Windemere

        Well actually I bought a house a while ago and have been meaning to get something like this up and running since early on. But for anyone out there who has also purchased an older home that "needs a little work" you'll appreciate how little extra time there is for frivolous things like blogging, sleeping, etc.

        So while this endeavour is starting out maybe a bit disingenuously with what will be in the following few days a series of postings recounting some of the disasters ehrm.... milestones that have occurred up to this point, going forward it will be more of a day to day or event to event rant about the cruel injustice and staggering economic burden associated with homeownership. Not that the upcoming posts won't also be along these same themes but they won't have quite the same intensity as what is likely to come up in the future as I've had time to calm down and collect my thoughts on what has passed but in the future will be sitting down while my eye is twitching in the middle of my blind rage and frustration at whatever further disaster or injustice has befallen me.

        Although I may whine and complain and wheedle and grouse a lot (because I stick to what I'm best at) I am truly happy to be in a place that is mine and to have escaped from the drab world of beige that is apartment living.

1/23/2007

        After a rather long and involved process of searching for and eventually finding a house I finally found something that I didn't hate, that was in a decentish neighborhood and was somewhat less catastrophically un-affordable than other things out there in housing land here in Baltimore. So my amazing Realtor, Agent Wayne and I sat down and I spent something like an eternity signing and initialing all the various pieces of the contract documents that he had had hauled in on a cart by a team of pack mule. At the completion of this ordeal I had officially put in an offer on the house.

        Now Wayne just had to drive the mule team back to the office and get everything over to the other agent so that the owner of the house could laugh with disdain at my offer much as Caesar would toward a not so mighty gladiator who was about to become lion food. But this did not happen. In fact over the course of the next week nothing at all happened. Well that isn't true mighty Agent Wayne was busy calling the other realtor and trying to get them to respond to my offer. And guess what, in the end THEY NEVER DID. Not one word back from the realtor or owners about the offer. Not "No I'm sorry we don't like the offer" or "Yes, your largess in this offer is only exceeded by your amazing charm and grace" and nothing in between.

        If you'd ever like to see a very calm real estate agent turn three shades of purple frustrated angry then I recommend putting in a reasonable offer on a house and having the other agent not bother to return a week's worth of phone calls and e-mails.

        So the house didn't work out and at the end I felt a little like I was back at square one. I had already mentally started planning on projects and moving and everything else. But Agent Wayne was still on the case and had a couple of properties for me to look at.

        So I did my usual night time drive by of the two properties. There's nothing more revealing than driving through random neighborhoods in Baltimore at 10 o'clock at night. The perfect little cottage on a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood is revealed as the cut through for the addicts moving from your sketchy neighbor's meth lab to the methadone clinic around the corner. So these nighttime sojourns have proved most useful in weeding out what seem like perfectly nice homes in decent neighborhoods that really aren't.

        One of these two properties was Windemere. And if I had known then what I know now I may have opted to just cash out my life savings in small bills and invite my friends over for a massive bonfire of burning cash and just warmed ourselves in the glow of burning dead presidents and statesmen. Then I could just move on with my boring drab apartment living and be happy, Right?

        But that's not what happened. Instead I set up an appointment to walk through Windemere. Fully prepared to be devastated by the fact the the interior was either another tacky terrible renovation or a gutted crack den. Much to my astonishment it was neither. The original hardwood floors were still there and not covered with the bargain basement beige carpeting.

The house was actually pretty great, it had passed the night time test, looked pretty good from both the outside and inside and was in a good neighborhood close to work. I kept ducking as I walked outside for fear of lighting strikes. This isn't to say that it was perfect. The house definitely needed some TLC but there were no massive problems evident from the walkthrough.

        Once again into the breach. Agent Wayne was on the case and got the mule team hitched up (hopefully for the last time) for another contract signing session. Now the waiting game. This time the other Realtor actually responded to our proposal and we, hold on to your hats, negotiated on the price. So there was some back and forth and a bit of drama (one of parties in the contract had passed away) in the contract process but at least things were moving ahead.

So we now almost have a house. Next week on This Old House we'll be going through the home inspection and closing process. Stay tuned....

6/9/2007

        So today's topic isn't exactly home related, but this is my page and I get to choose what goes here. On Saturday my brother is getting married and I'm the best man. I'm not being cocky, that's just my role in this whole thing. The role of best man is fairly simple (which is why it was entrusted to me) and consists of the following. Plan and execute a bachelor party, show up at the church on time and in whatever monkey suit requested by the groom, tell him he's doing the right thing over and over, and finally the toast.

        I have obviously known Ryan for all of his life and Amy for virtually none of hers. From the very start Ryan has proved to be a rotten little brother and from what little time I've spent with Amy she is a very sweet and patient woman. I know some of you are shocked that I would out my brother this way, and the rest of you actually know Ryan and are nodding in agreement. When you're the oldest brother it is part of your job to teach and train your younger siblings in the true ways of the world. Teachers and parents all have ulterior motives in their teachings, making you a good citizen etc. And not all siblings are willing students which can make the older brother's job difficult indeed.

        The reason that Ryan was such a rotten little brother is that he was already good at all of the things that the older brother was supposed to be teaching. He was better at sports, better at math, smarter, etc. The only tool I had left in my arsenal was to beat him up. And then he ended up bigger than me too and even that failed to work.

        But all of these frustrating things that make him a lousy little brother and make my job as older brother all the more difficult are the very same things that make him a great friend, a good son, a loving boyfriend and now a devoted husband.

        Please raise your glasses and join me in wishing Amy and Ryan the best luck and success in their lives together. May you both live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live.

        So raise your glass and wish me luck in toasting Ryan & Amy at their wedding on Saturday.

2/23/2007

        I had been warned that closing on a house wasn't necessarily the most pleasant experience in the world. But I have to admit that I wasn't fully prepared for the drama ultimately involved in the event. I'd gotten a guide for first time home buyers that was a couple steps up from the Idiot's guide to home buying. It was written by a real estate attorney who had flipped several homes through her career. The advice and background info about the process and everything involved was mostly review, but there were several good things that I took away. If I were more motivated I'd go look up the author and title and link to the book here but that book, along with hundreds of others, is in a box somewhere within the piles and piles of boxes still all over the house and I have no desire to go unearth it just to make your life easier. If it really really ruins your day not to know what the book was, or if you are searching for a home and feel the desperate need to read the same book I did, e-mail me and I'll consider putting forth some effort.

        If there is an image most unlike the process of closing this is probably close to it.

        Beauty, serenity, symmetry, color, nature, and balance. None of this has anything to do with the closing process. It is an agonizing soul draining experience full of paperwork, bureaucracy, delay, and stress. Perhaps the one best piece of advice that I had gleaned from my first time home buyers book was to take the full day of work off for closing. That and to have some reward for yourself for the completion of closing because there was bound to be anywhere from moderate to profound buyers remorse shortly after doing the deed. I did in fact take the full day off work. My closing was set for 3pm on a Friday afternoon and I spent most of the day getting last minute things faxed over to the mortgage broker's office and by about noon had gotten word that everything was good and that the mortgage was secured and that we were good for closing.

        I have to say that the best thing about the whole process of getting a home was the team of people that I had helping me. It's not that I'm all that important or wealthy and have teams of minions flitting about to do my bidding (much as I may desire it) but as a buyer and particularly a first time home buyer it is ridiculously easy and on the surface very much free (nothing is truly free, you do pay for it somewhere but just not out of pocket) to get help. I've already mentioned super Agent Wayne and through him I was led to a great mortgage broker, home inspector, and title agent.

        If I were to write an idiot's guide to home buying, and believe me anything I wrote would certainly be by an idiot home buyer even it weren't written for an idiot home buyer, I think my #1 tip for the process is to admit defeat right up front and know that unless you are already in the industry there is no way for you to reasonably raise your knowledge level much above idiot status in all the various aspects of home buying. There are just too many variables for one person that doesn't make it their life's work to master. Having Agent Wayne on the job and having him bring a network of trusted professionals that he'd worked with in the past made my job as a home buyer so much easier. And truly that is the Agent's job. To know more than you do about the market, take the time to get to know you enough as a person to find YOUR home, and draw upon their experience and contacts to make the process as straightforward as possible. This sounds fairly straightforward but it is a phenomenally difficult job.

        Based on the horror stories I've heard from other people's real-estate agent experiences I think most of the time the problem is with the home buyer. So my #2 tip is not to be an idiot. Of course if the book is titled "Idiot's guide..." this may alienate a lot of my readers but fuck'em they already bought the book, I got my dollar. ;-)

        In my mind, and eventually in chapter 4 if this ever becomes a book, the absolute most critical aspect is to find an agent that you can communicate clearly with. This ties directly in to tip #2 above. If you can't clearly explain what it is you want, need, desire, and despise about a home then all hope is lost. What I mean is that the agent must be able understand what you mean when you speak, not just hear the words that come from your mouth. This goes both ways. You must be cogent enough to explain yourself and your agent must be enough in tune with you to comprehend what you are asking for.

        There are some people who I suspect are just incompatible with any real estate agent because the real problem is that they themselves are lousy or confused communicators and can't even get their wishes clearly defined enough for the agent to work with. That and the delusional folks who can't get past reality. "Well I want 5 wooded acres and a 2,500 sq/ft home in a gated community within a 15 minute commute to work and there needs to be shopping within walking distance and my budget is $37. Oh, and a pony! If it had a pony that'd be great!"

        But I digress. Really we should be sticking to the tale of my closing. After all this whole thing is all about me and what I want to say. ;-)

        So on that fateful cold February Friday I made my way to RGS Fountainhead title in timonium prepared to spend the next few hours signing away my life. Their offices are very cozy and comfortable and considering the stress level what goes on in their office are some of the nicest and most relaxed people to work with. I met the seller for the first time and after a few minutes we all proceeded into a conference room to begin the process. The title agent must have made arrangements to borrow Agent Wayne's mule team because she had a pile of paper on the desk that could choke a medium sized termite colony.

        About ten minutes into the process someone came into the room and asked to see the title agent outside. My stomach made a slight lurch at this point as I knew whatever it was couldn't be good. They never come pull a title agent out of a closing to let them know that they just discovered that the buyer had won the lottery and wouldn't need this whole mortgage thing afterall. Only bad news is delivered privately and in hushed tones. We continued reading and signing things and she returned a few minutes later and now asked me to step out of the room with her. Ok so this is even worse my stomach now completed the double gainer back summersault that it had been contemplating with the first interruption.
. It is one thing for the title agent to be pulled out, it is another entirely for me to be called away. When it was just the title agent I was able to restrain my stomach with thoughts of other scenarios besides a disaster with my closing process. It could very well have been that her daughter had fallen on the playground and she had been called out to make arrangements to pick her up or something else that affected someone other than me. But now it had been confirmed that there was something not at all good happening and it was about to happen to me.

        What I found out was that the state had just called to say that "Ummm, oh by the way that mortgage loan that we approved and sent over to you for Mr. Moore, yeahhh, well uhh just kidding." Well that's maybe not exactly what they said but that was the gist. Basically the person at the state who had signed off on the loan and authorized the disbursement was not authorized to do so. Now of course we had already started the signing process and the title agent had a check in her hands ready to hand the seller. And as of that morning I'd been told all was well. It was now about 3:30p on a Friday afternoon. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a state bureacracy knows that there really isn't a worse time of the day or week to try to get anything to happen at the sate.

        My heart sank. I just knew that the one competent person at the state office office of loan approvals or whatever who's been there for 40 years and would be able to quickly resolve this problem and without whom the entire process just grinds to a halt had to be long gone and well on her way to the shore for the weekend. My mortgage broker's office jumped into action and began working things from their end. They needed some further documentation from my business partnership and after a couple of calls to the one woman in our office who can get this kind of thing done (who was in fact in the car on the way to the shore for the weekend) and some strings pulled by my broker to get someone at the state to stay late and take care of this etc we finally got word at 5:45pm that the state had moved things through and that it was ok to disburse the check. Whew.

        At this point, after spending nearly 3 hours on the precipice of disaster the "joy" of now owning a home was largely absent. It is hard to describe the feeling but it can basically be summed up as "Great I've just cashed in my life's savings, sold my soul, and mortgaged my very existence for the next 30 years all for a small brass key on an "Everything's bigger in Texas" keychain. Woot." No victory or achievement in my life has ever felt as empty or worthless as I felt after going through all this to get a house.

        The reward I had gotten for myself was a really nice bottle of champage to celebrate this first night of home ownership. I still have that unopened bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge today. After the closing process I don't think I even bothered to go down to the new house. I'm pretty sure I just went home and sat on the couch and watched TV. Pretty much shell shocked from the whole ordeal.

2/24/2007

        This whole home ownership thing is already over-rated. It is day one and frigid cold here in lovely b-more. And guess what. My house has no heat. Yesterday when this wasn't my house it had lots of heat, very comfortable nice warm heat, and now today that the house is mine. No heat. Nothing. Just lots of coldness. I'm not sure what I've done or threatened to do to this house that would have it behave so badly on it's first day as my house but I can tell that this is going to be a difficult relationship.

        Luckily I have this great home warranty for the house so this no heat thing should be no big deal. The only problem being that when I called the warranty company they had no record of my home or anything. Going to closing at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon seems like a great idea until the process takes 3 hours and all of the entities involved in the process are closed when the final deal is done. So I had to wait until Monday to see if the paperwork had gone through in order to get my name into their system.

        Luckily for me one of my co-workers at the BMA had been a residential HVAC repairman in a previous life and after a brief description from me of the boiler and the problem he was able to diagnose it and walk me through the process of getting it back up and running. I ventured back to the frozen tundra of my house that night and after a little cursing and fidgeting was able to get the boiler back up and running. Voila... heat returns to Windemere. The problem wasn't very serious, just a stuck flue damper (correctly diagnosed sight unseen by my co-worker I might add), but it was enough to stop the whole works.

6/29/2007

     So this week's drama of home ownership is the plumbing backing up. It is always lovely to go downstairs to see a couple of inches of water on the floor. It is even better to realize that it insn't rainwater or groundwater that has seeped in during a recent thunderstorm or localized flooding but that it has in fact come up out of the toilet.

     I guess it is good that the basement is sort of only quasi finished. It is carpeted and does have wall partitions but it is really tacky and kinda needs to go away anyway. I mean there is only so much fake walnut paneling that one can have in their life before they reach a saturation level. It is sort of like lead poisioning. It won't kill you the first time you lick a wall. But you do it enough times and the lead can build up in your system over time and make you just a little slower. I'm pretty sure that fake wood paneling has the same detrimental effects.

     Now the fact that the basement is sort of un-finished / poorly finished is a bit of a double edged sword in this latest adventure. On the one hand there is very little down there to get ruined by the overflow but on the other hand, being as there isn't much to do down in the basement I rarely go down there. This doesn't sound all that bad until I did go down there to discover the couple of inches of water in the corner of the basement and quickly came to the realization that I have no idea how long things have been ehrm... shitty down there. So the latter part of this week and this weekend I will be dividing my time between working on the sounds of summer events at Towson mucking out and drying out the basement. Then of course removing and bagging all the stuff that has been soaked and is starting to mold and mildew. Do you have any idea how many fun colors mold comes in? I didn't until this week.

     For those that don't know, the drywall in your home is composed of basically a layer of compressed chalk or gypsum sandwiched between two layers of paper. None of this is particularly water resistant. In fact, it is kind of spelled out pretty clearly in the name "dry-wall" that it is, in fact, a product not really meant for damp or wet environments. As we alll learned in our high school science classes, water is the universal solvent. And nowhere is this really more apparent than when you soak a product called dry-wall in several inches of not very dry at all water (well more than just water but we won't get into that). Basically bad things happen and the drywall turns back into a mushy pile of it's base component parts. In other words, a pile of loose chalk and paper pulp.

     Being mostly paper and chalk the drywall works as a fairly decent wick so any water around the base of the wall is quickly wicked up to help soak down and destroy and stain the rest of the wall, not just the bottom two inches that are actually submerged. In my case, thanks to not often venturing into the basement, it might have had a day or so of soaking time to thoroughly work it's way into the wallboard and now the bottom 2 ft or so of the walls in that corner of the basement are a crumbly mess. Oh, and not just a crumbly mess but a wet moldy, mildewed, crumbly mess. As luck would have it mold spores is one of the few things I'm alergic to so it has definitely been good times cleaning this all up.

    I'm pretty sure I can remember, quite vividly actually, sitting down Tuesday night and thinking to myself. "Self, you know what would rock this weekend.... That's right mucking poo out of the basement, that would be frigging awesome. I wonder where I can go to do that. I'm not sure that's something that is bound to be found in the weekend section of the City Paper or an entry on Craig's list or anything. I doubt there are very many basement mucking venues out there. I'm sure there's some sort of weird coprophagous fetish associated with cleaning up plumbing disasters but I kind of doubt it has the popularity to have been turned into a commercial venture and is more likely to be the kind of thing practiced in the privacy of one's home. Or within the privacy of someone else's home who happens to be out of town and you broke in to practice your craft (as it were). Little did I know at the time but as fortune would have it I would not even need to venture outside of the house to fulfill this wildest of fantasies.

     But that is all really besides the point that I now have several large 50 gallon trash bags full of what used to be the walls in the basement. And a couple more bags to fill this weekend with the carpeting that got soaked. OHHH, and guess what else isn't very waterproof at all. Bathroom vanities made out of low density fiberboard. Basically when they sit in a puddle of standing water guess what they turn back into. You got it, Elmer's glue and wood chips. So the bathroom vanity is now a couple of inches shorter and even more structurally unsound than it was when new.

     So if a full bathroom has a toilet, a vanity, and a tub/shower and a half bath has a toilet and a vanity.... What do you call a room with just a toilet and no vanity? I'm thinking that my downstairs bathroom has either been "converted" into a Port-O-Pot or an outhouse. Since it isn't really portable, the former doesn't seem particularly accurate so I think I'm going to go with outhouse. Now I do realize that this is also not a very outdoor space either. But it does have a window to the outside. I guess I just need to get the jigsaw out and get a crescent moon carved in the door to make things complete.