Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Thu, 13 Apr 2006
A couple of days ago, I stumbled across a house for sale that was (except for the price) disturbingly perfect: it was huge, it had a large two-car garage, minimalist yard, etc. Almost exactly what I'd been looking for. They were asking too much for me, but I could probably stretch to their price if it really was the perfect house.
Here's an unlovely (but fairly accurate) picture of it:
Anyway, it was sufficiently aligned with the points on my little list of "must haves" for my next house that I couldn't reasonably pass it by without at least looking.
For instance: it's 12 blocks north of my current house, and I really dig the neighborhood, except this house is on a much less busy street (yay!); did I mention the enormous garage?; 3000 (yes, three thousand) square feet; many bedrooms (sources varied between 4 and 5); recently remodeled kitchen, and from the pictures it looked like they could have hired me as the consultant; built in 1928... Anyway, the list is actually a lot longer, but those are the highlights.
So, I called up Laura, my friend and sometimes real-estate agent, to see if we could go look at it. Indeed we could, and that evening Kristin, Laura, Laura's 2 year old daughter Alice and I were traipsing around the house.
Fortunately for my pocketbook and my sanity, the place was stinky inside. I don't mean in just an olfactory sense either. The kitchen remodel was actually done pretty cheaply, primarily pointed out by the nasty floating floor that appeared to be installed over carpet(!). Everything had that cheap Value Village feel to it, with inexpensive materials applied as cheaply as possible. As Laura put it, "it's had a coat of Home Depot slapped on." Very true.
The house had been added onto at least twice in its past, once to extend the front, and once to extend the side, toward the north (in that picture above, we're looking at the east face of the house). As a result of this, the layout was really substandard, with weird twists and layouts to "take advantage" of the extra space, without actually making it useable. Each room was a slightly odd shape -- not enough that you'd look at one room and throw up your hands, but the overall effect was throwing-up-hands worthy.
Also, in the stinky department, there were these little scent-pots all over the place. I hope they were just there to cover the new-carpet smell (they must have spent a ton on installing this nice thick beige (ugh) carpet). Whatever they were covering, the comingling of scents was.. uncomfortable.
Speaking of money spent in weird places, the kitchen remodel had included shiny granite countertops (probably around the $4000 mark), but also included this nasty laminate floating floor (a $1500 savings over just doing it for real). Kind of weird where they spent their money, until you realize that it all looks really good in photographs.
I ended up spending some time on zillow.com and redfin.com, two interesting house-valuation sites. Zillow in particular seemed to be really wacky on its pricing, pretty much all over the map. But in the course of that research, I discovered that this house had been sold 3 times in the last two years, twice on one day in 2003, and most recently on December 15 of last year (about 5 months ago). Current owner was Rogue Engerprises LLC or something sketchy.
In talking with the mortgage broker (before I'd seen the house, checking my options), he listened as I described the transactions, and decided it was probably bought as a pre-foreclosure, then sold to one or more wholesalers or renovaters, who were hoping to pass the house off with a coat of paint and some new kitchen bits. Particularly after seeing the house in person, I had to agree.
Anyway, bottom line is that I got really flustered for a couple of days, thinking about what it would take to move myself and all my junk if this ended up being the perfect house. I'm awfully glad it wasn't, 'cause that would have taken a ton of work and time I don't really have right now. But it did make me realize that I have a lot of work ahead of me, getting my own house ready for sale (look for it on the market around this time next year). That's good, I guess.
Posted at 14:01 permanent link category: /misc
I just installed this clever new "blogging" package (and let us never use that term again) called Blosxom, and it's looking pretty cool. The setup is super-simple, and it uses a categorization system I really like (just directories on the disk, no weird databases to maintain or anything, and each entry is just a plain text file).
So, I'm going to try doing journal stuff in here for a bit, since it fits my growing desire to write on different topics without having to deploy a new instance of my homegrown journal software for each new category. I've (imperfectly) imported all the journal entries that were already in the motorcycle and aviation sections, and as you can see above, I added a bunch of new categories, too. (The "imperfect" part is that I haven't fixed any links yet.)
I can't really get behind the whole idea of "talkback" or whatever it is that "real" blogs let users do -- if you want to talk to me about a journal entry, send me email. I get enough spam without providing yet another entry-point for it.
Posted at 01:03 permanent link category: /misc
I'm working on the next Awesome show, called noSIGNAL. I'm the Stage Manager, but so far there hasn't been much to do. I've never worked on a show like this, where half the show is music (and it's not a "musical" in the sense that anyone really understands the word). They don't really want me around for the musical bits (and there's not much I can do, anyway), so even though I was all psyched up to be super busy this month, I'm not.
It'll all get more engaging as we get closer, but it's very odd to have this huge expectation of no free time, and yet find that there's actually lots of time. Now, if only it were easier to predict when I wouldn't have to go to scheduled rehearsals...
Posted at 00:57 permanent link category: /theater
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater