The Real Estate Blog by Cari McGee

They’re opening up registration for tours of Hanford! Tomorrow morning at 12:01 am, to be exact.  There are two kinds of tours – one takes about five hours and is intense in the amount of coverage it provides.  They’ll spend over an hour at the B reactor alone, and they added more attention on the tank farms this year.  VERY cool!

The other tour takes less than three hours and focuses only on the B reactor.

Stay up late (or get up REALLY early, last year the longer tour spots were snapped up within twelve hours) and log on to http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/HanfordSiteTours right after midnight tonight.

Read the instructions carefully – you need to be a US citizen for one of the tours, and not the other, and you need to present ID with the exact same name as the name you signed up under, too, so now is not the time to try out your new married name (Cari Clooney isn’t going to fly for me, for example). In addition, there is a dress code, and an age limit for both.

Seriously?  SERIOUSLY??!!

I first wrote about this a year ago.  The President of the United States of America has decided that Yucca Mountain should be removed from consideration as a place to store our spent nuclear fuel.  Where he’d like it to go instead was a mystery until yesterday when this exchange between Senator Murray and Energy Secretary Chu was reported - for those of you who don’t care to click on the link, I’ll tell you the idea.  They want to store the spent fuel in SALT DOMES.

Now, I am sure there are people who know a great deal more about this than I do, and perhaps SALT DOMES are the ideal nuclear repository. However, when you have spent BILLIONS of dollars and YEARS of time on Yucca Mountain, why go for something else at this point?  When the plan has been in place for eight years? And in the planning stages for ten years before that? There is a place, in the middle of the desert, prepared to hold the detritus from over 50 years of nuclear work.  It can be safely contained.  No one gets hurt, not the yellow-tailed small-bottom gopher or some other obscure animal on the verge of extinction.  People won’t be affected.  The air and the water remains pure.  They decided this YEARS ago.  They spent the money to make sure it would be okay.

And now, in one fell swoop, the President wants to remove it from consideration.

I loved reading this article because the people they interviewed were far more articulate and less sputteringly angry about this than I am.

I especially like what Doc Hastings said -

“A unilateral decision to abandon Yucca Mountain without any justification and blocking it from ever being considered in the future is simply indefensible,”

And the following makes me laugh out loud -

“It is the secretary of energy’s judgment that scientific and engineering knowledge on issues relevant to disposition of high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel has advanced dramatically over the 20 years since the Yucca Mountain project was initiated,” the DOE petition said.

Okay, I’ll buy that.  In twenty years, there have been significant changes in in technology.

But, haven’t SALT DOMES always been around??

We didn’t get the house . We qualified, we were getting our existing house ready, and then our taxes came due. Dun-dun-duuuuuun….  We owe too much to be able to afford the new house.

I hate it when reality gets in the way of dreams!

I made a big mistake.

Huge.

Or, as the kids today like to say  – Ginormous.

Something came over me on Friday night and I decided to look for available houses for my family.  I punched the criteria in and was pleased to see about six possibilities returned.  I showed the pictures of the one I liked best to my husband who nodded and said, “Looks really nice.”

Then we went to the Home and Garden Show at the TRAC yesterday and weighed remodeling vs. buying new as we browsed the booths (and bought a Topsy-Turvy Tomato Planter!).

On the way back to the house I suggested we go walk through the houses I liked, just for fun.

Well, that did it.  We walked into my favorite and my favorite it stayed.  And became the favorite for my husband and children, too.

Now, here’s a problem – our existing home is nowhere near ready to put on the market.  If we do this, a flurry of preparation activity will take place, and the dust will barely settle when I put the sign in the front yard.

And the BIGGEST problem is that we went looking without securing financing first.  Stupid, stupid, stupid!  It’s like walking on the the Mercedes lot when all you can afford is a Hyundai.  Or picking up on a guy when you’re already married.  Or shopping at Nordstrom (NOT during the Anniversary or Half-Yearly Sales)  when you really need to be shopping at Target.

My husband is self-employed, and has been self-employed for less than two years.  Loans are nearly impossible to come by for the self-employed unless you’ve got two years of tax returns to show.  So, we’re pretty much looking at an empty dream at this point.

And that’s what hurts.  I’ll say it until my dying day; buying and selling is an emotional business.  My husband and I are already emotionally tied to the new house.

I show houses all day, everyday.  That’s my job.  People ask me sometimes if I ever see a house I want and get disappointed when I come home.  The answer has always been no.  I’ll see something lovely or full of every feature imaginable or a great floor plan, and think about it wistfully.  But when I drive into my driveway, I feel at home.  I feel happy and content because my family is inside and our home is ours, and I love it.

But yesterday, as we approached our existing house, after viewing the dream house, I felt let down.  THIS is where we live?  THIS is home?

And it’s because I’ve mentally moved out.  It happens to my clients all the time, and now I understand.  I totally get it!

I think it says a lot about our community that this was reported on the news.  It says we care enough to warn others and we’re caring enough to fall victim to a scam artist claiming to help people.

It also says our rental market is incredibly tight.

Two things every mom should share with her children – 1) if it seems too good to be true, it probably is, and 2) never send money to Nigeria (unless you’re a Nigerian mother speaking to her Nigerian children).