Home Inspection
A prosaic subject deserves a prosaic title: for once I really can’t think of anything creative to title a post that is merely an update concerning our home buying adventure.
Lynn and I went for the home inspection today. We did not stay for the full inspection. We spent about an hour wandering around the house, the inspector pointing out all the niggling details we missed when we walked through the house and fell in love with it.
“Your gutters are full of leaves…” he says.
“Oh gee, I didn’t notice that,” I say, imagining myself on a ladder cleaning gutters, then just as quickly imagining me writing a check to someone else to go up on a ladder and clean the gutters.
“Look, someone forgot they weren’t on a cordless phone and ripped the phone outlet out of the wall,” he says.
“Well, whadda ya know…” I say, imagining me screwing the outlet plate back into the wall.
I can operate a screw driver. I have loads of experience changing batteries in toys, so I can easily see myself fixing an outlet plate.
Overall, the inspection went well, however. We will receive the full report early next week, but I don’t expect that he found anything after we left. The appliances are all new. The outlets all seem to work. The roof is new. When we left, the inspector was going to go under the house into the crawl space to inspect beneath the house.
On Friday, we signed the paperwork for our financing, so that end of things also seems to be proceeding apace. The mortgage broker expects no difficulties, and that is really a shock to me, considering my credit. Without going into the shameful details, my credit score is as low as you can go without being arrested and thrown into one of our nation’s secret debtors prisons, in which bankrupts are forced to do their part for the War on Terror by acting as practice dummies for military and CIA interrogators.
Still, I have been able to get a mortgage at an interest rate only slightly higher than someone with very good credit: 6.7 percent. This should give hope to all those with bad credit.
Next step for us is to interview some moving companies, as we await the financing to go through. We have until March 20 to get the financing lined up, and we close on March 31. Though we aren’t moving until April, we are anxious to get packing. I figure if we can pack a couple boxes of books a weekend, we’ll be well on our way to moving in early April, when the time comes.
We are going to hire movers this time, by the way. Last time we moved, the hassle of finding a moving truck, not to mention the back-breaking labor of moving, convinced me that the money saved does not make moving ourselves worth it. Sorry. I’m just not a do-it-yourself kind of guy. I work and make money to make my life easier and hassle-free.
We also took some more pictures today, which I will display below for your amusement or edification. The seller is still living in the house, so the pictures are not of clean, pristine, empty rooms. I’ll probably take some more pics when the house is emptied out, before we move in. I’d like to document changes we make to the house in a formal way, so that when we sell, we can share that information and those pictures with prospective buyers. I’ve been impressed with how forthright the current owner has been with us about the house, showing us his utility bills and so forth. He can’t show us documentation of all the work he has done on the house, because he has barely lived there six months. He hasn’t even used the dishwasher. When the home inspector opened the dishwasher, it’s baskets and instruction book was lying inside exactly as it must have come from the store.
So, no more words. Here are some pictures I took today. Sorry, but the originals are too large to display. Click the thumbs for the full size.
Front of home, with Lynn and Brendan on the porch.
Close-up of Lynn and Brendan.
Living room.
Dining room
Kitchen.
6 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
niiiiccccce house. when can we come visit?
Comment by michelle — Saturday, 25 February 2006 @ 10:58 pm
How can you live somewhere for six months and never use the dishwasher? I would love to have a dishwasher that actually washed dishes. The appliance in our otherwise nice apartment looks like it dates back to my kindergarten days and cleans about as well as a kindergartener.
Now tell me again: was this an investment property for this person? (Roommate and I watch far too many decorating and “flipping” shows, where people buy houses as speculation, fix them and sell them off, to sometimes satisfyingly comic results.”
Anyway, looks like a nice solid house. You should have a lot of fun making it your own.
Comment by Mel B. — Sunday, 26 February 2006 @ 12:42 pm
The owner worked at a local faux military college for the Fall semester, and apparently that was enough to make him decide he didn’t like being obligated to dress in a faux military uniform and observe faux military rules, even though he was a civilian. He took a job in Tennessee and apparently has been living and teaching there since the spring semester began. He left all his stuff behind, so I guess he must be living out of a suitcase. The house we’re buying was not an investment property; I think he intended to stay here, but he decided pretty quickly that he was really unhappy, and so after he decided to leave I think he just stopped caring about the place.
Lynn has the impression from his belongings and photos that he is a younger man, but I tend to think he is older, at least as old as my Dad. He has a framed class photo from a Missouri boarding school dated 1961, and he looks about thirteen or fourteen in the picture…assuming it’s him and not his father. Lynn suggested maybe he is a “Junior” and the picture is of his father, the “Senior.”
As you can tell, we’ve been doing a lot of speculating about who this guy is and why he lived the way he lived. It’s unusual to buy a home, work a job not even six months, then suddenly quit and move to Tennessee. He seems like a good guy, though, probably a history prof judging from the books he left behind. He left utility bills lying out for us to see, which is how we know his name. Very thoughtful.
It feels odd buying a home from someone and never meeting them, but I think that’s more common than not. I guess people really want a middle man between themselves and the seller in these situations.
Comment by Matthew — Sunday, 26 February 2006 @ 1:44 pm
Nice place! And I don’t blame you in the least for hiring a mover–not a chance we’ll move ourselves again if I can help it! Exhausting, frustrating, etc. Somebody else can haul all our damned books next time as far as I’m concerned.
The in-between time before moving in is weird…living amongst half-packed belongings for weeks and/or months on end. Hope it passes quickly so you can soon be settled.
Comment by Dawn — Sunday, 26 February 2006 @ 4:37 pm
We have too much stuff now, and moving ourselves would be even more of a pain in the ass than last time. We have more furniture, for one thing, and as you note, all these damned books are a real problem when moving. There are times I wonder why I keep my books. I don’t read much anymore. They serve mostly a decorative or nostalgic function at this point.
Comment by Matthew — Sunday, 26 February 2006 @ 4:44 pm
I’m just aghast that there are working people out there who feel comfortable enough to buy a house and leave it that quickly. That sounds insane and stupid. But maybe we are talking about someone who is ind. wealthy. wish it was was me.
I don’t think you will have any problems at all with a new house. And that roof won’t need attention for a solid 15 years. very nice.
On moving, we hired a couple neighbor boys to help us out and at 7-10 an hour it was a great value. Unfortunately, we did not have everything packed early enough to really make it work well for us.
Comment by Todd — Sunday, 26 February 2006 @ 4:45 pm