Buying beauty vs creating beauty

Our realtor had a little accident while setting up appointments for yesterday morning:  she mistook the bright red caution highlighting on our spreadsheet as houses we were eager to get into rather than those we'd like to stay away from for the time being.  They were marked that way because they were all in a price range that is just too much for us to consider right now.  By the time we all realized that the house addresses corresponded with the most expensive properties on our list, it was too late, and plus, we wanted to see the houses eventually anyway.  So, we set the GPS and started the morning.

(I'm making it sound like everything was hunky dory with me.  In reality, it was actually a pretty intense morning (and evening before) because I was ticked off something fierce.  Once I calmed down, it became apparent to Pat and I that we couldn't ever have a wedding - Bridezilla will not even begin to explain what I would probably be, based on the words that come out of my mouth when I'm stressed.  And no, it wasn't just this tiny mistake - there's been tons of problems with this realtor, in my eyes at least.  Another post for another day.)

Two houses we saw were brand new and one was basically brand new with some huge quirks.  Realtor lady is going to figure out the deal with said quirks (two years old, fully custom, gorgeous, but...things like bolts going through the fridge?!)  The two that were brand new were nice, but were anything but "designer" - very cookie cutter.  After falling in love with the strange property, I got to thinking, there's no reason we can't put designer touches on a less expensive home in good shape.

 (source)

It's really easy to get lost in blog world with ladies like Sarah (Thrifty Decor Chick) and Karen (The Art of Doing Stuff) making it look easy to have beautiful homes.  They both leave you feeling inspired to be crafty, for sure, but the other feeling that I always have when I read their blogs is that I want to BUY a beautiful home!  I'm wondering if it would be as fun...

Look at the difference in two houses we saw yesterday:

The picture doesn't do this justice, but I didn't think to bring my camera in since it was honestly out of our price comfort zone.  It's a stock photo from Trulia.  But, what we have here is a gorgeous fireplace with custom molding that flows through the two formal rooms in the house.  The entire house is like this - completely gorgeous.

This is the other house, brand new, cookie cutter.  Could we not make this just as beautiful as the first house for more than $20,000 LESS in purchase price??

I've rethunk the idea of needing to buy something that has the exact look we want - I'm feeling confident that we can design anything if the slate is blank (and big) enough.

Off-Topic: iTunes find

Hey all!

Completely off topic, but I was super excited when I figured this out about iTunes (how many of us use iTunes or our iPod/iPhone every day?!)

I was looking for a way to tag Pat and I's music as such.  We both like a lot of different types of music, but some of those just don't overlap.  Neither of us like having the other's music come up when we're in the middle of a jam sesh.

I knew that I wanted to change the genre (because we don't care about the actual official genre of music) to either "Pat," "Codi," or "both," for the music that we do both like.  I chose the genre over the grouping because the genre is something you can tell your iPod to choose from.  With over 1600 songs on my laptop and something ridiculous like 24,000 on his desktop, I couldn't stomach the idea of double clicking on each song in the correct spot and typing our name out.  I did multiple Google searches using both my computer-inept language and using terms that I found through said searches (no idea what an ID3 tag or AAC something or other is, but I thought it might get me to where I needed to be.)  The answer, according to many, was that there was no easy way to change these!

Since I had already gone through all of the artists on the laptop, making those correct, I knew that using the per each method would take me close to 10 years to get through (because it's just so boring that you stop after 10-20 songs, even on a motivated day).  Oh well.

Then, I figured it out!

First, highlight the songs you'd like to change info for:

 Next, right-click and go to "Get Info."  It's a little counter-intuitive if you ask me, which is why I never thought of it before:

Type in whatever fields you'd like to change, and make sure the corresponding check boxes are selected.  This would have been super convenient when I was trying to get all of my artist names spelled correctly.

Click ok!  You'll see that now, the rest of the Dashboard Confessional songs are categorized with the genre of "codi."  It may not be what Apple had in mind, but it works really well for us.

That's it, it's really easy!  What can you tell about my music taste from the pictures above?  I'm tagging Dashboard as just me (Pat doesn't appreciate Chris Carrabba; I don't appreciate the females in Chris' life), and while I was taking the screen shots, Chris Cagle (country) and then Deadmau5 (techno) played.  Now Kanye is on!  How's all that for diversity?

Anyway, hope I helped someone!  (And, for humility's sake, I hope I wasn't the only one who didn't know anything about this feature in iTunes).

Sweat equity defined

Pat and I spent the last week and a half or so deciding that we really liked the look of a specific property on our list:

It had charm and sooo so much more character than the stinking raised ranches that seem to be populating our Trulia list.  It's not even like I have anything against raised ranches (besides their inherent boringness), and I'll probably end up in one, but this was a real house!  We had driven by a few times, snooped around the closed back yard (little hands make for easy access), and could even see through the in ground pool that clearly needed a new liner.  A little over a quarter of an acre, we were ready for this to be the one (there's been a few of those, and I'm sure there will be a few more).

The ad told us that this was in fact a short sale, and that some poor slob had paid three hundred and forty thousand dollars for it in 2006.  Holy crow, it's now approved for short sale at $160,500.  Sweet!

Phone calls with the listing agent on Thursday got us set up for a Saturday meeting.  Yes, there was known to be mold in the basement, but it was a new, white mold, not the terrifying black mold of a low-budget real-estate horror movie.  Worth a look.

So, Saturday came around and unfortunately the mold was the least of our problems.  That part, at least, seemed to be an easy enough fix.  The smoke that stained the wallpaper and soured the air was a big part of our decision not to pursue this house.  The strange layout of the rooms and lack of closets was another.  Yet a third turn off was the back yard - not what we remembered.  The entire thing was concrete, which could conveniently be used to fill the pool of death, if we decided to go that route.

Basically, the house needed to be gutted, and redone, for me to be happy living in it.  As first time buyers, the project was just too big for us.  I'm thrifty, and we're both handy, but there's not a lot we know about actually rebuilding a house.  The house is only valued at around $240k on a good day - if we put any more money into this than $80,000 over selling price, we'd for sure be losing in the long run.  Aka, sweat equity.  The only way to build it.

Sad, too, because the house is a real beaut'.

Open house weekend

The last couple of weeks have been a real whirlwind of emotion on the home buying front. Last weekend, we went to our first open houses! How fun it was. We made the big mistake of going to a few that were completely out of our price range, and of course fell in love with them. We met a few really nice realtors, and one in particular who we will not be working with. All in all, Saturday and Sunday were really excellent days.

The trouble came Monday when Pat called a mortgage specialist referred to us by one of the agents we had met. They broke some numbers down for us, and we realized that with a mortgage payment, PMI, taxes, and insurance, we don't really want to look at a house that is more than about $205,000. We've been "pre-qualified" for about $300k (haven't done a pre-approval yet), and that dream house we went to see is $254,900. And of course, my initial reaction (because I am dramatic and overly emotional sometimes most of the time) was sadness, and distaste, and, "We shouldn't even be looking at a house, we'll never find anything we like, there is no point to move out of this apartment, I'm going to take a shower."

 Not even the lack of outside basement access is going

to get the builder to drop $50k on the dream house...

Warmed up and clean, I came out of the bathroom feeling ashamed and disappointed in myself. What do you mean, we can't find something we like? Our original budget for a house was about $150,000, and we fell in love with a few at that low price. The whole situation was humbling and put things in perspective for me. We're going to be okay.

The funny part is that about a month and a half ago, when our budget was still around $150k, we waited and waited to go see a house that looked great, but was over by $40 thousand. I finally took us to go see it one night, and it was taken off the market the next morning. Shoulda known then what we know now, because we'd be ALL over that place. Sigh, we'll just have to wait for another one like it to come up.

Ahhh, how we wish we had bought you, 

but there will be others!

Another few crossed off the list

As soon as Pat got home last night, we loaded up Nina (the Nav system) with the last few addresses we hadn't seen in our preferred town. These houses were all slightly outside of our comfort zone as far as price was concerned, but every one of them felt like it deserved a look. Plus, we drove past our number one, just because it was on the way :)

First was our standby house.

Calling it a standby house really isn't fair, because we love a lot of things about it. We don't, however, seem to love it enough to jump on it. If the price happens to drop, we may end up owning it. It's not that the price is too high on it, it's just that nothing is compelling us to march into the bank on this one.

Next on the list was a house we really thought we'd love, based on the pictures and the ad.

"This home is completely redone, nothing to do except come and relax
on your deck outside your master bedroom on the second level and view the Bay.
Enjoy the breath taking views - lighthouse, ships, bridges, and more."

We went to see this knowing we were willing to pay a little more to be on the water - a huge selling point when we need to sell in a few years. What the ad doesn't mention, though, is that there isn't actually any water access at the end of the road, just marsh, and that to put those great decks in, the other side of the house is thisclose from the neighbor's 8ft high fence. We DID love the house, but the location just wasn't for us.

A new home was our next stop. I hadn't brought my pen and paper with me, but we remembered the ad saying that if we acted fast, we could still choose our finishes. Perfect! We didn't expect that when we got there, it would only be a framed outline of a house. That didn't bother us, though, so we went in (probably illegally) to take a look around and try to imagine the rooms.

The raised ranch's upper floor seemed fine enough. Everything was on the smaller side, but we don't need a lot of room. No Walk in closets, but we knew we'd have plenty of storage downstairs. Cool.

We walked downstairs and were just turned off. Using a couple of the 2x6's (a good point of this house) as a handrail to help with the stairs really wasn't an option because there were a couple that were warped and not nailed down at the floor end. When we got into the lower story, there were a few spots in the plywood walling where we could see about an 1/8th of an inch of daylight. We got back in the car. Looking back at the house, we noticed that the stairway into the house (a large slab of concrete that looked good enough for my taste) was propped up by a couple of smaller chunks of concrete on the 4 corners. All we could think of was that there was nothing to keep the stairs from settling and sinking into the ground.

The first thing we admitted while driving away was that we know nothing about construction and house building. Maybe these "issues" are all normal, and they're just not seen once the drywall goes up. We just knew that we would always be wondering if our house was poorly made if we moved into this place. Onto the next.

Hmmm, to tell you the truth, I have no idea why the next one was vetoed on the spot, but it was. We continued on to our last destination of the evening:

And we actually kept it on our list. 1/4 isn't so bad. This home is lived in and looks really well maintained, even if it's completely outdated on the inside. There's nothing WRONG with this house. It's got a huge yard, and somebody takes pride in it. It's a little expensive for what it is, especially considering it has such bad decoration on the inside. It's going to take a little bit of money to update it. So, we are just going to keep following it and see what happens.

We finished right as it was starting to get dark - home for tacos :)

The Happiest Place On Earth

Never has a place made my heart flutter so much as Disney World Lowe's did last night!

Lovey and I spent the day yesterday driving around, looking at houses. We found a few (a lot) that we really didn't like. Luckily, we're both of the mindset that it's just as good to cross houses off the list as it is to add them.

When this:

hubpages.com

actually looks something like this:

efinancedirectory.com

over and over again, it's hard not to get discouraged. At the very least, it's tempting to call the listing realtor and ask if she's offering photography lessons - cuz she's obviously got mad skillz!

Anyway, I digress. More about the home search later. While we did find a couple of properties that we both Really Did Like in our price range (which, depending on who you talk to, could be anywhere as high as $144k or $530k...don't worry, we're looking closer to the former rather than the latter), we needed a little pick me up after a long day of driving in what felt like circles (thanks Nina Nav).

Did we go for a drink? No. Nor did we go to the pet store, that place always leaves me yearning for a dog, and Pat doesn't like having to disappoint (I actually think that he should be glad about the fact that while I might someday come home with a dog he didn't help pick out because I just couldn't bear the loneliness anymore, I will NEVER sabotage our birth control efforts! Seriously, he's a lucky guy).

Instead, we went to look at appliances. We went to Home Depot first, and man...I just wasn't impressed. Everything feels like it's more set up for a contractor than a consumer there. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It even might be a good thing when we're ready to buy. For now, though, Lowe's gets my vote for a Friday afternoon ooh-and-ahh window shopping trip. (No, really, we looked at windows. Fake paned versus real paned was something I never considered, but apparently Rucks has.)

I think that Pat may have been a little bewildered. He never expected me to get so excited about flooring samples (I made a pact to not take any until we actually buy a place) or faucet finishes. Seriously, every time we turned into a new aisle, he'd have to grab my hand to keep me grounded because I was bouncing in all directions at once. Ahhh, life's good when you're as simple as I apparently am.

The good news for him, though? Next time I'm really cranky, he can just load me into the car, kicking and screaming, and drop me off at the nearest home improvement store for a good hour. No chance of Zelda resurfacing after that ;)

Gathering, not hunting

Pat and I have started something that has me over-the-top excited and petrified all at the same time.

We're house hunting gathering. As in, we're gathering information at our pace, watching from afar, looking for prices to come down on a few choice properties. Not stalking or waiting to pounce ;) (Well, on 2 properties, a lower price WILL mean a pounce.)

I couldn't be more excited. I just feel really unfulfilled with apartment living. I want our own space, our own yard, where we make the rules and the decisions. I'd like to not be paying double (almost) for rent as we would be paying for our own home.

I'm a little against the whole thing because I feel like buying a house is giving up on going to South Carolina. We're being careful to pick properties that are in good locations that will hopefully be easy to sell in a year or two. No huge fixer uppers, because I know that we don't have the time, money, or know-how yet to take on something like that. And we don't want to.

Looking past the potential of not being able to sell the house, what if we love it too much to leave? Why do I want to move into a spot that I fall in love with enough to buy, make it my own, and move out in 2 years? The logical part of me says it's no big deal - we're planning a move south because we aren't happy here, but if we become happy, there's no reason not to stay. The emotional, anxious part of me (so, all of me) says that's like giving up and people will make fun of me for not going out of state like I've always said I was going to. SO WHAT! Get over it, kid, stop worrying about that part!

Pat doesn't seem to actually be nervous about any of this. He just knows that it's incredibly hard to save money when we're paying as much in rent as we are - and he's right, really.

The looking continues!