New house? Sure, why not!

There’s something to be said for fresh starts. Connie and I decided a few weeks ago that it was time for a new start for our lives together, beginning with a new house. It’s a little sooner than we initially planned on, but we also had a few other reasons pushing us toward this.

Connie had some specific things she was looking for, and we managed to find that in a new development going up between Moncks Corner and Goose Creek. We went up there just to have a look around and by the time we left, we had:

• met a nice couple who had been living there for a few months
• got a tour of their house
• toured a couple of the model homes with the sales agent guy
• decided to buy a house.

Talk about your impulse buys!

Being new construction and since the house hasn’t been built yet, we have the opportunity to add a few additional features to the house to make (radio) life a little easier.

• Requested a 2″ conduit running from outside terminating in the room we chose for the shack. This will let us run coax out to the antenna(s) without having to drill holes in the house or propping a window open
• Distribution panel for phone/TV coax. Later after we get settled, I’ll work on running Cat5 through the same conduits and have network drops along with the cable outlets.
• Dedicated 120V and 220V outlets in the shack
• Extra lights and outlets in the garage where the workshop will be
• Move a few doors around
• Garage insulation

The new house will be a fair bit smaller than the current one (1500ish sq ft vs 1880 sq ft) but I think we’ll actually gain a little more storage and functional space thanks to taller kitchen cabinets and additional wall space. We’ll also get the back yard fenced so that the dogs can run around outside (they’ll love that). We’ll lose our current library space so the bookshelves and their contents will end up getting split up to various places.

The commute between work will be significantly longer than the 10 minutes I have now, but it’s something I can live with. It will be a good excuse to put a mobile radio in the car and get in on whatever drive-time repeater chatter there is around here.

For now, the new place feels a little bit like being out in the middle of nowhere, even though there are a lot of other new-ish developments in the area. Nothing is terribly far away though. Goose Creek and Moncks Corner are both about 15 minutes away along some of the back roads. When we head out on road trips, there will also be a little less city to wind through before hitting the open highway.

It’s a big thing to buy a house, and just a little bigger thing to worry about having to sell one first, but after all the dust settles the new house should actually be better for the finances since we’ll end up with a slightly smaller mortgage and more energy efficiency than the current one.

Now we just need pack everything up, do a little bit of fixing up and renovating of this house (I don’t think we need to do a whole lot) and hope we can sell it fairly quickly.