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cimoreneMy parents still live in the 1890s house where I grew up, but they're both 64 and my mother is recently retired. They always planned to move close to her after retirement, but in recent years my sister and I have both wanted her to be able to have them actually right there to assist with tech support, prevent them from falling for phishing scams, etc. Everyone is in favor, apparently. My brother-in-law is a kind of quiet sort of nerdy dude and my sister thinks it appropriate to arrange a computer/gaming den where he can "hide" and be alone if he wishes, but nobody had any objections to the plan and they all get along.
There were some wrinkles recently, when the second-to-last hurricane to hit Baton Rouge caused flooding in my sister's house, because my parents were co-signatories for the mortgage even though she paid the payments, and it took forever to get the insurance money and start the renovations and then they somehow found out that the parish illegally failed to inform them when they bought their house that it in a zone where it technically wasn't legal to sell it without renovating it to bring the floor entirely above the floodplain, but the parish not only allowed the previous owner to renovate privately and sell it without doing the renovation, they also didn't inform my sister when they bought the house and then wanted to enforce the regulation to make them do the renovation if they wanted to sell? She's finally got an appointment with a lawyer to talk to about this on Monday.
Which is good because she and my parents, as I said, already bought another house. It's a huge 1960-ish basic plain American ranch house, long and sprawling, and is a shorter commute for my sister and her husband, who work in the same building for the Louisiana state government. Also there's tons of mature trees due to the age of the area and the streets are in a grid (also probably because while rather suburban in style, it's so close to downtown and so old that it isn't in that horrible cul-de-sac sort of suburban street plan that dominates later) and, most importantly, the house is huge, with three full bathrooms, a completely smooth flat floor, a lot of wide open spaces, and should be extremely easy to retrofit for wheelchair access for my dad and his power wheelchair. They haven't signed the stuff yet, I should add; they just agreed on an offer yesterday.
So everyone in the family, including me and Wax, is extremely absorbed in this, all over Zillow and Google Street View and googling things. My parents still have to sell their house, but actually they have been renting the spare room to a disabled army vet who acted as a handyman around the house at times, and he should be able to get a loan to buy it at any time - it's totally paid off, but the property isn't worth all that much in spite of its size because of the area it's in: diverse, low income, lots of poor repair and rentals to students, on the edges of a historically black neighborhood (of later date than the house - like 1920s/30s?-, which was built by the farmer who used to own the land in the immediate neighborhood in, as I said, the 1890s). (The houses around their house are younger - a mixture of bungalows and ranches, with the newest ones midcentury.)
I keep forgetting everything I intended to do today and yesterday, like for instance, it's five pm and I haven't finished my breakfast.
There were some wrinkles recently, when the second-to-last hurricane to hit Baton Rouge caused flooding in my sister's house, because my parents were co-signatories for the mortgage even though she paid the payments, and it took forever to get the insurance money and start the renovations and then they somehow found out that the parish illegally failed to inform them when they bought their house that it in a zone where it technically wasn't legal to sell it without renovating it to bring the floor entirely above the floodplain, but the parish not only allowed the previous owner to renovate privately and sell it without doing the renovation, they also didn't inform my sister when they bought the house and then wanted to enforce the regulation to make them do the renovation if they wanted to sell? She's finally got an appointment with a lawyer to talk to about this on Monday.
Which is good because she and my parents, as I said, already bought another house. It's a huge 1960-ish basic plain American ranch house, long and sprawling, and is a shorter commute for my sister and her husband, who work in the same building for the Louisiana state government. Also there's tons of mature trees due to the age of the area and the streets are in a grid (also probably because while rather suburban in style, it's so close to downtown and so old that it isn't in that horrible cul-de-sac sort of suburban street plan that dominates later) and, most importantly, the house is huge, with three full bathrooms, a completely smooth flat floor, a lot of wide open spaces, and should be extremely easy to retrofit for wheelchair access for my dad and his power wheelchair. They haven't signed the stuff yet, I should add; they just agreed on an offer yesterday.
So everyone in the family, including me and Wax, is extremely absorbed in this, all over Zillow and Google Street View and googling things. My parents still have to sell their house, but actually they have been renting the spare room to a disabled army vet who acted as a handyman around the house at times, and he should be able to get a loan to buy it at any time - it's totally paid off, but the property isn't worth all that much in spite of its size because of the area it's in: diverse, low income, lots of poor repair and rentals to students, on the edges of a historically black neighborhood (of later date than the house - like 1920s/30s?-, which was built by the farmer who used to own the land in the immediate neighborhood in, as I said, the 1890s). (The houses around their house are younger - a mixture of bungalows and ranches, with the newest ones midcentury.)
I keep forgetting everything I intended to do today and yesterday, like for instance, it's five pm and I haven't finished my breakfast.
