THINGS ON MY MIND (3 OF 3) - HOUSING

Confession - Every time I glance at the title to these posts I see "THIGHS" instead of "THINGS". Makes me laugh every time.

Anyway, the third thing that is jumping around in my brain has to do with where we live. A little over a year ago, after turning down a long-awaited opportunity to buy the house we were renting, we decided to move into an apartment. The one and only reason we made the move was so that we could pay off Tim's school debt more quickly.

I knew I'd miss living in a house. I knew I'd miss having a quarter acre and a big garden.

I didn't know we'd have mold.

We spent nearly five years in a 60 year old house and the only mold we ever had was on the ceiling of a poorly ventilated bathroom. I can live with that. About seven months into apartment life, in a building that's probably 20 years old, we found mold growing in two of our closets. That was about a month ago. They cleaned and re-painted the moldy areas, but that's just a band-aid for the problem.

The moldy places are all exterior corners where the building sits in stagnant puddles when it rains. While cleaning up the mold isn't going to really solve the problem, it's not realistic to expect the walls to be gutted and rebuilt and the landscaping to be redone in a way that doesn't create huge pools of water throughout the complex. At least not in the near future. That's a massive project!

Anyway, we were asked to open the bedroom windows and/or periodically blow fans into the closets to keep them aired out. We shouldn't have to do that, but I'm willing to cooperate and followed their suggestions. I also made sure to leave a little gap around the edges of the closet to let air pass. Seems like a trivial thing, but our closets are stuffed and there isn't much wiggle room.

Three weeks later the mold was back. Ugh.

They cleaned it again and used a new paint that's supposed to be a mold inhibitor. That was last Friday. We'll see how it works. Meanwhile, two shelves that were in the boys room are now in our living room and half of their closet is totally empty because things were getting damp. So frustrating!

So, what do we do if this new paint doesn't work? I have no idea.

We're taking apartment life one year at a time, kinda like homeschooling and kids, but expected to be here at least two years. We wanted to be here long enough to make the cost and hassle of moving twice (in and out of the apartment) worthwhile. The thought of moving after a year does not excite me. Especially when I know how much our last move rocked school for us.

I'm having a very hard time with the fact that I can't send our kids outside to play, something we used to do almost daily, regardless of weather. We have some grass outside the back of our apartment, but it's swampy, often filled with dog poop, and unfenced (an issue only for Naomi). Our poor kids are bouncing off the walls, which also stresses me out because I don't want our noise level to be obnoxious for our neighbors. I'm constantly asking them to quiet down and chill out. Not fun for any of us. The inconveniences of apartment living are things I can deal with, but the lack of a yard is really, really hard for me.

We have bikes and scooters that got used once last summer. Once. We have to haul them from the back deck, through the house, and out the front door in order to use them. It's a hassle and so they don't get used, which means they're just wasting space. But I don't want to get rid of bikes. It's like accepting that we're trapped inside. Indefinitely.

If we have to move because of mold, then how do we know the next place won't have the same problem? Where do we move that's still conveniently located for work, doesn't have mold, allows the kids to be outside, and is still inexpensive enough to allow us to keep making bigger payments on Tim's school debt?

I hate debt. I hate, hate, hate it. Truly. I hope you guys are living within your means and teaching your kids to do the same. Please, please, pleeeease teach them that any debt they accumulate will affect their future families and lifestyles. I wish someone had explained that to Tim before he unnecessarily accepted every loan that was thrown at him. But they didn't and here we are. I'm not mad at him about it, but it's definitely a frustrating situation.

Anyway, debt's not the point of this post.

I don't necessarily want to move back to a house with a yard ... and no mold. Well, I do. A lot. And we could afford to. But we wouldn't make much progress on the debt. Plus, we gave away hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of stuff when we moved, much of which we'd need to replace if we returned to a house. I'm glad we were able to share that stuff, but I don't want to fork out the money to replace it so soon. Kinda counter-productive to the whole purpose of our move.

Maybe the new paint will work and we won't be forced to decide what to do so quickly. Maybe it won't. Then we have to decide whether to live longer in a moldy apartment with closets we can't use, pay for a move to another apartment and hope it doesn't have mold, pay for a move to a house and negate the progress we've made on Tim's debt, or ... I don't know.

I don't want to pay for another move. I don't want the hassle of another move. I don't want mold growing through my walls.

I do want to be able to use all the space in my home. I do want my kids to have the option of playing outside. I do want to make faster progress on getting out of debt.

Our lease goes through April. Guess we have a little time to figure things out. But if we're moving, then I have to start preparing for that pretty soon.