I revisited both houses dissected in my last post. If my house hunt continues, I will now require myself to visit every house twice before I make an offer, because the second look was very illuminating!
On second visit WOW was the small house small beyond reason. There is no way I could live there long-term, and in fact I probably would have had a panic attack after unloading my possessions into it. The living room could hold my dining room table OR my small couch, and it would have been hard to have guests stay longer than a night or two. That's just now how I see myself living.
On the other hand, the bigger/newer house continued to impress me. I had a friend along who talked about these new-construction homes with a contractor friend of his, and was assured they're built solidly because of all the codes. It's true this house was finished with mid-grade stuff like cheaper doors and lighting fixtures, but those aren't fatal flaws. The light inside is nice, it feels really spacious, it's got nice views of trees, and I think it would be plenty of house for me without being overwhelming. Of course I can't furnish it fully but that's okay - no rush on that front. And major bonus - the small front and back yards. I have been clear from the start I don't want to have a lot of yard to deal with. But the yards are still big enough to each have a few raised beds, and I think I'll get a friend to design a pretty fence/seating area for the front to make it more welcoming to the neighborhood.
Another bonus is I already know people in the neighborhood - it's 2 blocks from where I'm staying now, and is around the corner from my real estate agents, who I really like. They're talking about throwing a party so I can meet the other neighbors they know. Exciting!
In short, if it's not obvious, I'm putting in an offer on the bigger/newer house. I probably won't know til tomorrow since it's a bank holiday today; if the seller insists on seeing my pre-approval before accepting the offer, that will have to wait. So, we'll see.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Friday, November 9, 2012
Speaking of price/location
Today I saw five houses.
1) was nice and in a good location, but it's a big higher than I really want to pay, and we both think it'll go for even more than list. So I'm not going to invest any energy in it.
2) was surprisingly nice for the boxy boring house it looks like from the front, but it's not really in an interesting location, nor is it near friends, and then we realized it's near a not-so-nice housing complex (probably as bad as it gets in Portland, i.e. not so very bad) and my agent said we should forget it. I wasn't sold on it anyway so that was helpful.
3) a poorly laid-out newish construction home with just really weird layout and features... like a garage behind the house that you access from an alley, and there's a door to exit the garage by the sliding glass door of the house..which you can't unlock from the outside. So it would be useless as a come-home-with-the-groceries thing.
I did however see two houses that have me interested. They are about as different from each other as it is possible to be. Both are under my mental price cap.
House 1 is newish-construction, only three years old. I have a possibly irrational dislike of these houses, and my agent said she did too, but being inside is an eye-opening experience. It was built with quality ingredients like real hardwood, decent tile, granite in the kitchen, etc. It's got a small but nice backyard. The living room has a gas fireplace in it, and the main floor has a nice flow of kitchen/dining area/living area, and a half-bath. Upstairs are three bedrooms and 2 more bathrooms. In short it is way more house than I need.
Good things about it: it's walking distance to 3 friends' houses, it's walking distance to light rail, and it's got a nice garage (good for my car and bike; I don't really care that much about it otherwise). It's nicely set up for me to have guests visit. It has really good light inside it.
Downsides: you can hear the highway from it. It's not that pretty and it won't appreciate as fast as other houses do. Its taxes are a bit on the high side compared to other (older) houses. It's not near much in terms of a cute neighborhood/restaurants, but it's a half-mile from a grocery store, and has easy highway access.
House 2 - I mean come on - just looking at it, it's SO much cuter! It's also a lot smaller - only 700 sf in the main floor, and another 700 sf in a dry basement, accessed via an outside door. It's also been completely gutted and rebuilt and looks amazing inside. It has a main living area that flows into the kitchen, and two bedrooms that are connected by a bathroom.
Upsides: it's walking distance to a booming/up and coming part of town. It will appreciate much faster. It's cute. Much lower taxes - in all this house will cost $250 less per month than the other.
Downsides: huge yard. on-street parking only. much further-flung so it'll be a bit of a trip to visit friends (a 15-minute drive to the closest ones).
On paper, the bigger one makes sense. In reality I'm leaning toward the smaller one. I'm revisiting both tomorrow.
1) was nice and in a good location, but it's a big higher than I really want to pay, and we both think it'll go for even more than list. So I'm not going to invest any energy in it.
2) was surprisingly nice for the boxy boring house it looks like from the front, but it's not really in an interesting location, nor is it near friends, and then we realized it's near a not-so-nice housing complex (probably as bad as it gets in Portland, i.e. not so very bad) and my agent said we should forget it. I wasn't sold on it anyway so that was helpful.
3) a poorly laid-out newish construction home with just really weird layout and features... like a garage behind the house that you access from an alley, and there's a door to exit the garage by the sliding glass door of the house..which you can't unlock from the outside. So it would be useless as a come-home-with-the-groceries thing.
I did however see two houses that have me interested. They are about as different from each other as it is possible to be. Both are under my mental price cap.
House 1 is newish-construction, only three years old. I have a possibly irrational dislike of these houses, and my agent said she did too, but being inside is an eye-opening experience. It was built with quality ingredients like real hardwood, decent tile, granite in the kitchen, etc. It's got a small but nice backyard. The living room has a gas fireplace in it, and the main floor has a nice flow of kitchen/dining area/living area, and a half-bath. Upstairs are three bedrooms and 2 more bathrooms. In short it is way more house than I need.
Good things about it: it's walking distance to 3 friends' houses, it's walking distance to light rail, and it's got a nice garage (good for my car and bike; I don't really care that much about it otherwise). It's nicely set up for me to have guests visit. It has really good light inside it.
Downsides: you can hear the highway from it. It's not that pretty and it won't appreciate as fast as other houses do. Its taxes are a bit on the high side compared to other (older) houses. It's not near much in terms of a cute neighborhood/restaurants, but it's a half-mile from a grocery store, and has easy highway access.
Upsides: it's walking distance to a booming/up and coming part of town. It will appreciate much faster. It's cute. Much lower taxes - in all this house will cost $250 less per month than the other.
Downsides: huge yard. on-street parking only. much further-flung so it'll be a bit of a trip to visit friends (a 15-minute drive to the closest ones).
On paper, the bigger one makes sense. In reality I'm leaning toward the smaller one. I'm revisiting both tomorrow.
Further adventures in house hunting
I saw a few more houses earlier this week - four or five, I guess. They tend to blur together, mostly because I can tell right away I'm not interested in them, so I don't spend a lot of energy committing them to memory. Also, my memory is crap.
I'm seeing more today. I really like my agent - she knows that my price point is on the very low/competitive end of the market, so she's being creative. She is going to get in touch with real estate investors she knows to see if they're planning to sell any of their rental houses, and she's also talking to a contractor she knows who buys really sad old houses, refurbishes them from the beams out, and does a quality flip job. He's working on a house that is in a good-for-me location (and boy was it SAD when he bought it - I found the listing) but we both think he'll probably sell it out of my price range. But she'll ask and see!
Today we're looking at a house next door to the one I most recently didn't get, and then we'll look at a few houses that are in a much more far-flung part of town.
I have to admit I resent the fact that most of the areas and houses are too expensive for me. It's not anyone's fault, so it's an undirected resentment, but it just doesn't seem FAIR. Ah well, them's the breaks, and I guess I'll try to focus most of my energy on the price/expense/location questions.
I'm seeing more today. I really like my agent - she knows that my price point is on the very low/competitive end of the market, so she's being creative. She is going to get in touch with real estate investors she knows to see if they're planning to sell any of their rental houses, and she's also talking to a contractor she knows who buys really sad old houses, refurbishes them from the beams out, and does a quality flip job. He's working on a house that is in a good-for-me location (and boy was it SAD when he bought it - I found the listing) but we both think he'll probably sell it out of my price range. But she'll ask and see!
Today we're looking at a house next door to the one I most recently didn't get, and then we'll look at a few houses that are in a much more far-flung part of town.
I have to admit I resent the fact that most of the areas and houses are too expensive for me. It's not anyone's fault, so it's an undirected resentment, but it just doesn't seem FAIR. Ah well, them's the breaks, and I guess I'll try to focus most of my energy on the price/expense/location questions.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
House hunting: Strike two!
Someone offered 200k cash for the house. That's 25% over asking and was 28k more than my upper offer. Good gravy, how is a person supposed to compete in that kind of situation? I guess the answer is, they don't. Back to the drawing board.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
House hunting: possibilities
I'm a decisive person and I find being in the deciding stage very uncomfortable. I like to make a decision and move on, thank you, and have no problem revisiting and changing the decision later if necessary. But right now I'm in the middle of a decision that is NOT easy to revisit, and it's painful!
I've put a fair amount of thought into what I want and why I want to buy. I've been saving 27% of my take-home salary (and now that I'm renting a room from a friend, I'm saving 42%) towards the down payment. I have been watching the market and have already made (and lost!) my first attempt to buy.
In the three-plus weeks I've been back I've done lots of driving, biking, and walking around looking at neighborhoods and absorbing being back in Portland.
I even visited the condo group I've beenstalking eying for the past year or so, and got super close to making an offer before realizing they are facing a lot of complex problems AND I can save myself several hundred dollars a month by buying elsewhere. I do have hopes of joining that community, perhaps ten years from now, but maybe I'm kidding myself.
Anyway, Sunday night I came home from the condo association's open meeting just feeling so disappointed and not at all sure I should take the plunge and make an offer. I saw a little house online that was in a great location (not as great as the condos), four miles from downtown Portland, 0.9 miles due east from three of my friends' households, 1.3 miles from one of my favorite breakfast spots, and 2 miles or less from several other really great locations. The price was even lower than the condo I'd been so set on, with a quarter the taxes and no built-in HOAs.
I was a little concerned I was acting in a rebound mode, and wondered if it would be indecorous to buy so soon after spending time with the condo people, but I arranged to see the house midday Monday. As far as I can tell it would cost about what I was paying in rent for all my fixed expenses (mortgage, interest, utilities, taxes, insurance), and I would be able to continue to allocate about a third of my take-home pay toward an emergency fund and home maintenance/projects/mortgage paydown.
The house is small (I actually laughed when I got inside and saw what an amazing job the photographer had done to make it look bigger than it is), but it's big enough for me. It's not perfect but I can see living there for the foreseeable future, and would likely be able to resell or rent it out without a lot of problems. The neighborhood has some really interesting businesses in it and is still being discovered by the city residents.
So to sum up: I'm making an offer today.
I've put a fair amount of thought into what I want and why I want to buy. I've been saving 27% of my take-home salary (and now that I'm renting a room from a friend, I'm saving 42%) towards the down payment. I have been watching the market and have already made (and lost!) my first attempt to buy.
In the three-plus weeks I've been back I've done lots of driving, biking, and walking around looking at neighborhoods and absorbing being back in Portland.
I even visited the condo group I've been
Anyway, Sunday night I came home from the condo association's open meeting just feeling so disappointed and not at all sure I should take the plunge and make an offer. I saw a little house online that was in a great location (not as great as the condos), four miles from downtown Portland, 0.9 miles due east from three of my friends' households, 1.3 miles from one of my favorite breakfast spots, and 2 miles or less from several other really great locations. The price was even lower than the condo I'd been so set on, with a quarter the taxes and no built-in HOAs.
I was a little concerned I was acting in a rebound mode, and wondered if it would be indecorous to buy so soon after spending time with the condo people, but I arranged to see the house midday Monday. As far as I can tell it would cost about what I was paying in rent for all my fixed expenses (mortgage, interest, utilities, taxes, insurance), and I would be able to continue to allocate about a third of my take-home pay toward an emergency fund and home maintenance/projects/mortgage paydown.
The house is small (I actually laughed when I got inside and saw what an amazing job the photographer had done to make it look bigger than it is), but it's big enough for me. It's not perfect but I can see living there for the foreseeable future, and would likely be able to resell or rent it out without a lot of problems. The neighborhood has some really interesting businesses in it and is still being discovered by the city residents.
So to sum up: I'm making an offer today.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Settling in: Free time!
It's already two weeks (and a bit!) since I returned to Portland. I'm working 8-5 and my commute takes no time at all. So what am I doing with my free time? It's a bit haphazard so far, but it's actually been rather busy. Among the highlights:
One weird thing is that shopping is a non-starter. I'm not really cooking much, I don't have any nesting to do so long as I'm renting a room, and I'm avoiding the one shopping trip I really need to do - getting an office chair from IKEA. Maybe tomorrow....
Finally, my roommate turned me on to the existence of a panaderia - a Mexican (or at least Latin American) bakery in my neighborhood. Oh. My. Goodness. They make everything themselves from the puff pastry (hard!) to the pastry cream (not so hard) and it was gooood and inexpensive. So far I've only visited once but the writing is on the wall there.
I have some upcoming social plans to reconnect with more people. We'll see how this all settles down after I've been here a while. So far, so good. Fingers crossed.
- Rejoined my old book group
- Went to a couple wine tastings - at Friday night's I was invited to find out more about some food/wine group, at Saturday's I was invited to drop in on a regular Thursday tasting. I am not convinced either will pan out, but it was nice in any case.
- Went to a couple different yarn shops - I think I've been inside two different shops a total of 5 times in the last couple of weeks...but did NOT purchase every time, thank goodness.
- Had brunch at a friend's.
- Gave blood.
- Went to a movie (and nearly wept with joy to pay 12.50 for the movie, a slice of pizza, a pint of beer AND a tip).
- Went to a pub to see some music (it was a total Portland experience, including the sidewalk chit chat that covered camping, biking, and global warming).
- Helped a friend paint a rental property.
- Helped another friend with some yard work
- Went out for Ethiopian food while watching the debates
- I just joined another book group, coordinated by a former coworker. We will meet for the first time next month. I belonged to two book groups about a decade ago, and frankly it's probably unwise, but I'm doing it in the name of expanding my social circle!
- I'd like to find a good knitters group to join
- I'd also like to find some bluegrass music venues to check out
One weird thing is that shopping is a non-starter. I'm not really cooking much, I don't have any nesting to do so long as I'm renting a room, and I'm avoiding the one shopping trip I really need to do - getting an office chair from IKEA. Maybe tomorrow....
Finally, my roommate turned me on to the existence of a panaderia - a Mexican (or at least Latin American) bakery in my neighborhood. Oh. My. Goodness. They make everything themselves from the puff pastry (hard!) to the pastry cream (not so hard) and it was gooood and inexpensive. So far I've only visited once but the writing is on the wall there.
I have some upcoming social plans to reconnect with more people. We'll see how this all settles down after I've been here a while. So far, so good. Fingers crossed.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Working from home: Food
So I already mentioned I'm not really settled in and am not doing much cooking yet. So what am I eating? I've been pretty healthy, actually, due at least partly to my housemate who is both crazy-frugal and very health-conscious. Dave wastes absolutely nothing - it's daunting, honestly. On the plus side, though, I can easily pawn anything off on him by hinting I might just throw it out!
My first week here I ate yogurt & knock-off brand cheerios for breakfast. Lunch was usually a piece of flat bread, with spinach leaves and eggplant hummus (recommended by my housemate because it's got the best fat-to-protein ratio...). A couple of days I ate cottage cheese and tomatoes, and also got some boxed soup I could nuke by the cup.
Now that it's *much* chillier here in the mornings, I've been microwaving oatmeal: a half cup of rolled (not instant!) oats, one cup of water, a sprinkle of salt - I put that in for one minute, then I add half of a chopped-up apple and put it back in for another minute. Tasty AND warming!
For lunch or dinner I've been doing more boxed soup by the mugful, and I also got a bag of washed & chopped kale. I've been putting a bowlful in the microwave for a minute, then stirring in tahini, soy sauce, hot sauce, and a bit of olive oil - yum!
Yesterday I made some cous cous and started eating through the food that had been in my earthquake kit - yesterday and today I had half a tuna/green curry packet from Trader Joe's, and I still have a couple of packets of spiced chickpeas.
Yes, technically I still live in earthquake country (in fact many scientists expect a truly big one here at some point) but trust me - my housemate's stores would support us a LOT longer than the recommended three days.
So even though I'm not truly cooking, I'm doing fairly well on the nutrition front. I noticed my jeans felt a bit loose but then I remembered I'd been wearing them every day for ... a while. That's the benefit of working from home!
My first week here I ate yogurt & knock-off brand cheerios for breakfast. Lunch was usually a piece of flat bread, with spinach leaves and eggplant hummus (recommended by my housemate because it's got the best fat-to-protein ratio...). A couple of days I ate cottage cheese and tomatoes, and also got some boxed soup I could nuke by the cup.
Now that it's *much* chillier here in the mornings, I've been microwaving oatmeal: a half cup of rolled (not instant!) oats, one cup of water, a sprinkle of salt - I put that in for one minute, then I add half of a chopped-up apple and put it back in for another minute. Tasty AND warming!
For lunch or dinner I've been doing more boxed soup by the mugful, and I also got a bag of washed & chopped kale. I've been putting a bowlful in the microwave for a minute, then stirring in tahini, soy sauce, hot sauce, and a bit of olive oil - yum!
Yesterday I made some cous cous and started eating through the food that had been in my earthquake kit - yesterday and today I had half a tuna/green curry packet from Trader Joe's, and I still have a couple of packets of spiced chickpeas.
Yes, technically I still live in earthquake country (in fact many scientists expect a truly big one here at some point) but trust me - my housemate's stores would support us a LOT longer than the recommended three days.
So even though I'm not truly cooking, I'm doing fairly well on the nutrition front. I noticed my jeans felt a bit loose but then I remembered I'd been wearing them every day for ... a while. That's the benefit of working from home!
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