Things are moving so quickly. On Friday, I made an offer on that house I looked at Thursday. They had four offers they were considering, and on Saturday I got the word that I got the house—the one that’s basically a cabin in the woods on the edge of downtown.

Yesterday was the inspection, and this time the inspector didn’t find anything too scary. I also didn’t see anything alarming about the neighbors—no kids setting fire to anything next door, and it’s even spring break, so the kids are home.

I did discover that a lot of the trees in the backyard are redbuds. I also found that I can see the Blue Ridge Mountains from the front porch and from the room I’m going to use as an office. When the trees leaf out, the mountains may be blocked, but I may be able to get glimpses through the leaves. I now know where I’m going to put my desk, so I can look out the window at the mountains.

So, I guess I’ve got a house. The seller still has to do a termite inspection, and then there’s closing, but I should be fully moved in before my lease in my apartment ends in May, so it’s perfect timing.

I have Rydding Village book 3 about ready to publish, so I need to get that done. Then I may not be getting much writing or other work done for the next month or so while I get moved and then get the new house set up. I got rid of most of my office furniture, so I’ll have to set up an office from scratch, and I have to get a new sofa — well, in that living room, it’ll have to be a loveseat. The rooms in this house really are rather small, and the closets are small, so I’ll be coming up with some storage solutions. There will likely be a road trip to the Ikea in the D.C. suburbs for an epic shopping trip.

I’m trying to decide what look to go with in my office. The floors are pine, a lovely golden color (the original hardwoods from 1945), the walls are a pale gray, and the woodwork is white. It’s a corner room with two windows, so it’s very sunny. I’m leaning toward white furniture to keep it looking bright and open, but I also like the idea of making it darker and cozy, sort of an eccentric professor’s study look. I think I’ll use my laptop stand as a desk for a while and move it around to find a good desk position before I start shopping for office furniture. Then I can decide what mood I want to go with.

The nice thing is that this house came in significantly below what I’d budgeted for buying a house, so I can spend more money fixing it up. It’s just been renovated, so I don’t have to do anything to the house before I move in other than put up some blinds and curtains so I’m not putting on a show for the neighbors. All the appliances are new, the kitchen and bath are totally new, it’s been freshly painted and the floors upstairs have been refinished, while the downstairs floor is new. So I just need to buy furniture and storage type stuff for the closets and the basement (the back half of the downstairs) and landscaping.

In the meantime, I have so much to do!

After that close call last fall with the cute house with the pyromaniac neighbor, I’ve resumed my house hunt, but there hasn’t been much I’ve liked on the market.

In late January, I looked at one that had a lot about it I liked. It had an incredible back yard with a greenhouse and fruit trees, and the rooms were a good size. It had some nice period touches. But it was also on a major road, with a driveway that went uphill, so getting on the road was a bit scary. Plus, the driveway was shared with the house next door, which had potential for problems. And the upstairs windows were wonky, just a bit awry in the positioning. From the inside, the placement made sense, but from the outside it was off enough to be unsettling. There was also just something about the house that made me uncomfortable, and I couldn’t tell what it was. Part of it was that the owners hadn’t finished moving out. The furniture was all gone, so the rooms were empty, but there was food in the fridge, junk in the basement, and laundry in the dryer (showing through the window in the door). My Realtor wondered if it was renters who’d cleared out, but some workmen who were on the property said the owners moved nearby and hadn’t finished moving. I couldn’t make myself get excited enough about it to put in an offer, and it took a long time to sell for something in that price range in this town. Part of it may have been that it’s technically in a flood zone. The creek that runs through the nearby park tends to flood down that street, so the basements on that side of the street get water in them. The city is redoing that creek area, which should stop or ease the flooding when they get it done, but there’s no way to know until they’re done and we get a heavy rain to test it. There’s a sump pump in the basement of that house, and we didn’t see any signs of water damage, but added to everything else, it was enough to keep me from going for it.

The listings that came up last month and early this month were mostly mid-century modern and very vintage, complete with pink bathrooms — pink tile and pink fixtures. I’m enough of a preservationist at heart that it would have hurt me to pull out those bathrooms and update them, but I didn’t think I could live with them the way they were. There were a few listings that looked possible, but when I drove by I felt really uncomfortable, or else they were farther out than I would like. I want to live in walking distance from interesting things.

Earlier this week, I looked at a house that was really cute, but strike one was when I saw that the house next door had a broken toilet sitting in the front yard. That might have been trash day, as it was next to the trash cans, but there was also a broken sink in the back yard. Then there was the big, scary dog in the front yard, behind a flimsy wire fence (in spite of the back yard having a wooden fence). The dog growled and lunged at the fence while I was standing on the porch of the house I was looking at. It was definitely one of those “I will kill you if I get to you” growls, not an excited bark, and the tail wasn’t wagging.

The house itself was nice. The kitchen was incredible and there was an amazing view of mountains from the back porch. But the house was a lot smaller than the listing let on. It included an upstairs room that would have been mostly useless. It wasn’t heated or cooled and had no light fixtures, and while there was a bathroom there, it was in an alcove without a door. The toilet was visible from everywhere in the room. I think the square footage also included the basement. When I added up the footage of the rooms on the main floor, the actual living space, it was smaller than my current apartment. I couldn’t figure out how I’d be able to put any furniture in the living room, it was so narrow. The owners just had a chair in there, and they had chairs and a TV in the room I’d have used for an office. I decided to pass on that house.

Then a listing came up Wednesday night that I initially dismissed because the layout was pretty weird and the rooms had to be tiny, given that it was 4 bedrooms in 1100 square feet. I couldn’t figure out how I could work with the space in the living room, as there were no solid walls. The house is built into the side of a hill, so the front of the house is on ground level there, with the back of the first floor under the hill, becoming a basement. The front half of the first floor is one big room, with a kitchen on one end, a bar as a room divider, and then the rest being windows and stairs. I couldn’t think of where I’d put a TV and sofa, and there was definitely no room for bookcases.

But then the upstairs is ground level at the back, with a big deck across the back, and sliding doors onto the deck from one of the rooms. I started thinking that this would make a good living room. When my Realtor sent me the listing this morning, I said we might as well look at it.

The rooms are small, but I think I could make them work. It would be cozy. I think I’d use the downstairs as an entry hall/dining room, maybe put a chair in there, but otherwise have a dining table. If I had people over, I could use that room for entertaining. The closets are small, but the basement is climate-controlled and insulated, so I could use it for storage. The house was built in 1945 but it’s been completely remodeled. New roof, new siding, new electric, heater/AC, etc. The downstairs is all new, with new floors and a totally new kitchen. Upstairs, it looks more like an old house, with the original hardwood floors, interior doors, wide baseboards, and window frames. The new things upstairs are the sliding glass doors in the room I’d use for a living room and the bathroom, which has been gutted and redone.

But the setting is what I like. The deck is beautiful, and the backyard is wooded, so it would be almost like living in the woods. I could do forest bathing in my backyard. There’s also an in-ground stone fire pit in one of the non-wooded areas. And all this is half a mile from downtown, one block off the main street. I’ve joked about my ideal house being a cabin in the woods on the edge of downtown, and this may actually be it. It’s on the end of a dead-end street, so there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic. And while there are hills, they aren’t as big as the one I currently live on.

It’s not the house I had in mind. It’s not what’s on my vision board. It’s also not the neighborhood I was looking at. But it may be what I need. After a sleepless night spent mentally arranging furniture, I told my Realtor to make an offer on it. I have another month in this apartment, so the timing is good for me to be able to get something and start moving. I’d have time to get a washer and dryer ordered and delivered (It comes with all the other appliances), gradually move in the stuff I’d move myself, with pros moving the big stuff somewhere along the way, then I could clean out the apartment before the lease ends. And then I’d get to decorate the new place. I’ve already spent way too much time looking around online and figuring out what could fit where.

The Dungeons and Dragons game was a lot of fun, though not entirely what I expected. Some of that may have been because some of us were pretty new, we were playing characters we weren’t familiar with, and we were all strangers. There was a woman about my age, her teenage niece, a couple of women right out of college (including one who just moved from the Dallas area after graduating from the University of Oklahoma—I swear, I run into someone from either Texas or Oklahoma at every event I go to around here), and the person running it was probably in her 30s.

I think part of my issue was that it’s essentially a storytelling game, so my writer brain kicked in, but it is a game that involves players taking turns and rolling dice, so an action event that takes a few minutes in story time can take an hour to play, and sometimes the play means we’re spending that much time in dealing with a secondary issue. Our group had to fight our way through a series of rooms, and we really struggled with the first one, with it taking a few rounds of turns before we got through. We got through the second one fast (mostly because I managed to roll a 20 on my turn, and I was the first to go, so my turn got us straight into the next room). And then it seemed to take us nearly an hour in the next room because nothing we tried worked.

I was playing a bard character (I used a pre-made character rather than trying to create one), and the time I rolled a 20, I was playing a lute to lull some monsters to sleep, so I had a vivid mental image of the Chris Pine character from Honor Among Thieves when he walked into a situation playing the lute as a diversion. My song worked so well that we just walked through the room.

I think the people who wrote some of the instructions of how the spells work also write IRS tax forms, and that was what took us a while, having to read and decipher what our characters might be capable of and how we might be able to use that in this situation. Aside from being able to put things to sleep, nothing I could do was all that useful for this campaign. Again, my writer brain kicked in and thought this character was a poor choice for the story.

But I think to some extent those kind of constraints could be interesting to work with in writing — identify exactly what your characters can do up front, then stick with that through a story. It would be a fun exercise that would force some creative solutions.

The main thing was the getting together with other people to do something fun. Once we got warmed up and into the spirit of it, we all loosened up a bit. I need to learn a bit more about it to understand how the game really works, but I’ll probably go the next time there’s an afternoon game. There’s now a big group chat of women in the area, so they’re organizing games at various times on different days. It’s a good way to meet people and spend time interacting.

I can also see how all the moral panic over this in the 80s obviously involved people who’d only vaguely heard of the game. From what I saw, it’s a lot of math and statistics. There’s nothing about how you do spells that you could take away from the game to try to use to do magic, just a description of what they might do in the game, and you roll dice to see how effective your spell is based on the statistics of the creature you’re using it on. I can’t see how you could go from this to summoning demons or worshipping Satan. I guess it might look like an obsession just because of how long it can take to get through a game and how much you need to learn to be able to play well, but it probably takes less time than playing golf. It all comes back to the geeks vs. jocks thing, where dressing up like a player on your favorite team to go to watch a sports game is cool, but dressing up like a character to go see a movie is weird. Spending an afternoon with friends hitting a little ball around is “normal,” but spending the afternoon playing D&D is geeky.