Commemorative One Week Anniversary Edition of B&G News

Today is the one week anniversary of home ownership! We loved celebrating our first Thanksgiving in our own house… and I’ll have you know, we did not sit on boxes as we gorged on turkey and pie.  The house was almost completely unpacked by Thursday evening.  Given that the moving truck did not even start loading until 3:15 PM on Wednesday, that is pretty impressive.  Want to know my secret weapon?  Child labor. Our little sisters, Sabrina and Chelsea, had boundless energy!  I pretty much threw objects out of boxes and barked its destined location and the girls rushed to put it away.  All it cost me was a few tootsie rolls and a pack of gum!  Nice!

Our family drove up to the Bay Area to help us move (the sisters), watch the baby (the grandma), and school us in the joys of homeownership (the grandpa).   Chris, Brakes’ dad, crossed so many of our to-do’s off the list and he brought us a whole van-full of tools and knowledge to get us started in our quest to DIY-dom.  Plus, he is coming back next weekend to tile the kitchen!  LOVE THAT MAN!

It has not been all glory though… there have been some casualties on our home front.  The paneling and wallpaper in the bedrooms and dining room suffered a crushing loss last Tuesday, when it was yanked from its locale with wild abandon and shoved into the dumpster down the street. 

My previously manicured nails are now mangled shreds of their former glorious selves and the skin on Brakes’ arms and hands is striped with angry, red scratches; the result of his epic battle with the black-berry bushes out back.

Lastly, I am sorry to report: the fancy-pants toilet seat went missing after the home inspection.  Alas I will never uncover the mystery that lurked beneath that potty’s still waters, nor what strange and unusual purpose the plethora of buttons served.  A monumental disappointment, but I must carry on.

                                                                   

 

PS: Because no post is complete without a picture of the Weez; here is ole’moneybags (Weez not me) signing the closing papers on her new house.

(***disclaimer***                                                       This is not a posed shot.  We do not stoop to manufactured adorableness. Yet.)

Closing Day!

Brakes and I are closing on our lovgly  (lovely/ugly) little rancher today!  I would love to post a pic of the front, but it is sooo ugly that it wouldn’t be difficult to find if you searched the recently sold list in Northern California.  Brakes is certain we have stalkers (I told him not to flatter himself) but I like to try to respect his wishes (occasionally).  As soon as we disguise it with a coat of paint and perhaps some yard art (fall decor?)  I’ll post our “after”.  Until then feast your eyes on what I’ll be doing for probably the next 24 hours strait:

Removing paneling, ripping down wall-paper, and yanking down curtains!

(please note that these are pictures from the appraisal, with the seller’s stuff, though I would not cry if he left the fancy-pants potty lid.)

Is it strange that I am super excited to get my hands dirty (I know all you sage old renovators are rolling your eyes at my naivety and enthusiasm)?

Wish us luck!

PS: Can I please take a moment to thank my amazing husband who guided us down this path frugally and thoughtfully at every turn?  Its true I may have wanted to punch his lights out a time or two, but my Bargain Man got us exactly the house we wanted at the price we wanted!  I am so proud of (and in love with) you, B!

The Thrill of the Hunt: Agave

We did not even glance at the MLS for 3 months, until we saw Agave! This is/was a great house! It had an open floor plan, two levels, a private lot, and mountain views. It was nearly perfect. Scrape the ceilings, ditch the carpet, and fancy up the kitchen and bath, and it would have been the most perfect 2 and a 1, plus a bonus room, ever. We were enamored... as were many other people in the housing market teetering on decline. The listing agent was actually fairly astute and under priced the house by a few percent to create a false sense of affordability. We got all our materials together and I wrote a heart-wrenching letter explaining how our offer (of course, we were low-balling) was not a reflection of the emotional value of their home but truly a reflection of what we, a civil servant, teaching special-needs kids and a humble chemist, finding the cure for Cancer, could afford. Needless to say, they were not convinced, and the place went for $715,000. We never had a chance. I did not even cry- do you see how jaded I’d become?  Bless Brake’s heart; he was really beginning to relish the game.

The Thrill of the Hunt: Berida

The summer of “07 our obsession with becoming homeowners hit critical mass. We had spent 2 years wasting time, building castles in the sky with homes that were out of our reach or always slipped through our fingers. We were beat-up, fed-up, and exhausted!  After 3 back-to-back false alarms we decided that there was never going to be a perfect house or a perfect time and we just needed to suck it up and put in serious offers.

We went to a walk-a-thon in the community in which I taught. Through the misty haze I watched families circle the track at midnight, walking for a cure and I became moved. I saw myself there, five years from now with a toddler in a jogging stroller and an infant strapped to Brakes’ broad chest. Brakes loves this town; he sees big lots, a cozy community, and close proximity to water sports.

I had always resisted living there because I was a special education teacher for the local school district. Every time I stopped at Safeway on my way home from work I ran into someone from the community I knew. I think this quality could be a really great if I weren’t in special education. But special ed can get really emotional and be wrought with tension. When I go home, I need to be going to a place where I can decompress and sit on the patio with a glass of wine and bitch about what a rough day I had without worrying that my next-door neighbor is behind the fence taking notes on what I say so that she can share them at the next Lions Club meeting. Basically there is an old saying; you don’t “poo” where you eat, and if I lived where I worked, I know I would be asking for many awkward encounters and conflicts of interest.

That said, among the famous fog, and the yearning light in my sweet husband’s eyes, I had a change of heart. We immediately made an appointment with a realtor and put in an offer on a cramped 3 and a 2 with a so-so floor plan but on a gorgeous lot: water views in front, mountain views in back, a truly knock-your-socks-off locale. They were asking $695,000, we offered $650,000 as it had been on the market for a few months. The realtor was not hopeful and accused Brakes of “low-balling,” (which Brakes took as a compliment).

That night neither of us slept a wink. We both felt like we had signed our lives away. Brakes jostled me at about 4:30 am, needing to burn off some steam. My man is a deep sleeper, people. Normally, I could not pay him for action that early in the morning but he was super tense and we had houseguests so he couldn’t get up and work out. (Am I insulted that, in that instance, I was the equivalent to an elliptical machine? No, not really. I got mine. Anyways.)

When we received the owner’s counter offer later that afternoon we both blew a big sigh of relief; they countered at $693,500. Obviously there would be no meeting in the middle. We weren’t even disappointed. We both felt we had dodged another bullet. We agreed to not even glance at the housing market for at least 3 months. We needed to take a break, and quit letting this monster steal our time and monopolize our thoughts. The first weekend house hunting free was a little strange. We didn’t have a great deal to say to each other, but Brakes took me to Chucky Cheese to play ski-ball and drink watered-down beer (admittedly, he felt a little creepy going there without the cover of kids), and by Sunday morning we awoke refreshed and excited to go back to just being us without this giant elephant in our bed between our feet, next to the Monk and the Ru. Our bed is only a queen after all. Two adults, (though, I am very thin) two 50-pound dogs, and a giant elephant; it was a tight squeeze. And we did not even glance at the MLS for 3 months...

-----Update: I was recently chatting with a colleague who grew up on Berida. We determined that our house was sandwiched between her mother’s house and her uncle’s house so she has first-hand knowledge of the home. Apparently it was a genuine crack house the whole time she lived there, and when the crack heads finally OD’d it was bought by investors and flipped. The flippers did a shoddy job and it had a serious mold problem, which the investors handled by merely painting over. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, right? Unless it is crack-chemicals and black mold taking up residence in your pores and lungs as you sleep at night! Yikes! Looks like we OFFICIALLY dodged another bullet here... do you see a theme developing?

The Thrill of the Hunt!

Thank you for all of the congratulations on Monday!  We are really excited!  Since I have a feeling I will be blogging a lot about all of this house stuff in the next 10 years few months.  I thought it might be fun to escort you on a trip down memory lane and share with you how we arrived at this destination. 

I alluded to the fact that we had been house hunting for an obnoxious amount of time, 4. 5 years to be exact. For the last 4 years we have spent at least 2 weekends every month, perusing open houses, annoying real estate agents, and getting our credit checked just for fun. I have spent more minutes on zillow and zip then I am proud to admit and I have discovered a hidden talent for making power-point models of floor plans complete with before and afters and our furniture penciled in.

NICE, I know.

Join me as we visit some old favorites from the house-hunting front. These are some of the houses we have seriously, and sometimes, stupidly considered over the years.

Rockhaven:

When we first moved to the bay area we had, oh all of $30,000 we had painstakingly saved when Brakes was in graduate school simply burning a hole in our pockets. We naively thought we would be able to “walk onto,” the Northern California housing market much like Kobe did the LA Lakers, strait out of high grad school. Being the Gas, I took my job seriously and was constantly scanning the MLS, making lists of potential properties I thought we could afford. I set our cap at around $800,000. Ha! We can’t afford $800,000 now and I am no longer an hourly employee and Brakes has earned 2 promotions since then. (This is why Brakes handles our finances.) It is strange though, how the more money we made and the more prices fell, the less we feel we can afford. I guess that is what they call growing up. Sigh.

Anyways, once Brakes brought me back to earth, I started targeting areas we could actually afford and I happened upon a quaint and adorable “village” full of charming Cape-cods. We called it an “emerging,” neighborhood that was “well on its way to gentrification.” There was a house on a darling-ly named street, Rockhaven, which had the most amazing ocean views! We toured this house twice, loving the tiny floor plan, and the large albeit steep lot. At $715,000, it was a little more than Brakes felt comfortable paying so we kept our eyes on it, waiting for its price to fall. It finally sold for $695,000 after 3 months on the market. Brakes was encouraged, he was sure prices were falling. I was heart-broken; sure we had lost our only chance at home-ownership in the bay area.

Three years later, I got lost on my way to a student’s house and ended up in the same “adorable” cape-cod neighborhood. This time my savvy eyes spotted the cars up on blocks in the front-yard and the couches on porches. And I certainly could not miss the freshly chalked outline on the street and the caution tape surrounding a house, where an apparent drive-by had taken place earlier in the week. I realized the neighborhood was still “emerging,” and at a very, very slow pace. As I drove away I reflected on what a silly girl I had been shedding tears over that house a few years ago; I felt like we had dodged a bullet... And, as it turns out, we may actually have.