enough that the restrictions didn't bind as much.
Until recently, that is. Now, I have put my foot down. I will have my dream: a home of my own where animals frolic and no wall is an unimaginative white - unless it looks really good that way. And this dream - like so many others - is proving to be more work than I could ever have imagined. Is it worth it? Of course! And you, my friends, will be given the chance to see exactly how worth it my dream is.
