House Project Write-up

 Author's note: This is a write up about doing my house project with Abbie. My first piece for this project was more explaining what I learned, while this is about what the process was like, and what emotions came up. My word choice isn't too great here. I am just focusing on fluency.

The whole idea behind Academy 21 is for kids to learn their own way, to do new projects that not only teach academics, but real-world skills, too. You are encouraged to do things that aren't conventionally done in traditional classes, so what better way to learn about the real world than simulating the purchase of a house?

When I first got the suggestion from my mom, I thought she was kidding. It seemed like buying a home would be to advanced to learn in middle school. But beneath the doubt, I was actually curious about the process. I talked my close friend in the class, Abbie, the next day, because I wanted to share this experience with someone -- both for support and a different point of view.  She seemed really exited about this too, so we made it official that this would be a project.

To be honest, we didn't know where in the world to start. We had a talk with Mr. Johnson who clarified it a little, and at least gave us a starting point. There are mainly two people that play a role in your home buying: a banker and realtor. With that in mind, we first set up a meeting with a banker. I was  unsure about this meeting at first, because I was afraid he would treat us like kids, bankers being so stereotypically professional, but Mr. Boldt treated us like he would have probably treated any normal citizen, and was very patient with all of our questions.

We came out of the meeting feeling really accomplished, with a number that we would be able to purchase a house at. Next we would have to talk to a realtor, Jan Farber, for the next steps. It took us a while to schedule the meeting, which frustrated us a little, but eventually happened. When it did happen, it did not go as smoothly as the first. She was nice, but had an extremely difficult time with our laptops and made what probably would have been a half hour meeting into an hour. Also, seemed to treat us like kids in some respects, such as saying we weren't allowed to go to open houses. This dampened our mood towards the project very much because going to open houses was admittedly what we were looking forward to in the project the most, but with that meeting over, our project was close to done.

As I'm sure it is in real life, there was a major sigh of relief when we picked the house and simulated filling out the forms. Abbie and I posted our final piece on our blogs and I think I speak for both of us when I say we were proud to have finished a project like this. We learned a lot about many different things, and dealing with problems that come up in the real world. After our tiring, long term process of home buying was over, we were ready to kick back and relax in our new "home".