Archive for category Housing
Completing the Housing Circle
To finish up my 3rd week in Seattle, I’ve finally put down a deposit for an apartment in Capitol Hill that seems to have a nice view. Originally I really wanted a loft, but the ones that I’ve seen in Seattle seemed fairly half-assed. Also managed to sign the lease to rent out my townhome too, so there’s a nice completion of the circle there.
But what people really care about is all the restaurants that I’ve hit this week:
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Housewarming party
People are always polite and won’t say to the host that they didn’t enjoy a party, so I’ll delude myself into thinking that I did a good first attempt. Living in a tiny apartment has made me develop a massive hosting debt which I shall have to struggle to work off. Regardless there’s always room to improve. Read the rest of this entry »
Home online
Took a couple of days to get a Verizon FIOS tech over to my new place to get my service installed. I opted for one of their bundles, which was probably more service than I need, but they were giving away netbooks alongside them. Even after the tech supposedly got it installed, I had to spend 2 days on and off the phone with Verizon tech support to clear up some issues on their end before I could finally get the following results:
Decent speeds right?
Closed
Or perhaps open for visitors…
Finished all of the settlement wackiness in about an hour and a half.
No way out
Been a while since my last posting, but I’ve been busy being sad about my WoW guild shutting down. This post is about the process of removing the last few contigencies on my home purchase offer – home inspection, HOA documents, and lender agreement. Read the rest of this entry »
House selected
So I finally decided upon a place. It’s in Fairfax, and is a short walk to Wegmans, and about a mile away from Fairfax Corner and Fairfax Government Center. I can’t lie, the close walking proximity to Wegmans was a huge deciding factor for me(as well as being <20 minutes away from work). The community’s kind of a horrible cluster of townhomes, but this is an end unit on the edge of that area, so it escapes a good deal of that feel.
Behind the cut are pictures that I stole from the various online sites before they all go down from the house no longer being on the market.
Open Houses 6/14
I cut out early from our finalization work on the 48 hour film project to hit up some more open houses. This time Bob just had me give a ranked order of my top 3 at this point. Yet another beautiful day for seeing houses. Read the rest of this entry »
Open Houses 6/7 Continued
Good weather for visiting open houses. Only managed to drive by the units in Oakton, Fairfax, and a couple of the ones in Reston before 4PM hits and the houses stopped being so open. At first I had the silly idea that I should knock on each house before entering(as though I were a vampire and needed to be invited in or something). But since the weather was nice, many of the realtors just left the doors open to let the air in, and thus I started barging right on in, and apologizing profusely for the intrusion to the realtor that was present(thus making Miss Manners proud).
Open Houses 6/7
Pile of Trulia links from the listing of open houses that Bob passed onto me. I particularily like Trulia’s display of listings because it integrates with Google Maps and Yelp to provide lots of local area info. Sunday is apparently open house day, and thus my goal for tomorrow is to hit a good chunk of these homes. With the miracles of the iPhone WordPress app, I may try to add relevant comments as I traverse these places. But for now, I’ll just have some general commentary from their links.
First meeting with Realtor
Ever since I graduated college in 2002, I’d always looked briefly into buying a home of my own in the DC metropolitan area. Through various factors(crazy housing market, buyingwith only one income, etc), I’ve managed to avoid pulling the trigger. Now, with the $8000 housing tax credit for first time buyers, a depressed(but rapidly recovering DC area market), and low interest rates, I can’t resist the urge to invest in a home, even if it’s just for the investment potential. In retrospect, as a first time buyer one of the biggest advantages that I have is that I can choose an advantageous time to enter the market(as opposed to a subsequent home where many of the market factors balance themselves out).
Today I began the process by meeting with Bob MacIntosh, a realtor who was highly recommended by many of my friends who recently purchased homes(Devin+Beth, Mike+Emily, Tom). We had discussions about various topics to start to get a feel for my requirements in selecting a home, and thus I’ve started a page to detail them here. With the listing of open houses, I can formulate a plan for tomorrow to see a variety of them and thus start hammering out my exact requirements. The key thing that Bob liked to reiterate was that this process is supposed to be fun, which is in stark contrast to the horror stories of high pressure agents who just want to make a sale at the expense of who they are representing. Read the rest of this entry »
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