Direction Connection

Now that we’ve officially cleared the final hurdles to close on our house this week, we decided to allow ourselves to go shopping for “house stuff”. We went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond on Saturday, and to Southern Season and Kitchenworks on Sunday. Here’s the rundown of purchases:

• Yet another cutting board that Rebecca simply needed to have (it’s somehow made of paper, or something). We now own seven cutting boards.
• A magnetic knife strip for the new place (we’re leaving the ones we bought several months ago at our rental house, because we’d rather do that than fill in the holes from screwing them into the wall).
• Battery-operated LED lights for inside of our new closets.
• Set of six fairly basic coasters.
• A toaster oven to replace the toaster I bought in April 2005 that for some inexplicable reason now does not work very well.
• A fried-egg sized frying pan (for Melissa).
• Popsicle molds (for Josie–we filled them with beef broth and put chew sticks in them. She loves them!).
• Two brew-in-mug tea cups (and some loose leaf tea).
•  A butter bell (see www.butterbell.com).

I know it probably seems like we went a little bit nuts, but the list of items we didn’t buy but really wanted is even longer! Here’s a sample of the items we restrained ourselves from buying:

• Wine glasses.
• Bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths.
• A ginger grater.
• New placemats and cloth napkins.
• New kitchen towels.
• An Oxo salad spinner (it has a brake).
• An immersion blender (Southern Season was out, or I’m sure we would have bought it).
• A pot clip to hold cooking utensils suspended above the pot.
• A microplane.
• More knives (for Rebecca).
• More All-Clad pans (for Rebecca).
• A cookie sheet or something else metallic that we can hang up and use to store our magnetic spice containers.
• Silicone cupcake pan (or bread loaf pan, or just about anything else baking-related that’s silicone–for Melissa).
• Outdoor recliner (for Melissa).

Oh, and I’m sure there’s more. I think we showed remarkable restraint!

I would love to be checking my email right now, but unfortunately, I can’t. That’s because the folks at google mail (”gmail”) simply cannot seem to get their act together these days. Often when I try log onto my account, I get either a cutesy littel “Oops” message or the following message:

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

Yeah, right. A few minutes. Sure, I’ve tried that. For about a half hour. In the past when this has happened, I’ve tried emailing the gmail people once I finally am able to log on, so that I can tell them just how much their product sucks. They sent me a lovely little email that basically said, yep, we were having a problem, but it appears to be fixed now. But let us know if it happens again. Super. So now I imagine I’m supposed to save the gmail customer support email address in my hotmail account so I can email the gmail people from hotmail, because if my gmail isn’t working at the time, that’s really the only way I’m going to be able to contact them, isn’t it?

Rebecca just emailed the gmail customer support people, copying my hotmail account so that they can get in touch with me to rectify the problem. Which begs the question: Why don’t I just migrate my email life back to hotmail and forget gmail ever existed? The bells and whistles of gmail are nice, sure, but only if the basic email functionality actually WORKS. Which it doesn’t right now. So what’s the point?

The bottom line: Can the bells and whistles, gmail, and just develop an email interface that actually does what it’s supposed to do–allow users to log on and send and receive messages.

First, let me say that I had no idea this could be this hard. It’s been two weeks and two days since we put our offer in on the house, and two weeks and one day since it was accepted. Way back then, our realtor scheduled an inspection for us tomorrow, and though we knew we had some negotiations to do over structural repairs, we figured it would be easy enough to come to terms and move forward with the purchase.

As it turns out, it wasn’t until Friday afternoon that it was clear we were going to be able to go forward, and as late as Friday morning we were bracing ourselves to walk away from the whole thing if the sellers asked us to make any more concesssions. By then, we’d been through so many ups and downs it’s hard to keep track — finding out that the repairs would only cost $3,500; learning that said repairs would likely cause the inside of the addition to essentially explode; hearing that another contractor had an alternate plan sans explosion, but with a $19,000 price tag; the back and forth with each other as we decided how much we were willing to contribute to the repairs, or whether it was time for us to walk away; waiting two days while the sellers ran out the clock, leaving us minimal time to negotiate if we wanted to keep our inspection appointment; the back and forth with the sellers, as we agreed to pay twice as much for the repairs as we’d offered; and finally, Friday, agreeing to give the sellers pretty much everything they wanted, but taking some of their furniture to save a bit of face, and making peace with the fact that though we were contributing more than we wanted to, we were, at the end of the day, paying a fair price for the house even with the repairs.

So tomorrow, 9 a.m., we inspect. The good news is that the house has already been through one inspection already — the inspection that discovered the structural issues that caused the last sale to fall through. We’ve got a copy of that report, and most of the major things found during that inspection have been fixed. Unless there are any major surprises on the second inspection, we hope that we might actually be able to close before our original July 27 date, and we’re hoping that carrot will incent the sellers, who are already in a new house, to be a little bit more responsive than they were last week. Today it finally seemed safe again to be looking at kitchen cabinets, to be discussing the merits of gas cooktops and Corian sinks, to be talking about which light fixtures Melissa couldn’t stand and was going to have to replace, and to start entertaining the spectacle of transporting our stuff the one block from our current home to our new one.

We went to see Pilobolus at the American Dance Festival at Duke University last night with our friends Molly and Susanne. (Here’s the program.) I don’t know much about dance, so our conversation afterwards was somewhat limited to “wasn’t it amazing when …” and “that was so impressive when they …” and “that one with the chairs was unbelievable,” and I found myself wishing that my sister was there to offer her movement thoughts. She was responsible for my last modern dance excursion, when our family went to see Alvin Ailey at Christmas time in NYC, for free, because my sister is cool like that. Anyway, my point: if you have a chance to see them, you should.

At last, we’ve found it–a house that’s right for us. We realize we haven’t been at this for very long, and it may seem like we’re complaining, but the whole “hurry up and wait” nature of the house-hunt was beginning to wear on us. We were ready to be finished, even though we knew our house-hunt could still take quite a while longer. We were trying to pace ourselves. But it turned out that we didn’t have to!

Here’s the short story: We found a house we really like, that’s the right size, in one of our target neighborhoods, for less than we thought we’d have to spend in that neighborhood. And now we get to call it our own and move into it in a few short months. Scroll to the bottom of this post for pictures.

Here’s the whole story:  In late April/early May (?), Rebecca spied a house right around the corner from us that was up for sale. It looked good from the outside, sounded good from the description, and the price was right! Even though we didn’t yet have a realtor, we tried to call the sellers’ agent to set up a showing. We were very excited. But by the time we heard back from the realtor the next day, it had already been shown seven times, and there was at least one offer and one back-up offer on it. We didn’t even get to see the inside! The house sold even before pictures had been added to the MLS listing.

This spurred us to begin our search, though. We found a realtor, gathered income documentation, and met with a mortgage broker. We were all set. We saw a few houses, but only a few interested us, and none of those worked out. We were about to consider increasing our price range, to see if that opened up any other options for us.

And then, Friday morning, I rolled out of bed and immediately checked my email to see if we’d received an email from the MLS tool our realtor uses to send us new listings that meet our criteria. And there it was–THE house! The one we really really wanted back in late April/early May! I immediately barged into the bedroom and told Rebecca to WAKE UP, because the house on Green was back on the market!

Rebecca emailed our realtor, and called her, and called the realty company’s main line. It turns out our realtor’s son was graduating that day, and she had a conflict of interest on this property anyway,  so she set us up with another realtor to show us the house. At one point I announced to Rebecca that I wasn’t going to go to work until I saw the house. But then Rebecca talked some sense into me–we could see it that afternoon, so I could go to work and then come home after lunch, and we could see it then. I guess we must have made a nuisance of ourselves with our earlier calls, because no sooner had I gotten to work than I got a call from Rebecca saying that the new realtor could show it to us at 10:00. So I turned around. We saw it. We liked it. We met with the realtor later that afternoon to put an offer on it. And the next day (today), we heard back from the realtor a little after 11:00 that our offer was accepted! We’re very excited.

OK, here is a picture of the view of the house from the street:

And here are the inside pictures, starting to the left as soon as you walk in the door, and proceeding counterclockwise through the house (except there should be pictures of the second bedroom after the bathroom pictures, but we don’t have any pictures of the second bedroom):

Living room                        Dining room                     Kitchen

Family room                      Master bedroom

Bathroom shower             Bathroom counter

And here are pictures of the back yard and front porch (we’re getting the rocking chairs!):

We met the realtor at the house today to initial some amended paperwork, and the sellers were there. Also, our friends Molly and Susanne happened to be doing a drive-by of the new place at exactly the same time, so we took them through the house. We were so fortunate to be able to talk with the sellers, and to learn a little bit about the house’s recent history (it was built in 1900, so there’s certainly more that we don’t know). The sellers seemed very nice, and told us that if we were interested in any of the furniture or decorations, we should let them know. They’ll probably just give us some of them, but they’ll name a price for the other stuff. That’s good for them because they don’t have to move it, and good for us because we need furniture that will work in this space!

About those granite countertops? Turns out they came with a $30,000 to $40,000 repair bill for everything the owners did wrong in the rest of the house. We went through with a contractor on Wednesday, fully prepared to sit down with our Realtor afterwards to write up an offer letter. It was like watching a car accident in slow motion as over the course of an hour (an hour of our lives that we will never get back), we learned that, in addition to committing some major drywalling offenses, the current owners had:

• Improperly cased nearly every window and door in the house
• Improperly installed the ceramic tile in the hallway, such that when you stood on it, it moved, and the grout was rapidly deteriorating
• Attached more than the allowed number of connections to the 2-1/2″ water supply before putting down new floor, thereby eliminating all access to the plumbing except via a 24″ crawl space
• Been blissfully unaware of major termite damage
• Installed concrete block piers without any mortar
• Overlooked a gap in the roof beams such that anyone who stood over the gap on the roof would fall in
• Neglected to install a shower pan under the master bathroom shower or any waterproofing material behind the slate tiles on the wall of the shower, such that the contractor’s recommendation was to rip it out and start over, and hope that maybe we could salvage the door
• Blindly cut through a load-bearing wall to make room for said shower in the master bathroom

After the fiasco, our realtor gave the seller (who is also the realtor) some feedback, to which she responded by offering to reduce the price by $20,000. Suffice to say we weren’t interested.

So we were supposed to go see three houses tonight, but our realtor wrote us this morning to tell us that two of them are already under contract. As Melissa so aptly put it in an email to some friends of ours, it’s like we’re playing musical chairs and we keep being the ones standing. In all honesty, of course, we’ve only been at this seriously for, what, a week? So we will either get used to it or just buy the first house we saw and call it done.

It should be said in the midst of all of this that we love our Realtor, Wendy Evans at Prudential Carolinas. We got hooked up with her when we called about another house in the neighborhood a few weeks ago (surprise surprise, it was also under contract, within about 24 hours of being listed). We were planning on taking things slow, having a little sit-down meeting with her, nothing serious. Then one day last week we found ourselves with an appointment to see a house, and we realized we ought to have someone with us who knew what she was doing. I emailed Wendy at 6:30 p.m. on Memorial Day; she called me back half an hour later. When we went to see the house, she was just invaluable, and she’s been incredibly patient and responsive as we figure this whole thing out. It’s a little hard to believe we thought we might navigate this without any help.

So tonight: cute bungalow around the corner from our house, bought in February for $100,000 less than they want for it now, newly refinished attic, fenced back yard. Wednesday: back to the first house we saw, with a contractor to tell us what it would cost to fix everything the not-so-handy owners did wrong (see The Dos and Don’ts of Drywall). But can you say granite countertops? And five-eye gas stove? And convection oven? And Bosch dishwasher? And so many cabinets that our current kitchen would hide its face in shame?

It’s been established that Melissa is the more voracious reader of the two of us — I’d be embarassed to calculate the ratio of the books she’s read since we started dating to the books I’ve read since we got together, and avid readers of the blog will note that she is the only one who ever updates the “Now Reading” section. However, a month or so ago we made a trip to The Regulator, a Durham independent bookstore, and I bought a bunch of books in hopes of improving my numbers. Right now I’m in the midst of Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I bought because the cover looked cool and the title was neat and I think I’d heard of it somewhere, and I am already three quarters of the way through it, and this is impressive! After I finish, I know that Melissa wants me to read I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, because she is dying to have someone to talk to about it, and I have discouraged her from talking about it so far, because I don’t want her to ruin it for me. I like Tom Wolfe, a lot — I remember snagging The Right Stuff from my parents’ bookshelf when I was young, and then reading it again when I was older, and I also enjoyed A Man in Full and Hooking Up, a book of short stories. The bad news for Melissa is that, before I’m done with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I am likely to receive two other books I ordered — Ambient Findability and Everything is Miscellaneous. These are non-fiction books, which I know Melissa secretly frowns upon for leisure reading; worse, they are geeky books, and so we will see how I negotiate this delicate situation.

Rebecca has it bad: house fever. When I went to visit my brother and his family in January, she IMed me quite a bit to tell me about this house in Northgate Park that she absolutely loved. She’d never bought a house before, so I encouraged her to go see it on her own, so she’d know what dealing with realtors and seeing houses was like. She did, and although she really liked the house, it was odd in some ways, and we decided that January simply wasn’t the time to buy, and that when we did, we’d get a realtor and check out more than just one house before deciding to buy.

Then, a couple of Fridays ago, she noticed that a house right around the corner had just gone up for sale that day. It sounded really good, and the price was right. Rebecca called the selling agent (who was a realtor who had been recommended to us anyway) to see about arranging a showing. We figured if it didn’t work out, at least we’d have developed a relationship with the agent. No kidding–by the time Rebecca talked to a realtor about the house the very next day, it had already been shown seven times and there was at least one offer on it. So we “lost” that one.

By this time, we had figured out that the housing market where we want to live (Watts-Hillandale or Old West Durham) moves so fast that we need to get a realtor and a pre-approval letter to have even a fighting chance of making an offer fast enough to get a house. But we were about to go on two weekend trips, and I was stressed out about work stuff. So I said, let’s wait until after we return from Las Vegas. Rebecca was OK with that. So we waited.

So now, we’re back from Vegas, and it’s Spring, so there are all kinds of houses on the market. There’s another one a few blocks away that Rebecca now absolutely loves. It’s not perfect, but it’s fabulous in many of the ways that matter to us. It’s been on the market for a while, and it’s almost certainly overpriced, but we have it on good authority that the sellers will accept an offer that’s in the neighborhood of what we’d be interested in paying. We’re hoping to see it tomorrow.

Our lease isn’t actually up until next April, but we’re about to bust out of our little rental house. The office is little more than a hallway, and there are days when we both work from home. There’s also no way to enjoy the outdoors on a sun room, porch, or patio. On the up side, the rent is super-cheap, which we both really like (OK, maybe I like that a little more than Rebecca…). It’s a little tough to think about doubling our monthly housing payment to buy a house, but that’s going to be the case no matter when we buy.

So here we go…we just spent a few hours getting together pay stubs, W-2s, bank statements, and retirement savings statements. We hope to be able to meet with a broker this week. If we can get financing with what little we’ve saved in our “house account” so far, we’ll probably take the plunge. I have a feeling it’s only a matter of time before we find “the one” and just do it.

After spending lots of weekends at home, we planned a few weekend getaways for May. The trips occurred on consecutive weekends, but they couldn’t have been more different.

First, we went to the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF). It’s a music and dance festival held twice yearly in Black Mountain, NC. I hadn’t been to LEAF in nearly 5 years, and was excited to go back, particularly because Rebecca had never been there before. We had a really good time camping, listening to good music, contra-dancing, kayaking, and eating bad-for-us festival food. We even bought some jewelry and a hammock that was made by Mayan Indians on the Yucatan Peninsula (or something like that–and yes, I know there’s supposed to be an accent on the second a in Yucatan, but I’m not up to figuring out how to add diacratic marks in WordPress). Now we just need a house where we can set it up (more on that later).

We went back to work for three days, and then headed out to Las Vegas on Wednesday night, to attend the wedding of a long-time friend of Rebecca’s. We arrived at the Luxor very late on Wednesday night (12:30 Las Vegas time, which was 3:30 am East Coast time), where the nice man behind the check-in counter “upgraded” us to a nicer room than what we had reserved. Instead of a room in the pyramid (which is the main part of the hotel, where the casinos are), he set us up in the tower. This ended up being fine (and perhaps preferable in some ways to the room we’d reserved), although he gave us a smoking room with two double beds instead of a King bed. I’m sure he assumed we’d prefer two beds to one, but he could have asked…

In addition to attending the wedding and reception, we saw the Blue Man Group at the Venetian, had some good food, and gambled. I decided that my relationship with money does not support a true gambling habit, so I spent (notice that I did not say “lost,” although that is essentially the truth) $20 on one day and $25 on another day. I played slot machines and video roulette, and I wasn’t very lucky, probably because I didn’t play  very “riskily.” Rebecca dropped a whole lot more than that at the craps tables (I’m convinced she knows the total on some level of her brain, but she’s clearly not dwelling on it).  She demonstrated good beginner’s luck at both craps and video roulette, but enjoyed playing so much that she didn’t leave with money in her pocket.

So those were our May trips. We have more tentatively planned for later in the summer. These likely will include the Blue Ridge Parkway, New York, Cleveland, and Asheville. I’ll also be traveling to Portland, OR (via New York) to see my brother and his family. Note: We will visit Ft. Collins after my sister-in-law has my first little nephew, but probably not until the fall.