Older blog entries for rooneg (starting at number 207)

No Really, This Time For Sure!

After the roller coaster ride we went through with the last house we made an offer on Joanna and I were a bit more careful this time. She started bringing a flashlight to houses we were looking at, and we spent a lot of time looking at the deep dark corners of the basement and other similar locations that our home inspector had seemed to enjoy pointing out problems. Fortunately, this payed off, and the house we decided on had far less trouble with the inspection than the first one did. I'm not saying it was perfect, but lets just say Mike was orders of magnitude more positive in his report with this house than he was with the other.

So yes, this means we've found a house and we're through the inspection process completely. Paperwork has been signed and we'll be moving in on November 1st.

We decided on a lease to own agreement, which means that we put a small percentage of the purchase price down as a deposit, and then lease the house for a year with a percentage of our monthly rent going towards the eventual down payment. At the end of the year we decide if we want to buy or not. If we do buy we get the house at the price we agreed on now, and we've got the added bonus of having already lived there so we know what we're getting into. If we don't buy then we only walk away from a few thousand dollars worth of down payment, which is a nice option to have in the event that the housing market nose dives or we end up hating the place for one reason or another.

Some details on the house. It's in Dedham near the West Roxbury line. That means we're close to Joanna's office, near commuter rail lines to get into Boston if either of us ever needs to do that for work, about half an hour from Joanna's parents and about an hour from mine. The house itself is a 3 bedroom 2.5 bath colonial that was almost totally rebuilt 9 years ago (meaning it was torn down and a new second floor and a completely remodeled first floor was put on top of an existing foundation). The kitchen is awesome, the living room and dining room have these great cathedral ceilings, there's a wrap around farmer's porch in the front and a nice deck off the back overlooking a reasonably large back yard. Upstairs there's a master suite with a loft overlooking it (a spiral staircase provides access) and an office off of the loft.

I'll post some more pictures once we're there. There are some more from the listing, but honestly they don't give you a good idea of what the place is really like, as most of them are designed to show off individual features, not the whole place.

Anyway, we're extremely excited about the whole thing and just can't wait to move in. The house seems perfect for us, and now we're counting the days until November 1st...

Syndicated 2009-01-11 14:20:33 from Garrett

Back from Chicago

A more motivated person than me would probably write a blog post about all the stuff Joanna and I did in Chicago over the weekend. I am not that motivated. Instead of writing that blog post I sorted through the hundreds of pictures I took and came up with these. They don't cover all the stuff we saw, but they certainly hit the high points. Enjoy.

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:21:21 from Garrett

An Accepted Offer

Yesterday was the first Sunday in quite some time where Joanna and I didn't go out house hunting. The reason, happily, is that last week we made an offer on a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath contemporary style split level in Natick and this weekend we found out that it was accepted by the current owners. We've now started down that fun filled path to home ownership. Next step is the home inspection, which should happen some time this week.

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:21:15 from Garrett

Easy Come, Easy Go

So, naturally right after we got all excited about having an accepted offer on the house in Natick everything went directly to hell. The building inspector found all sorts of problems ranging from a roof that was going to need to be replaced years earlier than expected to a patio that had settled in such a way that water and ice pooled directly next to the side of the house. Perhaps worse was a general feeling that much of the house was constructed in a less than high quality manner.

Anyway, so we asked the owners for money off of the purchase price to fix the problems, they didn't want to give. Since the numbers they were balking at were far less than any suitable repairs would have come to and we knew from the initial negotiations that they were rather unrealistic about the value of their house we walked away without bothering to get some contractors to come in and tell us what the real bill would come to. Life is too short to spend it dealing with crazy people anyway.

On the bright side, we now have a truly awesome home inspector who I'd gladly use again for any house we might want to buy in the future. He went over the place with a fine toothed comb and found all sorts of problems that we wouldn't have even thought to look for. Hopefully we'll be able to use him again soon, as we are still looking...

Next time though I'll probably refrain from blogging about it until we've had the inspection ;-)

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:21:05 from Garrett

The Internet is a Strange Place

I just got a truly strange message in my Flickr inbox.

Apparently one of the pictures I took during our trip to Chicago a few months back (the one of the Budweiser billboard painted right on a rooftop in sight of Wrigley Field) is going to be used in an exhibition on "Man and Product" that's being put together by the Department of Architectural and Industrial Design at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy for the middle and high schools of Torino and Piemonte. That is both totally random and completely awesome.

Glad to see someone's taking advantage of the Creative Commons Attribution license I use for my photos ;-)

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:20:52 from Garrett

Keeping These Tickets

I'm sure 98% of the bloggers who care about the Red Sox have posted something about Saturday night's game, so I'll just say it was a heck of a night, I've never seen the fans at Fenway park cheer quite so loudly for quite so long, and I'm glad Justin decided to overpay for a ticket so he could be there.

Oh, and it's a good thing Joanna and I still have the tickets, so we'll have some proof that we were there to see an actual no hitter.

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:20:42 from Garrett

No Really, This Time For Sure!

After the roller coaster ride we went through with the last house we made an offer on Joanna and I were a bit more careful this time. She started bringing a flashlight to houses we were looking at, and we spent a lot of time looking at the deep dark corners of the basement and other similar locations that our home inspector had seemed to enjoy pointing out problems. Fortunately, this payed off, and the house we decided on had far less trouble with the inspection than the first one did. I'm not saying it was perfect, but lets just say Mike was orders of magnitude more positive in his report with this house than he was with the other.

So yes, this means we've found a house and we're through the inspection process completely. Paperwork has been signed and we'll be moving in on November 1st.

We decided on a lease to own agreement, which means that we put a small percentage of the purchase price down as a deposit, and then lease the house for a year with a percentage of our monthly rent going towards the eventual down payment. At the end of the year we decide if we want to buy or not. If we do buy we get the house at the price we agreed on now, and we've got the added bonus of having already lived there so we know what we're getting into. If we don't buy then we only walk away from a few thousand dollars worth of down payment, which is a nice option to have in the event that the housing market nose dives or we end up hating the place for one reason or another.

Some details on the house. It's in Dedham near the West Roxbury line. That means we're close to Joanna's office, near commuter rail lines to get into Boston if either of us ever needs to do that for work, about half an hour from Joanna's parents and about an hour from mine. The house itself is a 3 bedroom 2.5 bath colonial that was almost totally rebuilt 9 years ago (meaning it was torn down and a new second floor and a completely remodeled first floor was put on top of an existing foundation). The kitchen is awesome, the living room and dining room have these great cathedral ceilings, there's a wrap around farmer's porch in the front and a nice deck off the back overlooking a reasonably large back yard. Upstairs there's a master suite with a loft overlooking it (a spiral staircase provides access) and an office off of the loft.

I'll post some more pictures once we're there. There are some more from the listing, but honestly they don't give you a good idea of what the place is really like, as most of them are designed to show off individual features, not the whole place.

Anyway, we're extremely excited about the whole thing and just can't wait to move in. The house seems perfect for us, and now we're counting the days until November 1st...

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:19:43 from Garrett

Let the Procrastination Planning Begin!

So, I've already told a few people, and it's not like it should be a really huge surprise to anyone (come on people, we've spent the past few months looking at houses, you do the math), but for the benefit of those of you I haven't actually spoken to over the past few days, this weekend Joanna and I decided to get married.

Well, that's really not entirely accurate. We decided we were eventually going to get married a while back. This weekend we actually started buckling down and start the mechanics of the whole thing, setting dates, talking about venues, ranking our friends and family in order of who's the most likely to give us the best gifts, allowing Joanna's elderly relatives to breathe a little easier about the fact that we're moving in together, etc.

Anyway, the event itself will be sometime in late March or early April, somewhere in the Boston area. We're thinking a reasonably small guest list (which starts to sound way less small once you take into account that just the bare minimum required family members already brings you to 30 people, and that doesn't even count our friends), and we're going to make a concerted effort to NOT turn into one of those couples whose life becomes completely and totally centered around planning what is in the end after all just a fairly large party.

Now I just have to get used to the idea of referring to Joanna as my fiance instead of my girlfriend. I suppose I'll get used to that just in time to start getting used to the idea of referring to her as my wife ;-)

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:18:52 from Garrett

Yeah, They Really Have No Clue.

Ever wonder why the story about what kinds of food you're supposed to eat in order to have a healthy diet changes all the time? Why the stuff that you were supposed to eat 5 years ago turns out to be bad and the stuff you were supposed to avoid last year turns out to actually reduce the chances of some new disease? It's because the kind of studies that determine that sort of thing are pretty much always fatally flawed.

Want to know why? Here's a fantastic article in the New York Times that explains the problems. It uses hormone-replacement therapy as its core example, but it's really the same thing, as the studies used to tell you that eating more of food X causes disease Y are subject to all the same sorts of problems as the one that tells you that HRT is a good idea.

The article's really long, but it's worth reading all the way through. Just think of it as a condensed version of the kind of conversation I have with Joanna whenever one of these studies comes across her desk at work ;-)

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:18:21 from Garrett

Sounds Familiar...

Great article in today's Globe about what happens when really dedicated fans watch a Red Sox game:

Sometimes, when she's watching the Red Sox, Elena Tate said, she feels "like I'm going to die." She'll get dizzy. Her palms will sweat. She'll hold her breath. "It's a lot of physiological and psychological stress," she said. "Sometimes, I feel like I can't stand it."

Yeah, that's pretty much what it's like at our house. At least when the channel hasn't been preemptively changed because of impending doom. Check out the rest of the article, it's pretty damn amusing.

Syndicated 2009-01-10 23:18:07 from Garrett