Welcomes; No Apostrophe.

I'm a little worried as I am looking at an evite that was sent out to announce our place and the party that we're having on September 1st. I'm looking over all my old files as I'd like to go ahead and redo the evite for some friends (and without mentioning the word 'gift') and I realize that there is a huge mispelling on the flier.

No bueño, especially since I created it. Regardless, in case you were wondering how long it would take me to notice the error; it was more than a couple days. Yes, so things here are a little crazy being in our first house and trying to get up and running with everything situated but in the end it makes no difference. This is something Dick will never let me live down. The most surprising thing is that Bethany kept it a secret this whole time (her tongue must've been raw). I'm convinced that she knew but didn't say anything. Well, anyway, I hope the error does not question the authenticity of a rockin' party. There will be lots of fun, some alcohol (rumors of a keg?), lots of food and of course you and a thousand of our closest friends that we haven't seen in 10 years, some family, coworkers and our dog Juno. We hope to see you there...

Ticking Time Bomb

I somehow managed to forget about the money we need to put down at closing. We have it but it isn't easy to get to. So I woke up Monday realizing that I may have screwed us. It has been a stressful 3 days getting the money from one bank to another, and then wiring it to a 3rd bank. The last step is the cashier's check tomorrow, and we can breathe a little easier.

The seller is a little nutty. Too many stories to describe. But we originally scheduled the settlement at 4pm. A couple of weeks ago, she asked to move it up, since she has to drive to Maine afterwards. So we moved it to 10am. Then, when we met with her to "tour the gardens," she mentioned that she would need a couple of extra hours after closing to get her stuff out, "But you'll still get the keys." After a few minutes, I realized that didn't sound right...and our realtor agreed. So now she is complaining that she won't have enough time to do a walk-through and get her stuff moved out by the 10am settlement appointment. I'm not sure if she knows she's selling the house, and at the end of it all, she has to get the hell out.

Meanwhile, our apartment is packed (mostly). It's a disaster area. The dog is surrounded by a labyrinth of boxes, like in "The Shining." Except all she has to do is chew her way out. Someone asked me, "is that [big hole in the box] from mice?" No...that's Juno, the box-eating dog. No, she's not a lesbian. Well, actually, she does hump female dogs, but that is for another blog at another time...

Sitting 36 hours from being a homeowner, I desperately want to be out of boxes and have a bottle of wine. I can't wait til this is over and we're moved in.

9 gardens

Remember Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller, and the "your son has been absent niiiiiine tiiiimes"? Well, we have niiiiiiiiine gardens. We have 4 hands, one dog who poops as she walks, and 9 gardens. This can't be a good combo. Anyone who has seen our paltry plant collection knows that the fate of the countless plants and flowers in those 9 gardens is uncertain. I don't prune. I don't really get off the couch. Which is why this whole home ownership thing is going to be a challenge. I crunched the numbers a million times over - we can afford it (JUST barely)...but I didn't think about having an 80-year-old furnace, or pruning 9 gardens, or shutting off exterior water lines to prevent freezing in the winter, or paying $459 for ONE gas bill, or actually having *an electrician*. I kind of like the notion of breaking crap in someone else's house and having someone else pay for it. This whole personal responsibility thing eludes me.

But I'm looking forward to having a party!! Come visit September 1 -- hurry, before the air conditioner craps out!!

Wanna live in Arlington?

Nope, not really ready to move yet, we've gotta fill our lease. Bethany and I just did a bang-up job on the basement this afternoon. We went thru boxes that we've been hauling around from house to house for years. This is a process that has been going on for awhile now, I think we had originally started it about a month ago and always seemd to procrastinate finishing the task. Though it probably isn't done yet, no; it's not done, it's a lot closer than it was earlier. Both of us weeded and pitched a ton of stuff, crap we'd accumulated over the years. Vicki had given us a bunch of Sterelite bins to store stuff and we put all of them to good use. As a matter of fact, the reason we're not really done with the basement is because we ran out of boxes to put stuff into. Anyhow it looks great, but we've got a bunch of other rooms to go thru and pack as well. The storage area outside of the kitchen still needs to be packed up not to mention all the things in the living room, books and knick knacs all over the house. Anyway, we made some progress but there's a lot more to do.

Anyhow, Bethany and I got some good photos of the apartment that we need to rent before we move into the place. Bethany seems to think that we'll be moving into the new house the day after we close; Saturday, August 4th. That may be true but we'll still need to clean and disinfect the apartment before we leave. Hopefully we'll have a renter by that time. We put up some photos of the apartment on a FLIKR account I set up today so anyone intrested that we know can simply log onto it and check it out. If you're interested you can click here. I've also placed in the links pages. I'm hoping we'll get someone to fill the place, if we don't we've broken the lease and will need to pay a complete months rent to our landlord. Also, he doesn't want just anyone renting the apartment, he'd like to see it go to someone that is "in the family" which means that we can't advertise it on Craigslist or anywhere else; the person that we find to take over our lease needs to be a person that we have some kind of reputation with.

Scheduled a Meeting with April

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.

Photos on Snapfish

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).

Our Backyard

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.