nimitzbrood: (Default)
( Jan. 28th, 2008 10:38 am)
January 28, 2008 10:41 AM

So...we put an offer in on a house on Saturday and it was accepted. The house is a 1955 cedar ranch - red. I’m not going to post a lot of details because there’s still an appraisal, inspection, and closing to go through before we get the keys. We gave the seller the asking price of $169,900 but asked for 3% for closing. Submitted and earnest money check along with the offer and got a call back that evening. (We’ll probably still have to come to the table with some cash for closing but I have a very kind friend that I can ask for it.)

There really isn’t anything we would have to do to move into the place except have DirectTV come by and install a satellite dish (there’s a Dish Network one already on the side of the house) and any electrical stuff I want done immediately. (I’d like to have 220V run to the garage but I’m not sure what that would cost. I’ll have to check on that because if I don’t do it right away then it’ll likely be a long time before I can afford to get it done.)

Anyway I will likely buy two new LCD TVs because I want to reduce our electric usage and our existing TVs are CRT ones. I might even buy three - one for our daughter’s room - and another TiVo unit. All that comes out to about $1400 but with what we save in electricity it will be worth it. (I don’t know - it depends on any fees we have yet to pay.) And after we close I can roll over the credit union loan and pay back some of the closing money right away and still have some cash for the TVs AND still have reserves. The problem of course is getting to the closing point...

So all we’re waiting for at this point is to get all the contract stuff taken care of, have an appraisal, have an inspection, and then close.

A long way to go yet thus why I’m not getting too attached at this point.

There is something I will have looked at though once we buy the house. It currently has a partial basement and a crawl space under the rest of the house. I’ll probably find out how deep the footings are on the house and see if I can’t dig out the crawl space and expand it into a full basement. If the footings are 6 foot or deeper then I should be able to just have them cut the one wall in the partial basement and I’ll just take out a bucket of dirt on a regular basis until it’s empty. Regardless I’ll need to get under there and insulate the floors because there’s no insulation at all under there. But that’s truly a weekend project.

Speaking of projects...

My wife should be bringing home a bunch of newspaper today so we can continue packing the kitchen. Our friend’s stuff is leaving CA on the 4th of February and will be here 7 - 14 days after that. One of the things included in that stuff will be the large china cabinet. I’ve moved that damn thing - it’s heavy. We’re not dragging that thing downstairs. ;-) It’s going to come right in the back door and into the kitchen. That means we need to have our stuff out of the way before then. Not a big deal. I pretty much want us to be packed by the 15th or 20th of next month. I don’t think that’s too unreasonable.

_My_ biggest headache is going to be the stuff in the rack downstairs and the rack itself. That thing was a pain to get in there and I need to take all the systems out of it before I move it. That means being completely down for at least a day or three. Likely less because I fully intend to get the DSL installed and turned on before we walk in the door. That way I can change the configuration files on the firewall, down all the systems, transport them, and then bring them all back up and have them running immediately. The only pain will be DNS changeover at the registrar level because I have some stuff that is not running on my in-house BIND servers. Maybe I should take the time to rectify that before the whole move. It would make my downtime a little less but not too much because I still have to propagate DNS to the root servers. A horse a piece I guess...

*re-reads entire post*

Damn. I’ve become attached. Oh well....
January 10, 2008 2:18 PM

Let’s see...we have...

A 100+ year old farmhouse for $159,900.

A 50 year old frame ranch for $159,900.

A huge (1500+ square-feet) cedar siding covered ranch with basement and garage for $164,900.

Another ranch for $164,900.

A 50 year ranch with deck, storage shed, and 2 car garage for $165,900.

And last but not least a 50 year old brick ranch for $169,000.

Now you’ll notice that all of those are above $150,000. That’s not a mistake on my part. What’s happened is that my wife and I are looking at the higher end of what we can afford because the houses, with the exception of the two that have been bought our from under us, around $150k have had some serious issues.

I’m aware no house is perfect but some of these houses shouldn’t even be on the market at the price they are without some serious cleanup. (Mold Central in the gallery for instance.) And a “unfinished refurb” shouldn’t mean “unlivable shithole that I didn’t bother cleaning up”.

Thus we’ve raised our prices in an effort to get something a little better suited to us. And it’s not like we can’t afford those homes it’s just that the PMI _in addition_ to the mortgage is pain.

So anyway we’re going to see the ones above this weekend and I’ll post more pictures. I’m wondering what’s wrong with the cedar one because the pictures all look good, it’s big, has a full basement, and a 1.5 car garage on top of it. So why is it so low priced?

I wish we had the time to wait on this but our financing has time limits attached to it so we can’t afford to tarry. I just really want the cycle to be finished and done with.

Need to get more sleep. I’m pretty worn out right now. Need to get that back in balance.

Damn. Forgot to grab the empty boxes from work for packing stuff in. :-( Oh well I’ll get them when I’m in on Sunday. (I have to pick up my daughter tomorrow so I can’t take them then.)

I’m way behind on that too. Other than the books and some stuff I’m going to ship to other people I haven’t gotten anything packed really. That’s not good because if we want to move quickly we need to have it already packed.

Watched the movie Stardust last night. It was _excellent_ in my opinion except for the musical transitions. To me they seemed too long and too formal. I know why they were like that , they had to show time passing, but they still felt a little out of place. Other than that I will only say this. I started the movie playing on my Macbook and didn’t get up until it was finished. That’s how good it was. I really liked it. :-)

Now I suppose I’ll have to get the book to see what stuff they left out...
.

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Mike Hebel

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