Here’s an interesting exercise. Let’s assume that you were looking to buy a new residence and had, say, about $950,000 to splash on it.
Do you go for Place A:
…or Place B:
Okay, maybe it’s a trick question. While both places are listed for $950k, Place A is in Texas, USA and Place B is in Wales, UK.
Your choice in Comments, with reasons.
The last time I spent in the company of The Divine Sarah (and her hubby, shuddup you dirty-minded sods) was when she lived in her Colorado house. It was a lovely place, and I have to confess I did feel the occasional pang of envy.
Her new place? Apparently, not so lovely.
Of course, what hurt Sarah was that she moved the entirety of her old house’s contents into (I assume) a house of similar dimensions, and she and Dan brought everything with them. That, I could have told her, was always going to be a mistake, because a rule of thumb when moving is that you always repeat always de-clutter before the move.
When New Wife and I moved a couple years back, it helped that we were losing a bedroom (and its closets and its bathroom), so we had to get rid of an unconscionable number of things that we decided we were never going to need again. (Sarah talks of a couple SUVs of stuff headed to Goodwill: that’s beginner activity where I come from.)
What’s interesting is that of course I had to de-clutter bigly, back after Connie died and I had to empty our enormous Plano house (seven 30′ dumpsters… how’s that for clutter?) so I could remodel and sell the place.
And New Wife and I moved into an apartment, she bringing only a couple of suitcases-worth of her stuff from Seffrica, and I bringing only the remnants of the stuff I’d kept from the old house (less than a quarter of a single-car garage’s worth). And we still managed to accumulate possessions during our time in that apartment so that when we last moved, there were many trips made to Goodwill etc.
I might as well have been in the Army for all the moves I’ve made in my lifetime — the biggest one being from Seffrica to the Land Of The Free in The Great Wetback Episode of ’86 (three suitcases, from a huge townhouse in Johannesburg), and the next biggest was the aforementioned one from the Plano house.
Obviously, in terms of stuff let go, the Seffrican move caused the most: stereo set, a thousand or so albums, furniture, 400 bottles of wine — what the hell was I thinking? — clothing, a garage-full of tools and two cars. (Now that I think of it, even the relinquished clothing was ridiculous: a dozen suits, a dozen pairs of shoes, two dozen dress shirts… oy, it hurts my brain just to think about it. And by the way, all the clothing still fitted me, so it wasn’t even that any were particularly old or threadbare.)
Recently though, I’ve learned to be absolutely ruthless in paring back stuff. It helps that we have an apartment that cannot contain anything more than what we have, so whenever we see something we’d like to buy for the house, the first question is always what we’ll have to toss out — new stuff is replacement, not additional. This includes clothing, even.
Anyway, let me just give y’all an example of what I’m talking about. This is our breakfast nook/dining room:
And no, it wasn’t posed or set up, but completely impromptu: I was lying on the living-room couch and thought it would make an interesting still-life pic. (That’s why the side pieces of art aren’t hanging symmetrically, sue me. They are now, though.)
In Comments, feel free to share the details of your most wrenching move. Or just tell me what caused you the most anguish to let go…
I thought everyone knew this:
You’ve probably never given much thought to silica gel packets beyond noting that they’re a mild inconvenience.
The tiny white packets are often included by brands in deliveries of shoes and bags – and we typically throw them out without a second thought upon arrival.
But the silica gel packets contain tiny beans of solid silicon dioxide, a desiccant or drying agent, which means they can absorb up to 40 per cent of their weight in water.
Silica gel can protect items from moisture and keep them dry, so can be a useful solution in areas such as the kitchen sink or bathroom cabinet to stave off mold.
Never mind that sink or bathroom nonsense; I must have dozens of these scattered around in my gun safes and sundry gun bags, all collected from various packages and such. Because:
…and I apologize most sincerely for any distress the above pictures may have caused.
Apparently these miserable folks are having their lives ruined by a bunch of pigs:
A group of rogue pigs have been causing chaos in a quiet village for months, according to locals, by digging up gardens and causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.
The animals have been raiding properties after escaping from a nearby farm.
Although they are regularly rounded up and returned, the escapes keep happening — with more members of the intrepid herd breaking out and heading for the gardens.
Of course, there’s a simple answer to this pressing problem:
or even:
But wait… I forgot that this is Britishland, where this kind of remedy is apparently frowned upon, and pigs are more important than private property.
And if the above pictures didn’t make you drool, we can’t be friends.
This one made me shake my head.
Chicago is one of the most expensive cities to reside in the United States, with Angel Reese revealing she’s also a victim of those high costs, as her WNBA salary does not cover her $8,000-a-month rent.
Oh, the poor thing.
This is something I happen to know quite a bit about, because as Longtime Readers will recall, I used to live in Chicago.
“But where did you live, Kim? That makes a difference.”
Connie and I lived in a 10th-floor apartment in Lakeview, a few blocks from Wrigley Field, which afforded us views of both Lake Michigan to the east, and the city skyline to the south.
Dawn over Lake Michigan.
That’s the John Hancock Building in the distance on the left. Both pics were taken on a glum fall day soon after we’d moved in.
The apartment itself was massive: around 2,800 sq.ft (3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms), it also had a basement lockup storage unit, free use of the laundromat, also in the basement, and 18-hour/day garbage pickup from the trashcan outside the goods elevator out the back door. It was also beautiful, with bay windows and solid brick.masonry walls which were so thick, they actually impeded the wifi signal. There were only two apartments on each floor.
It was so beautiful that when we had a couple of clients over for drinks during a conference, one — a wealthy owner of a chain of grocery stores — looked over at his wife and said, “We could do this”, and she nodded in agreement. It was truly a place to be proud of, and only the business need to move to Dallas after 9/11 got us out of there.
At the time (early 2000s), the monthly rent for this wonderful apartment was $3,700 and even with our combined incomes, the only way we could afford it was due to the fact that we’d sold both our cars when moving from the suburbs, and the resultant savings on car payments and insurance (about $1,200 a month) made our apartment affordable. (And the proximity to both train- and bus routes, not to mention the ubiquitous Chicago cabs, made car ownership irrelevant and unnecessary. On the few occasions when we needed a car — to venture out of state for a client meeting, for example — there was a Budget rental office four blocks away.)
Anyway, I went online and checked on the current (2024) rentals in that building, and they’ve gone up, all right: to $4,200 per month, just over half of what that WNBA tart is being charged.
Which begs the question: what kind of apartment is she living in, at that rent?
I don’t know, but I can guess: some swanky modern high-rise apartment in the Loop, Streeterville or Near North neighborhoods. Or maybe even a lakeside penthouse apartment just north of the Golden Mile. Whatever, it’s probably too big for her, and definitely not worth what she gets paid as a WNBA player.
The point about living in Chicago, as we discovered when we looked into it, is that yes, you can pay a lot of money to live in the city; but if you just lower your expectations a little and make a small compromise here and there, you can find affordable digs a-plenty.
Our apartment in Lakeview was just such a compromise, and I think that everyone could agree that it was not too great a sacrifice to have made.
The 20-year-old Angel Reese has clearly never bothered to look into such a compromise because her several sponsorship deals pay the bills, and not her WNBA salary (which is less than a fifth of my and Connie’s joint income at the time). In ten years’ time, her career at an end and the sponsorships having vanished, we’ll no doubt be reading about Angel Reese having to live in her car and eating dog food — unless, of course, she manages to snag some rich dude who can afford her.
Not the best outlook, but hey. According to the article, she has a (paid) “financial advisor” who, on this basis, ought to be fired.
Okay, here’s a place that for some reason has taken my imagination:
Another view:
It’s in England — it could only be in England in that location — and in the chilly north (York), which would make it even less desirable. Also, from its description it’s in terrible shape inside, and in typical Brit fashion it has only one bathroom, but ignore all that for the moment.
Like I said, for some reason it has a strange appeal for me. The “no neighbors” thing is one attraction, and yes, there will be terrible traffic noise so having a garden is not that much of an attraction. But it’s surely a better deal than one of the houses / apartments across the main road, which have all the same noise but not any privacy, with two shared walls and cramped living conditions.
Could you live in such a place, or is it the stuff of your nightmares?
I meant this to be posted yesterday, but in my sickened state I cocked up the date, so here it is.