Homeowners at last!

We own the house as of 11:06 AM on Oct. 31.

It has been a tumultuous couple of months. What I didn't tell you when I told you about how the sellers accepted our offer was the drama that ensued with our apartment. I'll tell you if you ask, but probably best not to post. So, while I was strong-arming the mortgage company and my phone ringing off the hook with lawyers and agents and loan officers, we also had this to deal with. At this point, I think we have avoided a lawsuit, *knock on wood*. Let's hope everything goes as planned.

We were trying to keep the apartment in good condition to show, because we were hoping to find a new tenant. Anyone who thinks Mike doesn't know how to clean, you are incorrect. Me, I am messy because I never really learned how to keep things clean, even though I really want to be neat. Mike really does know how to do it and he did it like perfectly for a month. At first I was like "ME-Ooowwww", but then I was like "Hey! quit moving my stuff!"

Due to circumstances at the apartment, we had to do a split move. We needed our stuff out of the basement by the 29th, and what with my bum shoulder, I knew that the two of us bringing all of the stuff upstairs was not really an option. So, I arranged for the movers to come on Sunday, Oct. 28, store our stuff for a couple of days, and then drop it off on Nov. 1, after we had closed on the house. This turned out to be about $500 more expensive than I anticipated, but there was nothing to do about it after they already had everything on the truck!

We closed on Tuesday night. Everything went pretty smoothly. The loan officer from Wells Fargo, who I had strong-armed, brought us a nice flower arrangement to thank us for our business. (Very nice of her!) The sellers left the house in great condition, which was very thoughtful of them. On Oct. 31, we brought over our food, suitcases, and the couple of things we had kept with us, like the air bed.

Mike's cousin Brian arrived in the afternoon. He will be staying with us for a couple months while he gets himself oriented in an internship in the area. The upstairs bedrooms are (were) neon green, bright sunny yellow, pumpkin orange, and mauve. Within 24 hours, Brian had the green room completely repainted with two coats of paint. And two walls of the orange room with their first coat! Without Brian, who knows how long we would have been talking about how badly we needed to paint those rooms! With the green gone, the sunny yellow isn't so bad. Not wild about the mauve, but it is not as ... extreme .... as the green. (My camera is with Christine, and so I got a disposable camera, and those pictures are still at CVS.)

The movers arrived around 9 AM on Nov. 1. They were amazing. Our house was built in 1860. The staircase going upstairs is pretty narrow, and has a moment of low clearance. It took all three of them like 20 minutes to get our pillow-top king size mattress upstairs, but they did it! (Aviv moving in Brighton, for anyone interested). Mike had said we were going to send half the stuff to the basement, and I said no way. We had taken two full carloads of stuff to the Goodwill, after all. As the boxes came off the truck, as Mike predicted, a lot of them got sent to the basement. We are going to adopt a policy of getting rid of things that have not been opened in a year. I confess to being a pack rat, but I think getting rid of stuff that is not giving me benefit will really improve the feng shui in the house!

So, having been stressed out for like two months straight, and having been running around moving boxes, out in the cold, etc. Of course, I have gotten sick. After being out of work for two days (Oct. 31, and Nov. 1), last night I said that I needed to at least show up at work today to demonstrate that I was sick. Sure enough, my boss sent me home. yay!

This weekend, I hope to arrange major pieces of furniture, and unpack clothes. (kitchen is already unpacked!) If there isn't a torrential downpour all weekend, I hope to put in some spring bulbs. I love crocus. They make me happy when there are little yellow and purple flowers in February.

Look forward to email / mail with our new address and land-line phone number!

Cheers!

What a busy day

Working for a defense contractor, I get all the B.S. holidays off, so today was a free day! Mike and I went to the Aquarium and went on a whale watch. The day after we were engaged, we also went on a whale watch, and it was pretty spectacular, but no camera. This time, I brought my camera!


We passed the inspection with flying colors. Basically no problems. We have one little thing to settle with the sellers and their lawyer, and we should be all set to sign the P&S tomorrow.

In other news, we are trying to find a new tenant for our apartment, and so I took some pictures. If anyone knows anyone looking for an apartment in Watertown, I think ours is worth a look!

They accepted our offer!

We have been looking at houses and condos for about a month now (maybe longer). While we were on our honeymoon, we had decided that we were going to wait a while to buy, since we didn't really have the down payment for a long term solution, and if we bought a short-term solution, the cost of buying, selling, and mortgage interest was basically the same cost as renting. All that changed when we got back and we found that some ... adverse circumstances had cropped up at our apartment. So, we looked into moving to another apartment, but the options available without going up in price were unattractive. So, we turned to buying. We had chosen two price points -- $235K, which would be the same cost as renting, and $300K, which is about the edge of affordability, if we assume that we want to be able to afford all of this on one salary.

We started casually, looking at a couple of open houses. We quickly learned some of the euphamisms : "convenient commuter location!" = "on a busy street". "Cozy" = "small". "Easily accessible to public transportation" = "Yikes!". Well, that last one is a bit unfortunate. At first, when I saw a house in Framingham that was pretty big, and "near the train", I thought -- Oh, look at that. Its near the train. Wouldn't that be convenient. We quickly learned about the wrong side of Framingham. In Boston and Cambridge, public transportation is a definite plus. But elsewhere, not so much.

We had been looking in Maynard, which seemed to offer a good balance of commute time, price and size. Our main criteria were 1200 - 1500 sq. ft at $300K, not more than 45 minutes away from both Natick and Burlington. For a while we were going to open houses on our own. When it became apparent that we really were serious, I got in touch with some mortgage lenders for pre-approval letters, and from thence I got into the real estate professional network, we found a buyer's agent, and everything seems to be taken care of from there.

We had made an offer on a Condo in Woburn, which was BEAUTIFUL, at $285K. No yard, but it had these two awesome decks. I bought a couple of books about container gardening, and I was willing to do this. The property was priced to sell, however, and they had multiple offers. We only have about 5%, but another buyer had $100K to put down, so they won. It was a big bummer.

So, we looked at some more houses. We went to some open houses in Woburn on Sunday. Some of these properties were real pieces of work... One of them, apparently the husband had house-project ADD, because some things were beautiful, some things were falling apart, and the windows weren't finished being put in upstairs, and there were no doors on any of the upstairs bedrooms. Yikes! We had started to think that we might need to come up a bit in price. Everything we saw at $300K had one compromise too many. One of the houses I had put on our agenda because it met our criteria, but when we got there, the listing agent handed us a sheet saying it was $340K. It was gorgeous. Mike and I looked around to be polite, and then got out of there.

So, I called our agent, and I said I wanted to look at a couple more things in Maynard, including going back to one of the first houses we had looked at. I mentioned the gorgeous house in Woburn at $340K. He looked it up and said it was listed at $324 -- I guess there was a mistake on the sheet!

So, we went back to this house in Maynard which Mike had liked, but I had said no way. When we got there, I felt really different about it seeing it the second time. The first time, our complaint had been that we would have liked 200 less sqare feet, but $20K off the price. They listed at $315K, and considering they hadn't had any offers on the property, we thought we could get them down pretty easily. We had seen two things that day in Maynard. The first one was close -- a very nice house, but in a "convenient commuter location." So, I might have taken this second house in Maynard, if I hadn't already seen the house at $340K, which turned out to be for $324K.

So, we went and looked at it again. (The $340K house). Gorgeous kitchen. Good space in the living room and dining room. The wood panelling will need to go. 3.5 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms. Full basement. Dining room, living room, eat-in kitchen. Laundry is in the bathroom -- which I don't get why everyone seems to put laundry in the bathroom or kitchen. Parking for 6 cars! Anyway, on Tuesday night, we offered $310K for the house. After some brief negotiation yesterday, we settled on a purchase price of $315K. Housing inspection is Saturday.



Wish us luck!

Fighting the Good Fight

This is my license picture that was taken when I got my new license this past month.


This is my license picture from just over a year ago, approx. last July.


I am continuing to fight long and hard to continue on this trend.

So true!

http://xkcd.com/303/

Pictures

Thank you to EVERYONE who came to our wedding. We were so glad to have you there. And congratulations to Caitlin and Ryan.

Wedding Pictures: http://www.hinkleyphoto.exposuremanager.com/g/mike__diane

I took lots of pictures in Vegas. I will put them up eventually, but I am already a day late and a dollar short!

It was really hot at the bottom of the grand canyon!

The time is approaching!

Hello to all.

It has been a very busy time, and as usual, I find myself apologizing for not updating my blog. I have been running around like a chicken with my head cut off! We have to meet with the minister this coming weekend. We have visited with every major vendor: Photos, Cake, Flowers, DJ are all set. I just got my dress back on Friday. There was some drama about the har and makeup -- I had gone to this place in Windham, called Soleil Salon, which I do NOT recommend. I guess they weren't so bad, but the thing that got me is that I told the makeup person not to put pencil eyeliner on me because it burns my eyes, and she did anyway. So, I am going to this place called Green Tangerine in Burlington, which I do reccomend highly!

The menu at the reception is set: chicken piccata and tenderloin for dinner. Hor d'however-you-spell-that will include shrimp cocktail, bacon-wrapped scallops, teriyaki chicken skewers and tomato basil bruschetta. There will be a cheese and vegetable display with italian meatballs. Our cake is going to be half chocolate with chocolate mousse, and half yellow cake with buttercream frosting.

Mike and I have recently welcomed a new addition to our family: my new 20" iMac. My old computer was ailing under the increasing weight of the Sims 2 expansion packs. Poor dear. My new computer's screen is VERY bright. When I put my laptop next to it, I thought the brightness on my laptop was like turned all the way down, but it was all the way up! Amazing. My initial plan was to put Windows on this computer for gaming purposes, but there were some hiccups. So, I decided to try out the Mac version of the Sims. At first, it looked like a disaster, but after some help from the Aspyr tech support, everything seems to be fine now. I figured that instead of giving my money to the evil empire, I could vote with my dollars to let game makers know that customers want Mac versions of their games!

My car is a year old today, with ~18,000 miles. My poor car still has an ouchy on its butt, but it is otherwise doing well.

If I don't see you before then, I will see you all next Saturday, July 14!