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A few days ago our realtor, Dan sent Bethany an email. I think he sent it to her because he likes her better, well, maybe that's not quite rite, Dan sent it to Bethany because Bethany doesn't make him feel awkward. I on the other hand however don't always have the best interactions, but that's okay. Regardless, Dan sent an email stating that the current owner of our soon-to-be home Arpil has requested a meeting with us. This isn't something tha I had never thought about but moreso something that I thought ould be out of the question due to the fact that we had yet to close on the house so I thought that everything, all dialogue would go between our realtors, Dan Metcalf and Jane Fairweather. Bethany and I werer excited to meet with April. We've got some questions that we'd like to ask her before she vacates the house but I had just assumed that all the things that we need to discuss would come after we had settled on August 3rd. Awesome, so it took us several days to contact the number in the email, a number that I thought was one of Jane's assistants, Amy. (Dan's email was not clear). So I left a message for Amy but it turned out to be for April, the outgoing message on the machine was a generic "leave me a message" type of thing. So since it did not seem businesslike I thought that maybe it was April so I got onto Zabasearch and punched April's complete name in there viola! The number I had just dialed pops up. If you haven't used Zabasearch, I think it's awesome. Comes in handy. I should put it in my links list. Anyhow. I left a message for April and we should be meeting with her on July 16th to go over teh house and how to care for her prize winning irises.
It's exciting to meet the current owner. I have a feeling that she is a little older, late 50's or something, empty nester type that is moving to get away from the citiy, rumor has it that she's going up to Maine. The original realtor that we spoke with when checking out the place said that she was an artist and an architect and had subsequently done a lot of the rennovations herself.A After we submitted our offer we found out that she was a school teacher, though she did have a very nice art collection in the house.
I found some photos of our place attached to the appraisal. I guess it's standard practice to place in the photos of the house when it was appraised. Anyhow, the quality isn't really that good, but I thought that I'd put a link to them in the blog since we haven't shared them much. Bethany and I still need to get over there to take some photos of the place ourselves as all the images we have of the place were shot by someone else. Oh, so the good news is that we're not overpaying for our house at least that 's what the appraisal tells us. But who knows, the closing date is more than a month away and there's been some slippery action in the housing market. I sound optimistic, huh? Anyhow, here's some of the photos...
The best thing about these images is the person who did the appraisal also had to draw a map to scale of our place, so finally we don't have to explain too much about how it's layed out and go into the detail about the third / fourh bedrooms. ...that said I might as well do it here. When we looked at the place, it could not be listed as a three or four bedroom on the contract. The reason being is that to fit the perameters of a bedroom it needs to have it's own entrance and a closet. (all potential bedrooms here have closets that are not shown), As you will see there are probably at best three bedrooms with an office or sitting room if we decied to tear down a wall... check the floorplan...
Oh I've also posted an album on Snapfish that you can access here: at Snapfish (you have to sign up for an account if you don't already have one).
This is the backyard of the place; I think it's the best feature of the house. Bethany and i realized that everytime we went to open houses or looked at a house with a realtor we walked straight thru the house and into the backyard. I don't think we realized it until the day we found this house, but it was true. I think this backyard is what sold us on it. Of course Juno has a lot to do with that, Los Angeles, I suppose does as well. Being amongst concrete and dry dirt, you develop a profound appreciation of things that are green, namely trees, shrubs and grass. During our time in LA together we never had access to anythying 'green' that we did not have to share with others.
Something we reaized after we put in the offer is that we were going to have to maintain the yard, meaning trimming the hedges (good thing we don't have hedges), mowing the lawn and keeping up the gardens that are already there. Bethany and I are working on our green thumb here at our place in Arlington; I fire up the lawnmower every other week, spend hours pulling weeds out of the overgrown area that was once a garden and developing my farmer's tan. keeping this backyard will be one of the challenges while owning our own place, but working at something to make it beautiful is a challenge we're actually looking forward to.
Wow, I can't beleive we bought a new house, well not a 'New' house, but a house that will one day be ours. Goodbye reasonable rent, hellow excessive mortgage! I thought it would be good for us to start something that reflects our feelings on this whole proces of becomming homeowners and something that other people from our old hometown of Los Angeles might be able to access and check up on every so often. We placed in an offer on this house that we found outside of teh beltway in Maryland. The process was relatively quick; I must admit that I didn't think it thru all the way before we finished writing the offer. The next day we had heard back from the howmeowner, April. She didin't like our first offer so she came back with something different and two days later we had settled on a closing date; August 3rd, more than 60 days after placing our offer. We've got more than two months from the time we placed our initial offer and the time that we close and move in. Those sixty days can be hellish thininking about everything that happened in the first 48 hours of this process. Did we offer too high? What have we gotten ourselves into? When we applied for our loan, our loan officer showed us the breakdown of the interest over the course of the loan, and our payment which really distorted things. Over the course of 30 years we could, or anyone with a mortgage rate of 6.125% afford to buy almost two houses. Wow! That is crazy, but it feels good to know that we toghther and our dog Juno will be able to call something ours. This is something that we've waited, hoped and saved for and now we will be purchasing our fist house. What follows is a conglomeration of feelings and hopes of ours between now and the time we gett settled in 306 Dennis, Silver Spring, MD 20910.
