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Archive for the 'Personal' Category
Winter sucksBut not for me! It’s Christmas time, it’s 80 degrees outside, I’m wearing shorts and t-shirt, walking among palm trees, listening to Christmas music. In the meanwhile, there’s Colorado and half the midwest buried in snow. In the words of Nelson, HA HA! It’s so nice to know that I won’t have to deal with crap like this any more.
It’s a good day after allLots of good news to report today! - My laptop is ready for pick up after 3 weeks at the Apple Store for repair. UPDATE: Not only did they fix my laptop, but they gave me the latest chip, a core duo processor as opposed to the single core processor that came with it when I bought it. Yay Apple!
CrazinessBuying a house is no easy work. Now I’m trying to get home insurance quotes. Except that most companies do not like doing business in Floriday. Not even Orlando even though we are not on the coast. Others don’t like it if a house has been built before 2002. The ones that will talk to me want to know things such as the type of foundation the house has. How in the world should I know that? So now I have an email out to my home inspector to see if he knows. Then other things such as “is there a fire station 5 miles from the house?” so I had to call the fire department. “Is there a fire hydrant 1000 feet from the house?” The fire department won’t tell me, they say that they insurance company needs to buy a book from them with that information. This is just crazy. I can’t wait for this to be over. Mortgage approvedI just got a phone call from the mortgage company. They’ve approved my mortgage. It’s scary to think that someone is giving me that much money, close to a quarter of a million dollars. Ouch. Of course I may not go through with closing anyway if the seller refuses to fix the problems with the HVAC system.
Seller disclosuresI’m very upset with the seller of the house I’m hoping to buy. Before I put in an offer for the house, I received the seller’s disclosures which consist of several pages where the seller lists anything that he knows is wrong with the house. The report was perfect. Not a single thing. So I hired a home inspector and he spent over 2.5 hours around the house this morning with me. Everything was going great. No problems with the roof, electric, plumbing, floors, no termite damage, no signs of mold, nothing. And then it hit us, we had turned the heater on and the house didn’t feel any warmer. Then we tried to set it to cold and the house would cool. We went outside and sure enough, the AC system doesn’t seem to be working. Now, I’m sure the seller was aware of this and yet he never disclosed it. In my books that is fraud. So what’s the next step? I’m not signing anything until that is fixed. It is a major system for a house. Specially down here in Florida. I talked to my agent and I guess they are sending an AC tech to see what the problem maybe. Maybe it’s a simple fix like a wire that came loose, or a fuse, or maybe the whole system needs to be replaced. But either way I’m not doing anything until that’s taken care of. UPDATE (12/15/06) - The seller has agreed to send a technician to check the system and see what’s going on. Now it’s wait and see. UPDATE #2 - The tech will stop by on Tuesday.
AcceptedThe seller accepted my counter offer to his counter offer! The house is mine, pending final mortgage approval of course.
It’s a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house. The master bath has one of those nice oval-shaped bathtubs, it has a front yard and backyard both with a big tree and hanging from each tree is a nice wooden double swing. The yard is not huge but big enough that in the future I could add a pool. Now all of you have a free place to stay when you come on vacation to Disney World.
Counter offer!Holy crap! The seller is almost ready to accept my offer but he had a counter offer (of course!) He is almost OK with him covering the closing costs…. minus $1000. So I countered his counter offer with closing costs minus $500. This is like when I was haggling in China. Except that I want to buy a house instead of a wooden replica of Mao Tse Tung. OfferAs scheduled, yesterday I met with my realtor and we looked at about 6 more houses and looked at the “jewel” that I liked so much a second time. I couldn’t help it, the “jewel” was just too awesome to pass up. So at around 5 pm I went ahead and made an offer on the house. I put $1,000 in earnest money, offered full price for it but asked for my closing costs and offered to close by the end of December. As it turns out, the seller had received another offer on the same day. So now he gets to evaluate both offers. I’m not going to get into a bidding war so if this is not meant to happen, I guess I’ll be disappointed and I’ll have to move on. There’s another house I saw yesterday that is in a more convenient area for me but that I don’t like as much as the other one. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice but I had really set my hopes on the one I made an offer on. My realtor told me that we should know something today, I hope that’s true. I am keeping my phone no more than two feet from me at all times so that I don’t miss the call. Wish me luck. I’m so nervous I could throw up any minute.
House huntingEven though I had an appointment on Friday to start looking at houses with the realtor, I couldn’t wait any longer and I asked the realtor if we could meet ahead of time, so we met on Tuesday after work and we looked at the houses of my list of “must visit” that I compiled while driving around to houses I had seen listed. The first one was nice with a great fenced in yard with a great pool. The problem? Tiny rooms, small living room and something I didn’t expect to see; it looks like the house had carpet for a while, and the carpet had been nailed on the tiles! Yes, nails going through tile! Now, I could live with that and in time re-tile those couple of rooms, but the size of the rooms really put me off. The other house tour was given by the home owner who happened to be there. A small Asian man who was telling me that the neighbor’s pitbull “will kill you after it grows up.” Great salesman. The rest of the houses were crap. For example, one of them had used that fake-wood contact paper on the kitchen cabinets to make them look good on pictures, but horrible in person. And that wasn’t just that, they had used those cheap stick-on vinyl tiles… on their warped floors. I was so discouraged by the end of the evening that I almost wanted to give up. Those were the houses that I had kept on a list for a couple of weeks and I had my hopes that one of those would be my future home. My morale really took a beating. Today the realtor called me because he wanted to show me a house he had. I went and oh my God, it was beautiful. It was a perfect house. 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, skylight in the master bathroom. Beautiful wooden floors, brand new appliances, nice cozy yard (where I could install a pool someday.) The problem? A tad far for my liking. It’s only a 15 minute drive to my job and about 20-25 minutes from Disney World, but I’m still trying to find something closer to where I live now. But I haven’t discounted this house. It’s awesome. So I’m meeting him on Friday and we’ll look at some more houses. The search for the perfect house continues….
They all look the same after a whileBy now I have driven past more than 30 houses in the past week, probably more, I’ve lost count. By doing so I’ve been able to assess driving times, neighborhoods, the actual appearance of the house, yard size, fences, etc. Some of them were clearly empty which meant that I was able to get out of the car and walk around a bit and look through some windows to see if I liked what I saw inside. Out of all of them I’ve chosen about 9 that I want to see again and go inside. About 2 or 3 of them even have a pool! I’ll start looking at them starting this coming Friday. Who knows, maybe I’ll see something on Friday or Saturday that I love and I want to make an offer. That’d be exciting!
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