Gettin' da HELL outta here...

[nodtveidt]

Living here in Isabela has been alright. This house was, at first, a nice, snug little place to live. But my wife has been getting very sick of our very loud neighbors. The house itself is okay, but a couple of the rooms are lacking electricity, and fixing the remaining electrical problems is beyond my expertise...I was able to repair most of the house's electrical system but these two rooms are out of my league. But that was okay for now, we run our office off of a high-amperage extension cord run from the one outlet in the other broken room that does actually work. Neither room has working lights, so I brought in a floor lamp.

The other day, while driving to her mother's house in Camuy, my wife spotted a house for sale just a few houses down from her mother. Something about this house grabbed her attention, and today she called up the owner to see what the deal was. It's a very large 2-floor house with a decent sized chunk of land to go with it, and the house isn't stuck next to any others like we are here. The asking price for the house is $110,000 but my wife's sure she can talk them down a bit considering the amount of work that needs to be done to the surrounding land.

So yesterday, my wife was prepping our to-do lists. One of the things on my list was to clean up a "cat mess" in the office...what appeared to be a huge amount of cat piss in front of the closet. I was avoiding this task as much as I could today, but my list was almost out of tasks so I started to tackle it. Turns out it wasn't cat piss after all...it's hot water. Oh shit, we've got a hot water break in the wall. This would be an easy fix if we lived in a wooden house, but if you live in a wooden house in Puerto Rico you're a dumbass...needless to say, this house is concrete, like most of the houses down here. Fixing this requires breaking the wall open...very expensive. My wife had commented the other day on how the floor felt a bit warm in front of the closet...well, now we know why. The closet was soaked with water. Fortunately, nothing important was destroyed, but for my wife, this was the last straw. We've decided we're not going to buy this clunker of a house after all, and are going to wait until the house in Camuy becomes available...it's being rented for three months right now so we've gotta wait until it's unoccupied. I imagine the sellers didn't expect to find a buyer so quickly...the house market down here right now is in shambles.

So yeah...we're so outta here. I told my wife I'd begin packing up our stuff right away...good thing we have dozens of boxes available that normally would be used for our little shipping operation. So, it's packing time...whee.

[Necromancer]

About $100k for a big house with a sizable chunk of land?  Sounds like a pretty good deal; the cost of living must be pretty reasonable down there, as that sounds cheap even to a midwesternite like me.  Of course living so close to one's mother-in-law......

So, are you going to make an offer on the house now and honor the remainder of the current tenant's lease, or are you going to wait 'til they're gone to finalize the deal?  Either way, I can be hired cheap to help you move, though I can't guarantee that your turbo goodies won't become 'lost'. 

[nodtveidt]

Houses down here don't generally go for much unless people are trying to stiff ya, which does happen too but those houses tend to stay "for sale" for years anyways. Fortunately, this is being sold by the actual owners, not heirs, so we'll be able to work a deal out with them. The owners said they can't show the house until the renters leave, so we're gonna go scope it out at that time, which should be July/August or so. For now though, since we've still got a contract for this house, we're gonna stay here until the contract expires, which should be in September, then we're outta here. As for moving...sorry, gotta keep my Turbo stuff safe.

Living close to her mother is actually a good thing. Her mother rocks. We actually lived with her for a few years when we first came down here. Besides, wifey's 22 year old sister lives there and is a great babysitter (among other things), heh.

[guyjin]

Nice climate and affordable houses? you make PR sound so tempting...

too bad unemployment is so high. (which probably has to do with the house prices.)

[nodtveidt]

PR can be very tempting...if you don't live here. Once you're here, you get to deal with all the problems...corrupt politicians (I know they exist everywhere but it's blatant down here), low employment rates (and even if you find a job, your wage will be shit), terrible roads, and very harsh summers. In PR, if you don't create your own job, you're unlikely to find one worth a damn. The best places to live in terms of housing vs work is just outside the metro area...that way, you can snag a house cheaper, and finding work inside the metro area will be more worth it than trying to find a job out in the sticks. But most of PR is poverty-stricken, so the crime rate is unusually high...6th highest murder rate in the world. Of course, this is mostly in the metro area but sometimes it happens out here too, just not as commonly. Poverty is high because work is hard to find, education is severely lacking, and the USA doesn't give a shit about us.

[Michael Helgeson]

Yep,PR is used as a cheap vacation spot and kept as a just in case tactical military spot if a major war breaks out,otherwise,yea the USA gov couldn't give a shit about what goes on there. Very raw deal.

[nectarsis]

Man rove buddy..you scarred me with that title..thought you were bailing on us  :oops:

[termis]

Yeah, $100,000+/- for a decent-sized family home sure does sound nice.  Here in Calgary they're almost hitting half-a-mil for a non run-down 3bed/2bath single family home in a decent area.  They're no way in hell I'm paying that for place where there's weather's shitty 9 months out of the year.

Soon enough, I'm off to Melbourne where housing prices are pretty crazy as well, but hey, a but I can handle a place where winters are 14°C/56°F.