I have been remiss in posting about my house on the blog. We left Hyde Park in May 2019, because it wasn’t the right fit for us long-term. There were things I loved about Hyde Park and sometimes I miss it, but things I did not love included:

– Unresponsive elected officials who allowed high-traffic intersections to have noncompliant ADA ramps for over a year despite my weekly complaints (the ramps are still noncompliant nearly 2 years later).

– The closure of a critical sidewalk near my apartment that forced me to cross the street eight times in order to get to the train (including at the intersection with noncompliant ramps).

– The fact that only 50 of my neighbors signed my petition regarding the sidewalk closure, but over 300 signed a petition to open a second dog park within four days (apparently, our current dog park is in *Jackson Park*, not Hyde Park).

– The fact that Dave’s parents have lived in their home for over 20 years and do not know any of their neighbors.

– The horrific lakefront winds in the Indian Village neighborhood – I think Hyde Park is colder than most of Chicago because it protrudes further into the lake, but it’s truly terrible where there are additional wind tunnels because of high-rises along the lake.

– Incredibly spotty service in (pretty expensive) restaurants. I once had the same salad made incorrectly in five different ways  – I have nothing to say about this that Yasmin Nair hasn’t said better. Please read her piece, Hyde Park: Where Food Goes To Die, which explores the critical question: “What kind of culinary omerta survives in Hyde Park to keep its restaurants at such a depth of mediocrity?”

– Social justice warriors who post online patting themselves on the back for their refusal to call the police on violent criminals, leaving them at-large to prey on others in the neighborhood. (On the other hand…why bother reporting anything when the State’s Attorney appears to have a policy of not prosecuting crime?)

– Carjackings in broad daylight.

– Roving bands of pickpockets inside of restaurants, including at 9am on Sunday mornings.

The last straw was a series of increasingly violent muggings on the lakefront bike trail that I commuted on. Adding insult to injury were the subsequent blogosphere musings about how the Lincoln Yards TIF is the true culprit, not the people who actually committed the crimes. (I see now what people mean when they talk about “personal responsibility.”) I felt that I did not share the same values and goals as many of my neighbors, and I thought we were paying too much to live in a neighborhood where I didn’t feel safe walking after dark. One day, after yet another bleak news report, I found myself looking into concealed carry permits, and decided I would rather move than carry a gun to feel safe. This was all very disappointing because I’d truly hoped to raise a family in Hyde Park. It was also probably the best bike commute I’ll ever have in my life, and very possibly the best bike commute on the planet.

I told D that I wanted to move, so he started looking at houses on Redfin and one day last winter, he took me to an open house in Blue Island. We took a stroll around the block and I noticed how much warmer it was than Hyde Park. On that walk, I saw a for-sale-by-owner sign outside our house and I impulsively called the seller. We drove back the next day to see the for-sale-by-owner, I fell in love with the house, and then fell in love again with the immediate surroundings.

Blue Island is, literally, a city on a hill. It’s not a hill I would have noticed before moving to the midwest, but moving here has allowed me to experience life more fully. Take this hill: growing up in Virginia, moving to the midwest has given me a new appreciation for geography. When I go home to Virginia now, the topography feels much richer to me. Blue Island is on a ridge, and it’s one I would never have recognized as such without living somewhere so flat for so long.  Sometimes, driving, I feel that I am suddenly somewhere ancient. D feels it too, and when we look up the roads we learn about the indigenous people who lived here. The first people on this continent built a road along this ridge, following a buffalo migration route.

To this day, I have no idea how D, the most practical person I have ever met, was persuaded to buy this home with me. I think that the home itself cast some sort of enchantment. During our first visit to the house, I felt a sense that it spoke to me, asking me to live in it and care for it. I think many of my neighbors felt the same way when they found their homes. It’s something that binds us, this feeling of taking shelter within an entity, and giving shelter, in turn, by helping these houses to survive for the next hundred years. I wonder whether the people that the houses speak to in this way have something in common that brought us all here. I don’t know how else to explain that every person on my block is a wonderful and thoughtful person with an eye for beauty and the ability to find joy in the midst of hardship.

These houses have been loved since their inception. Most of them were commissioned by or for individuals. Ours is an exception: William Vandenberg, a local builder, lived in the homes he built only briefly, preferring to build a new residence, sell his current one, and repeat the cycle. William and Anna Vandenberg lived here from 1890 to 1892. Later, someone named Harriet planted peonies from her grandmother’s farm from a cluster dating to 1875. I think these are some of the same flowers that we enjoy today, since I learned that peonies can live over 200 years. I believe that I am the third person who has lived in this house to serve on the Blue Island Library’s Board of Trustees.

We have always been lucky with our living situations. When we started dating, D lived in an amazing apartment in Rosslyn, then he had a nice one in Dupont Circle; I lived in a terrific group house in Mt. Pleasant and then we had a great setup at my house in Maryland. Our condo in Hyde Park was also very nice. But this house is the best by far. The only thing we gave up was the bike commute and the lakefront. The bike commute isn’t a huge loss since I barely went to the office before COVID-19. There is a rather scenic canal in Blue Island with a nice bike path network, and I never went in the lake anyway because it was never warm enough. The city/neighborhood is just as integrated as Hyde Park but we have a bigger Latino population, which was a huge selling point for me.

We have a nice porch that we used to sit on a lot instead of watching TV and talk about how we didn’t watch TV. This changed because I went to law school and now TV is apparently the only way I can make myself relax. We have a garden and wonderful neighbors and almost everything we need within walking distance. There are so many birds singing that people can hear them in the background on the phone.

One of the reasons we pulled the trigger on this house was our feeling that the community was inherently resilient. If D and I have a creed, it’s something like the Strong Towns ethos. We don’t see eye-to-eye with most YIMBYs, especially since the overlap between YIMBY and “Democratic Socialism” turns us both off (to say nothing of the “gulag landlords” memes among the NUMTOTs, which I’m pretty sure are not ironic), but Strong Towns comes pretty close to our view of the world: the importance of inter-relationships, self-determination, self-sufficiency, planning ahead, fiscal responsibility, etc. I feel completely validated by our decision to move here after COVID, which confirmed that Blue Island is a strong town in all the ways that matter.

Somehow, the history of human settlement here, along the Vincennes Trace, comes up when we talk about our town. And somehow, everyone we meet here seems to know the history. There is something about the place that makes you pay attention and think about your place in the world and in time.

If your job will let you work remotely, please consider joining us here in Blue Island. It is special. There is a small cohort of people around our age who like owning and fixing interesting properties, or having room to make art or create incredible spaces, or all of the above. There are people of all ages doing that, but there are a few I look forward to raising children beside and growing old with, and having a critical mass of creative young people gives Blue Island a vitality and energy and optimism that I think is difficult to find in places where you can live comfortably.

I started a new instagram account for our house and our neighbors seem to enjoy it. Maybe you will too. I like living in a house that reminds me of both my own mortality and of my unique abilities. I like knowing about the people who lived here before me, and seeing the traces they left in this world. I wish that everyone lived somewhere that made them feel as safe, content, and inspired as I have felt since moving here. My house is beautiful, and I want to make it even better. Improving my house makes me want to improve myself.

I know that I am the happiest I have ever been in my life, because last spring, I saw pictures of the peony gardens at the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor. The pictures reminded me of the particularly fine rose garden in Portland, and I thought for a moment that I might like to go see them. They are lovely, and it must be spectacular to see so many peonies in one place. Then I went outside and looked at the peonies beside my house, and realized that there isn’t a peony display on earth that could make me want to miss a single minute with the ones in my own garden.

Thank you, Harriet, for the flowers.

D moved to Chicago at the end of 2017. We drove the cats to Chicago on Christmas day, then did long distance for nine months while I looked for work. I joined Accenture in September 2018 and I can truly say that I have never been happier. It’s an awesome place to work, the people I work with are all incredibly smart and genuinely kind, and I have had opportunities that I couldn’t have even dreamed of. I feel blessed to have new friends all over the world and a role that let me travel and set my own hours.

I’d dreamed of working at Accenture for over ten years, but I never thought it would actually happen unless I got an MBA (or a time machine to go back in time and attend a college where they recruit liberal arts graduates).

Accenture wasn’t the only dream that came true for me in the last three years.  I am honored to share my life with the most wonderful person I know. I had my first date with D in late October of 2014 and I wrote in my diary around Valentine’s Day in 2015 that I expected to be living with my husband in Chicago in five years. Although our wedding has been delayed indefinitely because of coronavirus, pretty much everything else worked out precisely as my 26-year-old self hoped for.

I was so confident of my future with D that I oriented my career around this five-year plan: I accepted my first records management job in August 2015 with the intention of parlaying that experience into a private sector job in Chicago when I eventually moved there with D. D was not speaking to me when I accepted this job offer, and I was dating someone else, but I knew that eventually D and I would get back together, get married, and move to Chicago.

By the summer of 2016, we were getting back on track but things weren’t moving as quickly as I wanted them to, so I bought a house thinking that it would help me move on from D if he didn’t settle down with me. Happily, the house made D settle down. We got a kitten shortly after I closed, got a second cat not long afterwards, and then D finally moved in eight months later and then we got a third cat and became “domestic partners.” This bothered me a bit at the time since I wanted to get married, but now that it has been nearly three years I feel that it is very hip and “queer” that we are not legally married.

I was expecting us to spend longer in DC together, but D’s job became unbearable (discussed at more length in my post about DC toxicity). We briefly considered looking for new work in DC, but a potential opportunity for D in Chicago presented itself in the first half of 2017, and we decided to go for it after my dream job hired a white male candidate who did not meet the position’s minimum qualifications (more on this to come).

I thought that 2017 was a hard year. D’s job in Chicago was delayed, then delayed again, and we didn’t have a firm offer in hand until after Thanksgiving. In the meantime, we were both very unhappy at work. I decided to tough it out at my job given our potential relocation, and D accepted a consulting project with a company that understood that he might relocate after six months. The job finally came through in November, we made some trips to Chicago for job interviews and househunting, and bought a condo in Chicago that we planned to renovate for D’s parents.

2018 was actually the hard year. I interviewed for over ten jobs in Chicago, it took me over a year to find a job*, and I came out of all this hating public libraries, museums, and Chicago’s incestuous hiring tendencies. Through all this, my job in Washington devolved from comically bad to actively hostile. D and I were bleeding money maintaining two households after D took a pay cut to move back to Chicago. I had a tenant in Maryland who offset my expenses by $800/month, but our condo in Chicago was much pricier than my mortgage, D had taken a pay cut, and we were spending tons of money on my job search and on medical expenses. (The medical expenses have yielded one cool thing and that is that our household was selected for the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey! This is a long-term survey where the government sends a very nice researcher to our house every few months to look at our medical bills.)

In August 2018, I finally received the perfect job. A year at a good company has gone a long way to healing my mind, body and soul, despite lingering chaos from our move at the end of 2017. I had trouble leasing my house and only finished moving the rest of my stuff into a storage unit at the end of August 2018. I finally extracted myself from the storage unit in November when my old roommate from DC moved to Chicago and brought my stuff with her.

2019 was eventful, but overall less difficult. Since moving into our condo in September 2018, I remodeled that apartment, leased it (we bought the condo with the understanding that D’s parents would move in the summer of 2019 – instead they held firm on a 2020 relocation and ultimately backed out of the transaction), and moved us again into the Victorian house of my dreams.

I really can’t believe everything that has happened in three years, but the most unbelievable thing is that there was ever a time when our biggest source of stress was the uncertainty of D’s job in Chicago. I hope that I will be able to look back and say that these were some of the hardest years of my life. D said the other day that he had almost forgotten how horrible my job search was. I guess that we have both suppressed a lot about the nine months we were apart. I cried a lot and spent a lot of time in bed. I gained 20 pounds, lost it, then gained it all back. I know that a lot of you relate to my difficulties finding work, and I will try to post about it since I know a lot of you have struggled with this and I am almost ready to talk about it now that I have more perspective on the matter.

At least now I can say there was a light at the end of the tunnel. D is back in a functional work environment with people he respects. We’re out of D.C. and in a functioning labor market that’s grounded in basic reality.

It has cost a lot of money to get here (a subject for the job search post). Most days, I think this money was well spent. Even though things haven’t gone the way we hoped with the condo, we will hopefully turn a small profit if we have a quick sale. I’ve done very well on my house in Maryland (despite Wells Fargo’s bogus valuation of my property).

The job I finally got has exceeded all my expectations. The job was so good that I might have moved here even if I were single. (My single female friends should definitely move here. The dating market is much better for women.)

The house (and our neighborhood) have exceeded not just my expectations, but my wildest dreams.

Best of all, my relationship with D is better than ever after all of this (and maybe because of it). I hope the future will be easier, but knowing that D and I will find a way through whatever lies ahead gives me a lot of peace.

In the end, everything worked out almost precisely according to my five-year plan. Below is a list of the deviations:
– D’s job came a little early
– I didn’t expect to have the financial hiccups that we did
– I thought we’d have a wedding before we moved to Chicago (and maybe we would have if not for the financial difficulties)
– I didn’t expect my job search to be so protracted (although even that worked out in the end, because I got my new job within days of my three-year anniversary with the federal government, which gave me career tenure!)
– I thought we would live in Hyde Park
– Specifically, I thought we would live in Dave’s parents’ house
– I didn’t expect to buy an enormous Victorian house
– I didn’t expect to move to a small town
– I didn’t expect to have three cats (I expected to get a female tuxedo Manx cat with a pink nose to replace my last one – this did come to pass but the two surplus cats were unexpected)
– I thought I would get married in D’s family synagogue, but that place is a disaster and I refuse to set foot there unless we are going with his parents to something
– I also thought that I might get married at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington but for a number of reasons it’s more convenient for me to get married in Chicago

Although I would have preferred a smoother road to getting here, the outcome really is better than I could have planned or predicted. D is my favorite person and I can’t wait to have a real wedding someday so that we can have lots of pictures to enjoy in the future.

* It really should not have taken this long to find a job but for some reason there was not a lot of turnover of records management positions in the first six months that I was looking. Once I started seeing jobs in the private sector that were a strong match, the process went very smoothly. I think it says a lot about libraries and museums that every private sector employer I interviewed with loved me and that libraries and museums apparently…didn’t. I can promise that I did not interview differently in the corporate job interviews…

It’s hard to say which company is more terrible.

First, Wells Fargo’s employees tried to tell me that I couldn’t have PMI removed on the basis of a new valuation unless the increase in value was due to improvements to the property. It took months to get them to send our initial correspondence to me, which said very clearly that it could be removed if my mortgage had been paid down to 78% of the new appraised value. (One of the reasons I hate having Wells Fargo as my servicer is that they have ZERO statements or any other information about my account available online. In this year of our Lord 2020, I still receive paper statements in the mail and have to save them for reference).

After this was finally sorted, Wells Fargo then told me that I cannot pay the difference on my mortgage to reduce the LTV to 78%. Of course, there is no policy available for the date that my mortgage balance has to be at 78%.

Of course, the appraisal cannot be appealed. My husband and I spent hours putting together comps and making the case that the comps the appraiser chose were BOGUS. The property’s valuation is artificially depressed because properties were included from inincorporated areas with the same zipcode as my property. They refused to include my next door neighbor’s home in the list of comps. Their appraiser was the laziest professional I have ever had the displeasure of doing business with, and I hope that he gets paid peanuts.

This is all so ridiculous. I obviously would not have spent $500 gambling had Wells Fargo made clear that I can’t pay down the principal the way I can to get the LTV to 80%.

I am so annoyed by this that I would pay off the principal to get down to 80% just to stop giving them money, even though I wouldn’t save much more than about $1200, I just don’t want Wells Fargo to have a penny more of my money. Unfortunately D and I are finally going to have a wedding so I need to spend my money on that instead. It is fortunate that D and I are having a wedding, but unfortunate that I have to give Wells Fargo more money because I have to pay my caterer instead of my mortgage.

D points out that this same appraisal error came out in my favor when my house appraised for $20k below the asking price. It’s unfortunate that I might have a sale fall through in the future because appraisal methodology is so imprecise. I feel very fortunate that we were able to get our house in Illinois appraised at what the seller wanted, but it probably worked to our advantage that there were no true comps available. Also, I’m sure that appraisers in Chicagoland are generally more competent since everyone here works harder.

I’ll expand this post more at some point but I wanted to document how annoyed I am. I actually screamed about this out loud at least twice. What a parasitical and incompetent industry.

Well, no one explained that Daylight Savings Time means that you can’t rake your leaves after you get home from work! I knew I would be doing a lot of work on the weekends, but I didn’t realize it simply wasn’t possible to do many things because of the early sunset. I guess living in a rowhouse without a yard really spoiled me.

My parents have a HUGE yard so I thought the leaves were a unique issue to a larger property – nope, my lot of <4000SF and only three trees has A TON OF THEM. It’s unbelievable!

Also, when people told me that houses cost money, I didn’t totally understand that the stuff that actually costs money is all the dumb yard stuff you have to buy. Here are some things you need when you own a house:

– a lawnmower

– a ladder that you can lean against your house to get on the roof

– an offset for that ladder so that it’s not leaning against your gutters

– a leafblower

– a shovel

– a hose

– attachments for your hose

– a shed so that your lawnmower and leafblower won’t get wet

– a rake

– garden shears

GOODBYE ALL MONEY! Forget about furniture! Also, have fun replacing all the kitchen stuff that you totally forgot belonged to your roommates, they charge like $9 for a single spatula at Target, thank goodness I work across the street from a pretty serviceable Marshall’s! I have never been more grateful in my life that I took this job, 2015 Anita was hella smart!

Oh, also microwaves cost like $70 and they sell like hotcakes on CraigsList unless you wanna drive to the suburbs for one!

On the plus side, a new TV is only $200 until our new president starts a trade war with China, LOL. Also, apparently I get free HD cable by hooking up TiVo, $20/month for cable guide functionality, federated search across Netflix/Hulu/Amazon (yay, Amazon streams to my TV! Not the case with my Apple TV, which I’m keeping to broadcast from my laptop since I have a Dumb TV), and DVR is a pretty good deal, shout out to my boyfriend for giving me a $350 box, I’m never getting off the couch again

jk, I’m off my couch every weekend dealing with the never-ending leaves, and tree #4 (the world’s cutest Japanese maple) hasn’t even started yet! I cannot wait to get rid of as much lawn as I possibly can next spring! Raised beds and gravel paths, here I come!

In the quest to get rid of my lawn, I had my utilities marked. Here is another fun trick: because I was in Iceland, I didn’t harass the title insurance company to actually do the house location drawing that I requested over email! I figured, hey, no big deal since not having one didn’t jeopardize closing! Boy, what a dummy I was! The gas company marked my gas line and hooray, it looks like it’s on my neighbor’s property! My brilliant mom figured out that that looked wrong, and sure enough, it looks like 2 houses to my northeast are encroaching on the property to the west, great job everyone for making me wonder if there is something wrong with his fence! Definitely looking forward to spending another $1000 to have the boundaries marked by a surveyor, hopefully my neighbor to the rear can go in on this with me somehow. It never ends!

Okay, enough complaining (about OWNING A HOUSE, AKA “the greatest thing in the world OMG”)

here are some pictures

this is my friend (and roommate!) preparing a Thanksgiving feast while my parent’s fox terrier looks on in hope

this is the huge ventilation fan in my attic, as viewed from the pull-down stairs in my downstairs hallway

this is the train I ride to work

this is the amazing ice cream truck

this is the park next to my house. I appreciate that my neighborhood is always appreciably cooler because of its proximity to the river, which situates it in a microclimate about 4 degrees cooler than the city center. there is also great fog.

this is the enormous weekly farmer’s market!

some photos from the historic house nearby – it’s nice to walk and get ideas for my garden!

my awesome doorbell that vibrates!

a little memento from the home’s first owner: she used nails to organize things in all sorts of clever places (the attic is also full of them on the beams). this is the interior of a cabinet in the laundry room.

this is a local bar/restaurant that, like my house, has not changed in decades. I love going home at night to a small town!

I love the house! I’m so happy that it came into my life! It’s a nice feeling to be settled and to be able to do obnoxious stuff like installing furniture you never want to move again! My boyfriend and family have been so helpful, it would be unthinkable to do this alone! Everything is grand and I hope to invite everyone over the first weekend in January!

My high school reunion was this weekend and it was swell, I can’t wait for the pictures, and I’m also looking forward to organizing housing for visitors to DC during inauguration, and kicking it Bibliodiscotheque style once again, at long last, on December 19. Very happy to have 1 project behind me and 2 to look forward to between now and the end of the year!