BogoSort » Housing

Completing the Housing Circle

Lee — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 06:48:02 +0000

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:
Macrina Bakery – had some baked goods for breakfast. Their breakfast menu itself looked work trying for later.
Uli’s Famous Sausage – sausage by a very reputable man with a mustache.
Sub Sand – a somewhat interesting take on
Palace Kitchen – another Tom Douglas joint. Meal was nice, but not mindblowing as per what the praise for Tom Douglas would seem to imply.
Sub Sand – an interesting little joint that served subs with asian fillings. They were tasty, but the 1 person trying to prepare all the subs made this a much slower experience than subway.
Sweet Iron Waffles – excellent belgian waffles. They get some nice caramelization on their syrup which makes them extra tasty.
Nell’s Restaurant – Place with a decent view of green lake, if you happened to get one of the 4 tables by the window. Excellent food as well.
Le Panier – neat french bakery, had a nice croissant there.
Crush – It may not look like much, being a converted historic home, but it was by far the best place that we went to for Restaurant Week. Our waiter(Steve) had a great passion for wine, and actually gave us refills on the house when our appetizers came a bit late(and thus we had finished the wine pairing. The whole restaurant week experience was like a sped up version of some of the nicer restaurants that I’ve had the pleasure to dine at recently(Volt and The Dining Room). I had an appetizer of a well prepared Carlton Farms pork belly, which was fatty, but somehow managed to have a slightly sweet finish to go with the balanced riesling that was paired with it as an opener. For the main entree there was a perfectly prepared sous vide Pained Hills flank steak(nice warm red all the way through with just enough char for flavor on the edge). For dessert(since I’m not a huge sweets fan) we had a nice cheese assortment, kumquat sauce, and amazingly delicious homemade crackers. I don’t think I’ve ever had crackers that wowed me, and there they were. Steve(taking extra care of us) also brought us an order of their Buttermilk Beignets(basically a french donut) which was also fantastic. Granted we only got to sample 2 dishes and 2 desserts, this restaurant week experience was clearly the tip of an iceberg. I’ll definitely have to follow Steve’s advice and come back on a Tuesday or Wednesday, when they can appropriately care for favored patrons. And plus any evening when I end up by the kitchen geeking about sous vide cooking gear is a win!
NYC Deli Market – not that exciting as a breakfast place
Thai Curry Simple – Basically Srees, but in Thai form. How could you go wrong?
Trellis – to finish out restaurant week, we hit Trellis, which had potential, but either just didn’t feel the need to execute for restaurant week. The salad that I had basically was large slabs on a plate that was far too small to do any cutting on. The tri-pepper hangar steak was well seasoned, but was served on an overkillisn mound of root vegetables.
Saigon Bistro – decent quick pho in Uwajimaya
Georgio’s Subs – ok quick subs, pretty much all over the Seattle area.
Claim Jumper – It tastes chainy.
Big Bang Cafe – Cute little breakfast place in belltown. Had a nice sandwich, but their breakfast burritos seemed to be a good item.
Pike Street Fish Fry – I was kinda expecting more of this place that seemed to portray themselves as a hole in the wall fish and chips place. Maybe I ordered the wrong thing, but the cod and fries seemed like a safe bet.
Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream – nice little ice cream shop by one of the apartment buildings that I looked at. They had a fair amount of interesting flavors, and make their own waffle cones.
Zeek’s Pizza – The pizza flavors reminded me of a California pizza kitchen, but they were actually all done really well(in stark contrast to CPK). The Thai one on was delicious, even if it’d kill Muffin.

18 more places for a total of 50 food serving places. Of the actual restaurant week places, most were of a decent enough quality that I’d consider going back, with one(Szerac) which I’d refuse to return to and one(Crush) which I would make a serious effort to go back(and maybe on a semi-regular basis if I could convince others to go with me).

Housewarming party

Lee — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:52:53 +0000

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.

Things to do/improve on before the next party:

Get more seating! Standing around all day is tiring, and sitting on the floor is hardly desirable.
Get a cooler! A modest variety of beers and soda fills up my fridge, and that’s without a variety of food that’ll take up far more space.
Cook! I just had snacky things, and no actual real meal items, so those that were there for an extended period were certainly hungry. Getting a grill certainly would help facillitate this.
Get a recycling bin! We do have recycling in VA, and having a visible place for people to toss their recyclables makes for easy sorting later.
Setup a music playlist. In general my reconstructed legal music collection is pretty consistent, but the occasional track(from musicals for example) breaks the flow.
Be more aggressive about getting people to eat/drink. I got a fair amount of stuff expecting people to feel free to partake in it, but it seems that many people are leery to potentially overstep their welcome and thus need a bit of prodding.

Home online

Lee — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:52:42 +0000

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?

Having worked in tech support I feel that I’m fairly sympathetic to the tech support worker that I’m dealing with. I’m even fairly patient with them as they run me through the battery of tests that I’ve already done on my own(rebooting everything, doing a factory reset of the router, testing the wired connection instead of wireless). What gets me is when I eventually get on the state of waiting on something that we can’t work on in that call, I eventually have to call back and get a new person. This new person generally doesn’t read the logs of past interactions(or maybe the logs aren’t complete), and so I have to run the same battery of tests and they have to make thier own diagnosis. Maybe there’s a Houseian aspect of tech support where “Everybody lies” when talking to tech support and they want to try to double and triple check when possible.

Closed

Lee — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:56:32 +0000

Or perhaps open for visitors…

Finished all of the settlement wackiness in about an hour and a half.

Went to the bank in the morning to acquire a certified check. Luckily I have a PNC account where the fee for getting a certified check is waived. Certainly pays to retain those last few ties that I have to Pittsburgh.

Met up with Frank who was sitting in for Bob on my day of settlement. We did a final home walkthrough/inspection to make sure that the place was still there, intact, and all the components that were agreed to on the contract were left behind. It went pretty quickly, as the previous owners did a good job of cleaning the place, and everything was quickly verified to be in proper working order. Supposedly not everyone does the final walkthrough/inspection on the day of settlement. Just seems like a terrible way of having major catostrophies occur to the property between the last time that it was seen and when it was bought.

At the Coldwell banker office, the settlement process seemed to go pretty smoothly. Amusingly enough the seller’s agent also had a prior commitment, so both agents were substitutes. There’s the occasional odd question(the sellers were asked if they were continuously married during the duration that they owned the place for example), but in the end, I bet each of those have a good story behind them. After a lot of handshakes, and signing of tons of paper(which I didn’t read all of) I’m now the proud owner of a townhome!

Things of note for me to remember that came up during signing:

My FHA loan is apparently transferable. Which means that if I ever do decide to sell the property later, someone can get it transfered to their name and finish out the payments. Since I have an absurdly low 5% interest rate, this is a nice selling point.

I should always keep around a copy of my title insurance forever(even if I’m no longer the owner). There’s the occasional weird circumstance that may require it.

While at my home for the first time(and talking on the phone with my mom while walking around it), I managed to lock myself out by walking out onto the deck and failing to realize that there was an generic non-deadbolt closing lock on the door. A minute or so of finangling with a credit card got it open, but it just shows that I need to deadbolt that door for security purposes. Luckiy I don’t live in Cambridge, and thus breaking into my own home is ok. Also, I’m amazed that I managed to miss the fact that there’s RJ45(Ethernet) scattered throughout the house. The prior owners apparently put furnature in front of all the jacks as though they were embarassed by it! Had dinner at Wegmans, which is about a 5 minute walk(I suspect that I’ll be doing this multiple times a day).

No way out

Lee — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:11:56 +0000

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.Since this is a relatively new unit, the home inspection was less about finding all of the problems… er “quirks” of a given home, and more about creating a user’s guide about how to maintain the house. The inspector was quite good about discussing many of the finer aspects of the house that my untrained eye couldn’t see. He took lots of digital photographs which are included in his pdf report(which can basically function as a manual for home ownership for me). Outside of making sure that all the plumbing, electrical bits, appliances were all in proper working order, he found some defects in the home siding as well as in some of the bathroom tile. We brought these findings back to the seller, and score, got another $500 off of the price in exchange for removing the inspection contingency.

As far as the HOA documents, my agent Bob brought them over on Monday afternoon, giving me three days to review them and escaping from the offer. After the time was up, that contingency automatically goes away. It’s pretty amazing that a 1/3rd inch binder of poor quality photocopies cost around $350 to create. Theoretically a PDF version was available for $25 less, but that’s pretty damn crazy. Doing a bit of digging yielded http://ridgetopcommons.org as the underutilized community web site. There seemed to be nothing abhorently terrible in them, with the most demanding item being that most exterior changes requiring HOA approval in order to happen(which I think is pretty typical for HOA agreements). As I had suspected the parking spots right in front of my unit are open parking, which should make having guests over an easy proposition(and thus I can start to work off my hosting debt).

And finally the last contingency that I had was the lender’s letter pending an appraisal. The appraisal came back at $11k under the sale price for the house. Pretty drastically below the sale price. After a bit of discussion with Bob(and indirectly with the selling agent) we came up with some ammo to get the appraiser to reevaluate the appraised value. One of the interesting points is that for the comparison homes they included the amount of seller assistance in the value, but not for the appraised value of my future place. With that, and some aspect that we believe that the seller missed, we eventually got a revised appraisal which ended up at $4k below the sale price of the house. Bringing that back to the seller, ultimately we decided to split the difference, so I get to have pay $2k less overall in exchange for having $2k more down upfront. Sounds like a good deal to me!

So those three pretty much covers my last contingencies for getting out of this offer unscathed. Now I have to prepare for settlement(July 30th) and get ready to move.

House selected

Lee — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:17:50 +0000

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.

Exterior shots of the house. As you can see it’s got 4 levels. Hidden behind the tree on the right is a 1 car garage and driveway. While I’m not a huge fan of garages on townhomes(since it means that the community doesn’t have to put in visitor parking), this particular unit faces a small parking lot so there’s a fair amount of space. I do have a lot of party karma to pay back over the years after all. No front yard which makes for less time spent doing yardwork! The front of the house faces SE, so the exposed side faces SW, which makes for a lot of light coming in through the copious windows for the living room on the 2nd floor. The deck eems sizable enough to accommodate a grill and maybe some seating. I’ll likely go with the convenience route and do a gas grill, even if the charcoal ones produce superior flavor. I’m somewhat concerned about the ability of drunken friends to navigate the deck stairs, but if worse comes to worse, there’s always the baby gate solution.

Recreation room on the first floor. Possibly a decent place to setup rock banding or a home theater type things. Main issue is that the off photo area has doors leading to the furnace and washer/dryer. If I got a drop down screen for a projector that might make for a pretty solid setup(assuming that said appliances don’t make too much noise).

Living room area. What really drew my eye to this place was the fact that the corner of this living room area has windows all around it to bring in a ton of light. Not too sure about the built in bookshelves, but I suppose it does save me from having to buy/build my own. The main drawback is probably that it’s got a built in area that only fits a smallish TV.

Kitchen has appliances in what appears to be good shape. I think I personally prefer granite to corian for countertops, but it’s still a dramatic upgrade over vinyl stuff. There is a certain aestetic appeal to having it be a single seamless counter though. Breakfest nook is right beside the powder room on the second floor.

Master bedroom suite is ginormous. It takes up the entire 3rd level, so I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with that space(though I’m sure Beth will help me come up with ideas). The bathroom wraps around the backside of the house and could practically be a room onto itself. There’s a jacuzzi tub, which is pretty much useless to me as a tallish individual(though it does mean that I get a huge hot water heater). Sadly I think I’ll have to spend time and money maintaining it even if I don’t use it.

Forth level has 2 bedrooms and a full bathroom. The first picture is the one in the rear which has a vaulted ceiling and is otherwise normal. The second is the one in the front that has a bit of a slope on one side. I’ll probably turn one of them into a home office and the other into a guest bedroom. We’ll see which of them I happen to prefer the view out of.

Open Houses 6/14

Lee — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:27:33 +0000

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.

3 br | 2 full 2 partial ba | Townhome – Nice new kitchen with new applicances and granite countertops. Sizable basement, as well as rear porch. I could befairly happy with this one, a shame that’s it’s a fair chunk more expensive than the rest of them.

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Single-Family Home – I really liked the layout of this one. Shame it doesn’t have a basement because that’d really be fantastic for me.

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Townhome - This one right smack in the middle of the golf course reshowed well. It had really awful looking wallpaper that would need to get removed.

Saw some townhouses in Herndon, while they were generally newer, had better furnishings, and were cheaper the areas that they were in were just unpleasant. Generally reeking of suburban sprawl they often directly faced other houses or crazy things like power lines. There’s something nice about the neighborhoods tucked away in the woods of Reston.

Open Houses 6/7 Continued

Lee — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:29:01 +0000

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).

Oakton:

3 br | 2 full 2 partial ba | 2,160 sqft | Townhome – drove around and around, and couldn’t find this actual unit, despite seeing open house signs from the road. Since I’d theoretically like to invite people over at some point, this is a huge negative in my book. Plus my initial web photo perceptions were accurate – I don’t care for that color of brick.

Fairfax:

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Apt/Condo/Twnhm – Walking distance to Wegmans as well as the Fairfax County Government Center(which was having their Celebrate Fairfax Festival). Also should be an easy walk to Fairfax Corner which has a lot of various nifty restaurants. This unit’s in Carriage Park, where the options seem to generally be 3 level condos with either a garage or an additional rec room on the lower level. These units are all surrounded on 3 sides, and thus they cleverly have all of the bedrooms facing the front, as well as a deck coming out of the middle level. The backsides all have bathrooms, stairs, and the kitchen covering the party wall. I did like the vaulted ceilings of the upstairs area. It gave the whole unit an airy nature that was reminiscent of my parents home. Being a condo, they share a pool with the apartment complex next door and have all the outdoor areas taken care of(still undecided about on yards).

2 br | 3 ½ ba | Townhome – Didn’t have to spend much time here, as this is basically a carbon copy of the townhome that Devin and Beth lived in prior to their current home. Being a Penderbrook unit, the rear faces one of the holes on the golf course. The kitchen towards the front of the house seemed ackward being almost shut off as its own room. In addition there was a breakfest nook which just seems like a poor use of space. Contrasting this to the previous unit, I think I prefer the idea of a master bedroom and 2 smaller bedrooms as opposed to the 2 master bedroom plan of this unit. Just seems to be a better use of space for me to have an office and a guest room rather than just another larger room.

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Townhome – This definately seemed to be a “nicer” part of the Penderbrook neighborhood. These houses didn’t seem to have the golf course views. But they were practically right on the intersection of 66 and 50(living very close to major highways seems to appeal to me for some reason). The agent who was hosting was adamantly trying to talk(in broken english) about how this house is an excellent choice because it’s not only cheaper than the other houses of similar size in the same area(that have garages when this one doesn’t), but cheaper than units that have more space. Being in Penderbrook, this unit seemed to have the same kind of vaulted ceiling and the nook for assorted stuff above the bedrooms. This unit seemed to not be well cared for, and combined with an irritating agent, I decided to hightail it out of there(and luckily being right by the onramps made it easy).

Reston:

4 br | 4 ba | Townhome – I’ll have to say that I was rather surprised by this unit. The exterior seemed earthly like a hobbit hole(which goes somewhat counter to my preferance for shiny newness). But on the other hand this unit was humonguous. I didn’t really look at the stats carefully before walking in, but 4 bedrooms and a garage in addition to everything makes for a sick amount of space. This unit’s in Bentana Woods, and seems to be fairly out of the way(and thus necessitating driving everywhere). Met an easy going agent who was nice enough to tell me a bit about the Reston area(and really seemed to harbor a distaste for Herndon). She gave me some various maps of the area, and a pamphlet of the Taste of the Town event, which is kind of a nice way to help sell the Reston area. This place is definately too large for me(and too out of the way), but it was good to get a good feel for that.

2 br | 2 ba | Townhome – Was a bit on the small side. Pretty turned off from really spending time in the unit by a really pushy agent to basically told me that I had selected a shitty agent because he wasn’t taking me around all over to check out all open houses when I’m clearly in the browsing for requirements phase. With the lack of a walkout basement got me thinking about what I wanted on that front and deckwise. This particular unit pretty much as a semi-elevated deck just above the ground, which I seem to remember breeds all kinds of weird shit underneath and can be a maintence problem. The pushy agent made me want to get out of there, and time was ticking down anyways for open houses, so I rushed out of there.

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Townhome – Like the Penderbrook, the back of this unit also faces a golf course. I really liked the airy floorplan of this unit, and it seemed to be about the right size. Gigantic rectangular rec room downstairs is begging for a pimp home theatre setup. I don’t think I’m a fan of the isle kitchen, because with hosting it’s a very poor use of space(as people naturally head towards there). The general wide open nature of the living/dining room combo area probably makes up for this though. This unit’s also within walking distance(~.5 mile) of where they are putting in one of the new metro stations. Also it’s really close to the Washington and Old Dominion trail, which in principle could be a good thing as it’d be a good excuse to go out and get exercise for me.

Didn’t get any further than this, but hitting 6 units scattered all over was a pretty good pace. Luckily the last unit wasn’t too far from the Dulles Toll Road, making for a speedy trip home. So I’ve got to think about a couple of factors on the coming week – number of bedrooms, walkout vs underground basement, whether i want a garage, and just plain space considerations etc. What I need to think about next week is what I want to do inside of the house, and what I want to do nearby said house.

Open Houses 6/7

Lee — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:18:38 +0000

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.

Oakton:

3 br | 2 full 2 partial ba | 2,160 sqft | Townhome - not a huge fan of the brownish yellow brick exterior(and it’s not even pure yellow to remind me of CMU buildings).

Fairfax:

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Apt/Condo/Twnhm - condo with a garage. Practically right next to a Wegmans, with Fairfax Corner theatre right by it.

2 br | 3 ½ ba | Townhome - Wedgeway Place? That’s where Devin and Beth used to live before they bought their current home!

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Townhome - extra credit one that I found

Reston:

4 br | 4 ba | Townhome - right next to a korean supermarket. Really tiny ugly windows, and it’s got a brown exterior which is just bleh to me.

2 br | 2 ba | Townhome - right by Lake Anne Village which seems to be the old Reston Town Center. Seems a bit small from the stats.

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Townhome - right smack in the middle of a golf course! It’d be a good excuse to learn how to play. Though a side effect is that this seems quite from from the major roads in the area. Exterior design is oddish – bright cheerful and attention-grabby.

3 br | 3 ba | Townhome - deeper up 7100, so that may be worse for the commute.

3 br | 2 ½ ba | Townhome - I think the narrow looking kitchen would drive me insane.

I doubt I’ll have the motivation to hit the following ones, as Centreville and Clifton are far away from anything that I might want to be close to.

Centreville:

4 br | 2 ba | Single-Family Home

Clifton:

3 br | 3 ba | Townhome

First meeting with Realtor

Lee — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:40:57 +0000

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.

Handouts:

Poster sized northern Virginia map

List of open houses for tomorrow

Listings of houses in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties

Stack of business cards(to be left at open houses as I visit them)

Homebuyer’s guide from RGS Title(which had a nice home buying workflow that I shamelessly copied to keep track of what I need to d0).

Exclusive Right to Represent Buyer Agreement

Housing market activity report for the last week

Tasks:

Get an ADC map of the area

Visit open houses

Complete and return realtor contract