Home Network
Since the house is pretty much movein ready, potential home improvement projects are rather limited. The first one that I had originally planned on doing was wiring the house with ethernet. But low and behold after walking through it as an owner, I noticed that there are RJ45 jacks in various rooms around the house. After the initial bout of enthusiasm, I plugged my MacBook Pro into it and it didn’t detect anything on the other end.
Looking around for a bit, I eventually found a mini wiring cabinet in the garage. Turns out all of those RJ45 jacks are connected to a OnQ Phone Punchdown. After a bit of research, I believe that this problem can be “fixed” by splicing the cable before it hits the punchdown, attaching a patch panel both to the punchdown and walljacks, then using patch cables to connect each jack to either a switch or the phone punchdown. Looking at MonoPrice, I can probably do all this for about 60 bucks(I already have a switch).
The main worry that I have about this plan is having network equipment in a non-climate controlled garage.
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.
48 hour film project (Baltimore 2009)
Last weekend I participated in the 48 hour film project in Baltimore, which meant for a lot of playing with cool gear, a bit of logistics, and a lot of sleep deprivation to get everything to fall into place. So I’ll start this story just as I’m about to Hsien’s(our director) place, and we get our list of required elements:
Genre: Horror
Character: Tim or Tina Flagler, Unemployed Musician
Prop: a tire(any kind of tire)
Line: “I need to leave in a minute.”
Not distributing a link to the movie itself till the screening on Wednesday at 7:15PM in Baltimore. Probably a bit too far out of my way to make the trip.
Behind the cut is mainly my recollection of a timeline with comments of what I(and maybe some of what other folks) was doing, so that we can at least hope to manage our time better for the next time that we attempt this. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
BogoPhoto
