Issues @ The New Global Headquarters

As I believe I explained in an earlier post, I came to South Carolina to start work while my family remained in Houston.
This left me in the unenviable position of needing to select a house without the benefit of the input of the key decision-makers in our power structure.
Additionally, I was living in a crappy hotel, which made just about any comparison favorable.
We should also remember that I get easily distracted by shiny things.
So. I picked a house.
It is wired for cable and eligible for high-speed internet.
There is no Home Owner's Association coming down on us for anything.
The walls are made of bricks, and kicking them scuffed my shoe and hurt my toe, but left no lasting mark on the house itself.
There are lines already run for surround sound in the living room.
Sold.
As it turns out, there are some things I didn't immediately notice about the house itself, and things the home inspector also missed.
Since we've moved in, we've had a plumber out twice. Once to fix a leak in one of the bathrooms and once to run a gas line to the laundry room, since our gas dryer was horribly ineffective without it.
The thought did not occur to me that different laundry rooms would have different connections and that dryers would not all just work when placed in the slot for a dryer.
Were this my only failure, I could pretty much laugh it off. However, that is kind of minor.
There is no pantry in the kitchen, and the cabinets (while pretty, certainly) are not deep enough to actually hold boxes of cereal. My suggestion that we stop eating breakfast was met with almost open hostility from Gwynyth, but to be fair I'm just used to slipping into that kind of out-of-the-Kellogg's-box problem-solving mode.
When selecting a house, who looks for a pantry? Pantries are in houses. It is like checking for light switches. What kind of builder doesn't put in light switches and a freaking kitchen closet?
Two of the lower cabinet doors don't actually even open due to an installation failure, but I didn't try opening all of them pre-purchase.
We have a better work-around coming up in a later post, but for now I'm trying to get the family to embrace single-serving foods which can be removed from the packaging and stashed in drawers. In, like, bedrooms maybe.
Also, as it turns out, the house is largely yellow on the inside. Who notices that kind of thing?
Yellow, it seems, clashes with most of our stuff. Except our yellow stuff. Our yellow stuff fades ninja-like into the walls themselves where it waits in ambush for the unwary.
Okay, so the whole thing needs to be repainted. Every surface of every room. Picking paint colors is fun. After purchasing the paint, the fun level starts to immediately decline.
Then we met our neighbor.
The house behind ours is empty most of the time. The people that stay there live in Philadelphia and come to Columbia a few times a year. This week is one of those times.
He stopped by earlier this week and asked Shana if she had had the baby.
Shana explained that she had indeed had the baby over nine years ago, and that the baby was listening to MP3s through SkullCandy headphones in another room. She also clarified that the people that used to live in our house no longer did, therefore we are not them.
He asked about the gate in the fence in the back and Shana said he was welcome to look at it since it opened into the area behind his house.
Then he talked about "the deal".
He came back to discuss "the deal" when I came home from work.
Apparently, in exchange for letting the former occupants put in this gate so that they could more easily access the golf course, he gets to use our pool.
For serious?
Apparently.
The gate is nice, certainly in better shape than the wiring in the bedroom (which an electrician termed "fire hazard", "death trap" and "flaming hell mouth") but it doesn't really lead anywhere I'm interested in going.
I don't even have a membership at that golf course.
So, for anyone paying attention, let's not leave me alone to decide things in the future. It leads to excessive painting, fires behind the sheet rock and some weird old guy swimming around in the backyard.