Neo-Academics at Home

Last time, I said that each time things went well, I grew increasingly suspicious.  That hasn’t really changed.  You see, we got notification of final approval for our mortgage today, which by all accounts is fantastic news.  Which of course means that something must be wrong.

I’m not sure what terrible thing will happen.  But I know it will be something.  Things can’t consistently go well.  I mean – I have a new job, a new house, reasonably good health, and my dissertation seems to be progressing on-time.  We’ve been having trouble getting insurance companies to get back to us about home insurance, but other than that, everything has been smooth-sailing.  So whatever’s going to go wrong, it must be big.

Plans for the house itself haven’t really changed.  We bought HGTV Home Design Software in order to better model what our renovations will ultimately look like, which has been slow-going.  It’s very complex software, but I think creating a 3D model of our new home that we can virtually walk around is worth the learning effort.  Plus, then my wife can redecorate at will without making me lift any furniture!

Some advice though – if you are buying a house from afar and planning to make a 3D model of it, make sure your room measurements are accurate before you leave!

Deniz, one of the members of my dissertation committee, chased me into a parking garage next to the airport.  If caught, I was done for – so I ran.  I found a set of elevators and hit the button to head to ground level.  I could hear her approaching; slow, purposeful steps were coming toward me.  The doors opened, and I slipped inside, pressing the button far more rapidly than would do any good.  The doors closed, and a few moments later, opened on the next level.  I hadn’t made it twenty feet toward grass and sunlight outside when I heard a noise and turned around to see her staring straight at me, ready to attack.  Coated in sweat, I opened my eyes.

Yes, that’s right – this is the tail end of a dream that I had last night.  That is certainly better than it reflecting a real situation, but it is still not a dream that I prefer to have.  I am guessing that it is the combination of 1) working on my dissertation 8-10 hours each day for the past week or so and 2) reading Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, which is light fantasy describing a wizard detective in modern Chicago.  Dresden gets chased a lot.  As apparently do I.

Some people try to interpret their dreams.  I suppose such people would say that this dream somehow reflects my beliefs about massive impending deadlines and nearing dissection of my dissertation by my committee followed by a two-hour cross-examination to see if I really know as much as I am supposed to know, and if I don’t, that there’s nothing I can do about it at this point, and my entire life and career would come crashing down, and I would likely have to work in a Wendy’s.  Good thing I don’t believe in interpreting dreams, eh?

The most "real people" I could think of... image courtesy of bittenandbound.com

My wife half-jokes that the end of graduate school is when we become “real people.”  I suppose this is a feeling that many people actually get at the end of college – walking out of the ivory tower, degree in hand, heading out into the world, leaving “growing up” behind, and becoming a full-fledged “adult.”  We didn’t have that.  We instead walked out of one ivory tower and into another, which I imagine is a process that will reflect the rest of my working life.

I don’t know that I agree with her label.  Graduate school is an odd sort of hybrid between “growing up” and being a “real person.”  Sure, you continue to take classes, but there’s an odd sort of independence that begins to grow.  You are given more responsibility and more control over your time as you get further in the program.  I’ve even taken outside projects as a consultant completely unrelated to schoolwork.  Is that when I became a “real person”?  When someone trusted me enough to pay me for my expertise independently of my education?  Or is that moment still ahead of me, perhaps at my dissertation defense?  Or, as many people I know that aren’t in academia would claim, perhaps the lack of a 9-to-5 means we will never be “real people”?  I just don’t know…

That’s right – I have a real lab in addition to my virtual one!  While I was in Norfolk, I visited my new department a couple of times, during the last of which I took the opportunity to take a look around.

The department chair, Janis, showed me where my lab will be.  The room is actually perfectly sized for my needs – I was very happy with it as a lab space, and honestly, a smidge surprised that kind of space was actually available in the building.  It wasn’t in the best of condition, however.  I don’t have a picture, but I give you this visual approximation:

Okay, so the lab isn’t actually that big.  But it is full of boxes.  And desks.  And bookcases.  Which yes, means that right now, it’s a storage room.  That’s fine, since obviously I’m not using it yet.  My understanding is that the boxes, desks, and bookcases will be gone by the time I move in, but if not, I suppose that just means my graduate student and I will have a lot of heavy lifting come the end of summer.  Frankly, I’m fine either way.

And when I realized that, it felt a little strange.  I am actually excited about a room.  A room.  Not because I necessarily love the space, but because I love what it represents – a place of my own to conduct the research I want to conduct.  It represents independence.  It represents responsibility to a greater good.  It is an affirmation from the powers on high that I – after 21 years of education – am finally being given the keys to the research Nova with the expectation that I will not drive it off a cliff.

That simultaneously thrills and terrifies me.  I am endlessly excited at the view in front of me, and also a bit nervous that I will not meet the expectations of my advisor, my colleagues, and most of all, myself.  I feel the great weight of expectation upon me, but I am also cautiously optimistic that I will be able to bear it.  Is this what being an academic researcher is all about?  Will I soar, or will I turn into a old, bitter academic with many regrets?  I suppose I will know in only a few more short months.

Every day that things continue to go smoothly, I grow increasingly suspicious.

We went to the home inspection today, which took about 3 hours.  The man basically went from top to bottom in the house and looked for every single possible thing that is or could be wrong with it.  We ended up with a many-page printout (which he produced on-site!) detailing everything that needs to be addressed by either the sellers or by us.

Fortunately, it’s nothing too major.  Apparently the previous owners either were or knew a handyman who decided he could install the wires to the air conditioner by drilling a random hole in the side of the house and running them through it.  Which, believe it or not, is the not the appropriate way to install such a cord.  There was also a random extension cord installed in a similar fashion, several plugs which appeared to be grounded were in fact not, and a few shingles were damaged or missing.  So altogether, nothing terribly surprising, and the sellers shouldn’t give us much trouble to get them addressed.

This is not our house, but it is modern laminate. Not bad, eh?

As for us, we’re planning how to update this house once we get to it.  I pulled back some of the ’70s carpet on the stairs and upper floor to discover a diamond-in-the-rough: neglected hardwood floors.  After closing, we will have $5200 in escrow from the sellers to deal with the flooring, so a good chunk of that (we are guessing around $2000) will be used to sand, stain, and re-finish those floors and the stairway.  We’ll also be ripping up the flooring downstairs and installing laminate (which is much higher quality than it used to be) and hopefully re-tiling the bathrooms.

So the tentative plan thus is:

1. Move in late May
2. Pull up the upstairs carpet
3. Call in a carpenter to get an estimate on refinishing the floors
4. Paint the upstairs and move to the downstairs ASAP
5. Get the carpenter to refinish the upstairs flooring (hopefully this step will be complete within 1 week of us moving in)
6. Have our furniture and possessions from Minnesota delivered
7. After the downstairs is painted, pull up the downstairs carpet
8. Install hardwood-lookalike laminate flooring in the entire downstairs
   
9. Buy area rugs and possibly a runner for the staircase
10. Re-model one or both bathrooms

So there goes our June and July.  That’s why the dissertation has to be done before we move!

Yes, there's a mural, and yes, it's wood panelling. Why do you think we have so much work to do!?!

Our New Home!

Day 7 was quite a bit more successful, although still a little stressful.

This morning, we heard from our agent that the bank had not updated their conditional approval letter (previously called a “pre-approval letter”) to reflect our new asking price ($5k under asking rather than $12k under asking), so the seller’s agent never even forwarded it to the sellers.  A quick call to our mortgage company later, and the letter was off.  Only a few hours later, we received word back that the sellers had verbally agreed to our offer with a minor change – we had asked for the entire house to be re-painted with white primer, but they only wanted to put primer on non-white walls.  Minor distinction (and not really important to us), but a distinction that had to be made in writing.

You might note that I used the words “verbally agreed.”  This is because the sellers don’t live in VA Beach anymore – they moved to North Carolina some time ago.  So the seller’s agent (based here) had to drive 4 hours to North Carolina in order to get them to sign the papers – which they did!  We very quickly drove to our agent’s office to sign the papers indicating we agreed to the slight change in wording, followed by a trip to Haynes (a local home furnishing store) to look at carpet and hardwood floors.

So as of March 19, we are homeowners.  At least, given several contingencies.  One, our financing has to come through (of course).  Two, the house must be appriased for more than we paid for it.  Three, the sellers must repair anything troubling discovered in the home inspection.  We managed to find an inspector willing to schedule a next-day inspection, so around 4PM tomorrow, we’ll be heading to the house with our agent to listen to the inspector tell us about our new house for a few hours.  Fun times!

Our agent seems honestly surprised that this all worked out.  We went from looking at our first house to having an accepted offer in one week!  Not bad, eh?

Home buying is a horrible, horrible process, whether you are an academic or not.

We tried to prepare to for this horrible, horrible process by reading a lot of books on the subject and perusing a lot of webpages where people told horror stories about their experiences.  And by we, of course I mean my wife.  To save time, I have been hoping to learn about real estate by osmosis from her, and for the most part, it seems to be working.

As part of our plan to transition to a full-fledged academic life, we wanted to purchase a home in South Hampton Roads at the south end of Chesapeake Bay before we actually moved.  This, at the time we decided it, seemed like a “good idea.”  Today, we finished Day 6 of an adventure that started on my birthday, and it has been a very stressful and thus far not-so-rewarding experience.

Days 1 to 4 went fine.  On Day 1, we flew in relatively uneventfully.  On Days 2-4, we looked at about 30 houses in Norfolk (the location of ODU), Chesapeake (south of Norfolk) and Virginia Beach (east of Norfolk).  Each has its own particular traits that tend to be similar across neighborhoods.

Norfolk is very much a city, and any house that we looked at there simply felt very urban: small lot sizes (and small backyards), less square footage for the price compared to the other cities, and generally more run down neighborhoods, at least in the areas that we could comfortably afford.  Ghent, for example, was ridiculously nice, but far out of our price range.  So it didn’t take much looking to realize that for the quality of life we wanted, Norfolk wasn’t really an option.

Chesapeake and the areas of Virginia Beach within 30 minutes of ODU, on the other hand, are more suburban areas, comparable to South Minneapolis or West Nashville (the only two cities that I can really compare against!).  So houses in both ended up near the top of our list.  We ended up settling on three properties in our price range: one near Town Center in Virginia Beach that needed a little work (about 30 mins from ODU), one near KempsRiver Crossing also in Virginia Beach that needed a lot of work (also 30 mins from ODU), and one in Chesapeake in the Indian River neighborhood (about 20 mins from ODU) in beautiful condition.

The KempsRiver house was my wife’s original favorite.  I think it was because of the white counters with lime green trim in the kitchen and shag carpeting.  I’m not against fixer-uppers, but only those that I wouldn’t feel dirty living in while the work was being done.  The house in Indian River was my original favorite, as it was more conveniently located to ODU and “turn-key” – spacious, clean, roomy, and every single square inch of space under the roof converted into livable square footage.  Of course, that’s just the reason my wife didn’t like it – no room to build equity beyond ordinary appreciation over time (which we’re not terribly confident in, given the economy).  So ultimately, we settled on the Town Center home – it also needs quite a bit of work, including new paint and flooring for the entire house.

So given that, we decided to put an offer on that house, which happened on Day 5.  We made final visits to our final choices with our agent, Ronnie Hooks (who has been fantastic), and drafted the contract for $12k under the asking price with all closing costs paid, new paint, and new carpets (bad economy for sellers, good economy for buyers!).  If all worked out, we’d live within 15 minutes of the picture below.

In the morning of Day 6, we received notice that our offer had been rejected.  No counter-offer – outright rejected.  Our closing date was apparently a problem – we didn’t want to close until June 1, because that’s the earliest that the banks we’ve been working with would close (my appointment at ODU starts July 26).  A one- to two-month closing is apparently fairly typical in most places (like New Jersey, from which my wife was getting most of her information).  In this area, three weeks is typical.  You can see the problem.

So today has been spent in a multi-step process, much of which we didn’t have any control over.  We immediately contacted the banks to see if they could give us a better closing date, but neither of the loan officers that we’ve been in contact with was available.  We then contacted our agent to set up a new appointment at the Indian River house, as that was second-place in our housing scheme.  On the drive to the agent’s office, we received a call from one of the banks that they might be able to move the closing date, but that they needed to see the wording of my contract.

Apparently, most jobs only give you a “letter of intent to hire” when they agree to hire you, which means that they are only obligated to hire you if everything goes well.  Academia does not work this way.  I interviewed for this position four months ago, signed the contract two months ago, and the position does not start for another six months.  It’s a long process.  It also means that I sign a contract that is legally binding for both parties – I have to work there, and they have to hire me.  Apparently, the bank didn’t understand this.

So, I gave the bank the phone number of the ODU Academic Affairs office so that they could get a copy of my contract to see what it actually said.  Five minutes later, the bank called me back to say that ODU wouldn’t release my contract without my permission.  Five minutes later, I called Academic Affairs to give my permission.

At this time, we arrived at Ronnie’s office and set out to see the house at Indian River.  We then looked at it for the third time, to verify what we basically already knew – the house would be impossible to expand dramatically (to build equity).  What we did figure out was that two walls could be fairly easily knocked out to increase the size of the kitchen, which was my wife’s major concern.  So the Indian River house became a contender in our hunt.  If we couldn’t get the bank to agree to an earlier closing date, the owners at Indian River were willing to entertain a June closing date – they had small children, and pulling them out of school wasn’t preferable anyway.

By the time we were done seeing the house, it was time to drive to a reception being held for a senior faculty candidate at ODU.  I mean – I’m in Norfolk anyway, so I might as well start to participate in departmental affairs, right?  So we head over to the reception and have to stop on the side of the road because I’ve received a call – one of the banks that we contacted has received the fax of the contract from ODU, and we are clear to put in a closing date as early as we want.  Our closing date thus shifts to April 30 – this is still 5 weeks out, but classes end in early May, so this is as close as we want to cut it.  We call Ronnie, and she starts drawing up new offer documents.  We spend a couple of hours at the reception and then drive back to Ronnie’s office to sign the papers so that she can fax them over.

And now you’re up to speed.  I have to say that this is one of the worst life experiences that I’ve ever had and can’t imagine ever wanting to do it ever again.  The degree of stress and uncertainty throughout the entire process is just mind-boggling, and we always have ten things to do at any given moment.  I’d planned to do some dissertation coding while I was here too!  That doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, at least to the degree that I’d hoped.

Anyway, this is, as the title implies, Part 1.  Part 2 will be more uplifting, right?   Here’s hoping…

My name is Richard N. Landers, and I am only four months from being a Assistant Professor of Psychology at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA.

This blog represents… well, actually I’m not really sure yet!  I imagine it will be a window into the life of someone transitioning from graduate school to full-fledged academic (a neo-academic, you might say!).  As I’m not quite sure what that involves yet, I can’t really say what this blog will be about.

But rest assured that it will be interesting!  At least to me.

I have long been a fan of academic comics like Piled Higher and Deeper and academic blogs like Rate Your Students, although I doubt I will be nearly as inflammatory, or possibly as interesting – but we’ll see.