Monday's are a deja-vu

Rule #1 in homebuying, never piss off your Real Estate Agent.

... three days and I haven't heard a response back from him. Two houses just hit the market in our target area, one in the middle of our price range. The other at the top with little wiggle room.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned this yet, houses are moving really quickly in our area and price range. You know the houses I mentioned in this post? All have gone contingent*, most were on the market for under twenty days.

If I'm in the market longer I'll start bringing a camera, and I'll post screen caps of the market listings. That way you'll believe me when I say, time is of crucial.

The majority of the houses we looked at are ones we can see ourselves in. We've considered expanding the kitchen, visualized where the entertainment center would go, laid on the floor to figure out how our bed would fit in the master bedroom, imagined wedding pictures mounted above the fireplace and planned Thanksgiving dinner. In a way we don't so much get an emotional attachment to the house but rather what the house means. The house is a blank slate in many ways, if there's the room and money for it, almost anything can be changed inside.

*contingent essentially means that an offer has been accepted by the seller and the escrow process has started. Houses can go back on the market during this time.

and then I was wrong...

Update: according to my husband I'm harsh.

With that in mind, I probably apologise cause I need to.

The Apologizer

Hi my name is Meghan, I am 25 and I am an Apologizer.

I'm the finger on the trigger, apologize first and then ask what I did wrong kind of gal. If it's not the first thing I do, sometimes a defensive exclamation escapes first, it's the second thing I do.
Always without fail, I will apologize whether I was really wrong or not. It's probably my faux-bohemianesque upbringing that makes me want to care about how others "feel". That as part of a whole working society we're all just gears that need to get along in the machine of life. In part I can attribute my Apologizer status to my tendency to be blunt and my preference to soften the blow with an "I'm sorry, but..." (those shoes do give you cankles).

As I've gotten older, I've started to wonder if me being an Apologizer is adjusting the way those I interact with view me. Does it weaken my stance and how I'm viewed as a whole? Does it cause people to take me less seriously? Am I often apologizing for no reason?

In a brief e-mail exchange between my Realtor and myself, I felt the need to apologize. My initial e-mail could be viewed as an insinuation that he had not done his job. Previously he had insisted the listing price on a house was almost $10,ooo more than it was. Not only was I calling him on it but I was asking if any subsequent information regarding a bid in on the house was also incorrect due to the original mistake. His response was completely clipped and brief, telling me that the information on the bid was still correct. My internal response is "I'm sorry I implied you can't do your job!! FORGIVE ME!". Followed by groveling.

.... I'm stepping back, and reminding myself that in life I'm not always wrong. He had a right to be irratated if he was, and I had a right to question his original answer due to his initial mistake. No apologizing for me this time. It's a twelve step program!

Dear diary

I'm starving. My stomach is an empty gnawing pit.

My last meal for the day has consisted of rabbit food, with a little bit of protein thrown in for shits and giggles. So far the "I is so poor I can't afford my frilly $10 coffee drinks" diet is a tough one. I'm not going to share with you the midday daydream I had of a dancing Iced white mocha, or the chorus line of rice crispy treats with shortbread cookie feet, or the measly snack of garlic tasting cucumber slices I had earlier. I will share with you my desire to sell my husband "services" on the street corner. Buy me an iced chai anyone? He's a great mechanic, mind out of the gutter people.

Isn't my life so tragic? On the plus side, I hear starvation is God's diet plan.

*note: sarcasm doesn't always translate well in text.

Mis-Adventures in Homebuying Pt 2

Here's a quickie, when looking at homes that are foreclosed you'll eventually run into some unusual choices in home construction. Some of the unusual things we've run into so far:

• Wood paneling in the closet, only in the closet. This was faux wood-paneling that was peeling off.
• Random tile, in all colors of the spectrum, on a closet floor and no where else. With no grout.
• Brick fireplace with ugly orange marble framing out the mantle.
• Storage unit with a door built three feet inside of the unit, door ends at the start of the door way. At first it looked like it was a sliding door, even had a handy-dandy (don't say notebook) handle to slid it out with. No cause that would be practical, and it's a lot more fun to install a standard door complete with hinges that can't actually be used. At all. All of those above are from the same house.
• Mirrored, floor to ceiling closet doors used as a master bathroom door. Seriously, double doors at that. Wish I'd taken a picture cause it was he-larious.
• Bedrooms or random rooms built into the garage, illegally, and with various stages of professionalism. Usually the walls are unfinished and unpainted sheet rock.

The list goes on. That's not even including the stuff left behind, the walls scrawled with angry sentiments against the banks, random mattresses on things like pergolas, improperly installed shower units, missing cabinet doors, missing toilet seats, warped wood floors, seriously outdated kitchens and etc... It's enough to make you lose ten pounds from laughing at it all. Anyone want to share their experiences searching for a house?

Misadventures in Home Buying Part 1

I know that my husband and I are not the only ones out there in the great U S of A that fell for the line “It’s a BUYERS market!” for some people this rings very true. For others, us in particular, it’s a bit of a misleading statement. Along with all the news of massive foreclosure’s hitting the market, it’s easy for one to believe that all they need to do is get pre-approved and a house normally out of their price range would be handed to them. Ok, so maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, as even the most naïve know that there is a little bit more to it than that.

To me what a “buyers market” combined with foreclosures implies is an inventory larger than the demand, and prices that are low if not rock-bottom along with a little to zero chance of getting stuck in a bidding war. What we’re finding is the opposite. Out of the eight houses we’ve seen, we were advised that two were priced low to create a bidding war and would go for well over the listing price (ie:$20,000 over). One got bought out twenty minutes after we saw it, right before we could put our bid in, and four days after being listed. Another lender wouldn’t deal with our lender, we’re going FHA. On two of the houses the listing agents were expecting bids with large amounts of cash down to back up the offer. Those are only the houses we’ve been able to see so far, at least fifteen that I was interested in went into Escrow before we could check them out. One literally went contingent, an offer was accepted, an hour and a half before we went to view it.

We’ve been looking since middle of June, and it’s becoming frustrating. Neither of us thought it would be this hard. What we’re finding is that the supply is actually decreasing due to the moratorium placed on banks from foreclosing and likely in part due to homeowners not selling at this time. The demand is also increasing, specifically in our price range and in our area which is admittedly in higher demand then other parts of the country. Our price range is clearly the target price for most people within our area, it’s what I’d dub the “thanks greedy banks! Now even I can afford a house on a Wal-Mart Salary!!” budget. Note, I do not work at Wal-Mart and I do not know how much they make there it’s a metaphor.

We are checking out more houses tonight, my fingers are crossed that we can get in a bid before the house sells under our feet. Lastly, I am praying that the meth lab moved to another neighborhood than the ones we’re looking into… Anyone else out there having problems trying to buy their first house?

A voice to the song

Super long time no post. Here’s the deal, I’m trying to find my voice for this blog. I’ve sporadically blogged on livejournal since roughly 2003, with posts ranging from silly commentary, stories and poems to the angst of the day. There was randomly any consistency, or follow-through, as they were little shout-outs from my day. I treated it much like a twitter account, pre-twitter. Of course, there is really nothing wrong with that especially since I was only writing for myself.

For this blog, I am still writing for me. But not the me of today, or really tomorrow, more like the me of five or more years from now. In five years I want to look back and remember who I am today and all the things that got me to the destination of five years in the future. So there will still be a little bit of randomness, cause life is chock full of it, and a little bit of silliness. I might also share a recipe or two, keep in mind that I’m no Pioneer Woman (no matter how much I wish otherwise) and can’t seem to take pictures while trying to prevent dinner from erupting into flames. It’s that hand-eye-coordination thing I lack. I’ll be feeling my way around here for a bit, if you join along for the ride I hope you enjoy it and find something to relate to.

While you’re here share a story. Tell me, how did you find your writing voice?