Hoo boy did I luck out!

My family is still back in North Dakota until the end of the school year. In the meantime I’m ettling into new job and new house – and thereby hangs a tale.

I was looking for a house with two, maybe three bedrooms if it wasn’t too dear. First I stumbled across a smallish two-bedroom that looked OK, because it had a lot of storage space in the detached garage.

Too bad it had water in the basement. That’s a deal-breaker, we had to move out of one place after the basement got damp, because my son seems to be highly allergic to mold.

Then I found a beautiful place with a fenced yard on a cul-de-sac. Oops, missed it by less than a week.

So one evening I checked out a movie, and afterwards wandered into a bar.

No, no, no! A respectable bar filled with middle-aged people.

At any rate, some were talking about real estate, how tough the rental housing market was, and how those with houses to rent kind of didn’t like the fact the primary customer base is college students.

Do I have to explain to anyone students are kind of hard on houses?

At any rate, I was shooting the bull with a gentleman who turned out to be a real estate guy, who said, “I think I can get you a house.”

Boy did he ever!

An elderly gentleman retired and moved into a smaller place. He had a house on the market for a year – not moving. The agent talked him into renting it out for a year to see if the market might recover in that time.

It’s got four bedrooms upstairs, a wood-paneled study to die for, a huge living room, attached garage that’s going to be my martial arts school, (my bud Terry Gibson started out that way,) and a basement I can move into during the winter.There’s a nice yard, but not so big it’ll be a hassle to take care of.

Price?

Less than we’re paying for the cramped duplex in Valley City.

I told my wife, “You’ll love it, but don’t get used to it. This fell out of heaven into our laps.”

There is one teensy little caveat, it’s heated with fuel oil. You have to buy that in big lots evidently, like a three-month heating bill that falls on you all at once. However I’ve found a company that has a plan you can estimate a year’s average consumption and spread the payment out on a month-to-month basis.

So next steps:

1) Get family moved.
2) Get martial arts lessons advertising.
3) Get moving on plans to self-syndicate columns.