Philibuster

I had a house warming party on saturday. Not as good a turn out as I had hoped for. At least some of the people that said they were coming called and cancelled. Others not so much. Which bugs me. If I cancel out of plans I at least let them know that I won’t be there. I mean it’s not like they aren’t going to find out anyways when you don’t show up. The much milder second version of my strawberry salsa seemed to be well recieved. With the rather poor turn out I decided not to cook up the brats that I was going to. Wasn’t worth the effort and later on I had a bad case of the drunk. I didn’t open the chamepange which I was going to but I did pop open the grey goose and make a couple screwdrivers. That turned out to be a bad idea.

The next time I have people over I’m going to do a taste party. I’m sure most of you haven’t heard of miracle fruit. Well it’s awesome.

You pop a berry and make sure to get it all over your tongue. It then alters your taste buds so that for the next 30 mins anything sour suddenly becomes sweet. Lemon juice? Not anymore, now it’s lemon awesome, like liquid candy. Beer? Yup it affects that too.

I’m going to buy some of these things and then my friends and I are going to trip out by eating various sour stuff and see how it is. For that party I won’t need a very big turn out I’m only going to invite a few people but I’m going to make sure that they all can show up.

YAY! I have the internet back.

So I went out to dinner with my parents to celebrate and then I swung by my house to take some pictures and drop off the first round of supplies. They are after the jump because they’re going to screw up the layout.   (more…)

So unless something majorly stupid happens I will be closing on a townhouse on Tuesday. Hurray I’ve been slightly homeless for too long now. I had to quickly move out back in august and I’ve been staying in the guest room at my parents house ever since. It wasn’t supposed to take this long. It’s not like I’ve been siting around doing nothing about finding a place. In fact I found a place relatively  quickly the first time and was supposed to close on it before I left for South Africa in November. That fell through through no fault of my own. Then I put an offer in on a great house but I lost out to someone else.

The latest house is a townhouse in Virginia beach. I had been looking at houses in Portsmouth but in the end I decided that it would be better for me to choose a place that doesn’t need any fixing up and is closer to my friends. I’m also not one for yard work.

While I don’t exactly want a townhouse the place looks pretty good and it’s cheap and the I’m tired of fighting for a place and dealing with crappy selling agents. This selling agent is on top of things and everything has flown along smoothly.

I’ve taken off about a week in the beginning of April so I can paint the place, remove some wall paper, and make a few modifications to my room. Plus the whole moving stuff in and so forth. I’ll have a bunch of pictures of course and soon as I do I’ll put them up.

So Yay! I can file my taxes this year and expect to get a cool 8 grand back. Even though I didn’t buy a house last year because I’m buying one this year I can still claim it on my tax and get the credit. I don’t have to pay it back if I stay in the house for three years. Great. Now I just need a house. I’m still working on that. In fact I have an offer in on a place right now but who knows it might not go through. There are two offers on the house right now and it looks like my offer is the lower one. I’m not getting excited but I would really like to have that house. Never easy.

Well I offically withdrew my offer for that house I was looking for. They don’t have the stuff needed to legally sell the house and the last straw was when the selling agent offered to forge the documents to get the sale done. No thanks I would like to legally own my house thank you. Well now it’s back to looking. I went around today and saw a few houses. There was one that is excellent it’s small but very very nice. Of course the nieghborhood. Eh, yeah, well about that, not so good. I might still go for it but pulling up the crime maps for that area makes me nervous. I’ll have to think about it.

I went in to work late today so I could view a couple houses. I was only really serious about one of the houses because I already knew I wouldn’t like the other. They were both around 135,000. The one I like is in a decent neighborhood in Portsmouth. It has a garage, a paved driveway, and is big enough inside. There doesn’t look like any major problems but I’m not a home inspector. There are hard wood floors through out the house but some after though carpet put down in the bedrooms. There’s no padding under the carpet and it doesn’t look like it’s tacked down properly. There are three bedrooms of decent size. The kitchen is a little small compared to the house I want on Arcadia. I can’t really expect to find a house in my budget with a kitchen as big as Arcadia though, that house is a steal.

I would need to paint the house and do some minor repairs/neaten-upers around the house to make it look nice. There was some work to do on Arcadia so this is nothing different really. Over all it looks older than Arcadia even though it’s not. It’s a good choice really and I’ll probably end up putting an offer on it unless something can be worked out with Arcadia. The clock is really counting down on that one. It forecloses in one week and I have less than that to work it out. There is a slim possibility that I could pick it up as a foreclosure. We will be discussing that more in the coming days.

The second house I took a look at is not in the best of neighborhoods but it’s huge and priced very cheaply. So I decided to take a look anyways. Well, the previous people decided to trash the place before they left. Giant holes in the walls. Just about all the doors trashed. Door frames knocked off the wall. Stuff written on the walls. All the carpet in the first floor just gone. The carpet in the second floor looks like someone tried to set it on fire. A shame really because the house really was quite nice. New too built in 2005. Still I don’t think I would have gone for it even if it had been in good condition just on account of the location.

Well there is no more new news about the house I want. It is now getting on to about 3 months since I was all set to buy it and I am still waiting on stuff the seller should have had before the house went to market. It is for lack of a better description, bull shit. Seriously I was ready to close on the deal back in November. It is now January and we are sitting around waiting for some paperwork that is “in the mail.” The house was supposed to foreclose back in December, we managed to get an extension on that, but now the new deal line is coming up. If the paper work doesn’t get in by the 19th then to foreclosure it goes. And as much as I love that house I don’t think I will pursue another extension.  Which will mean that the house forecloses and the sellers loose out. I feel bad that they will have to go through a foreclosure but really my stance on that is tough cookies. It didn’t matter who had put an offer in on the house they would still be in the same boat as they are now because they didn’t have the right paper work. It’s not my fault that the deal has been held up. It’s still a shame though because I really liked that house.

I’m pretty sure that the deal will blow over so I’m already looking for another house. I’m going to see one tomorrow and next week I’ll either be looking at others or working on the one I’m seeing tomorrow.

I did the house inspection yesterday before work. It went pretty smoothly. The guy that did it, John Douglass from The BrickKicker, was very good. Admittedly, I’m not an expect on home inspections but he did go through everything and took his time. The package he put together for me was far more than what my parents got when they bought their house.

The house was built in 1941 so I wasn’t expecting a clean bill but I also wasn’t expecting anything major. The house looked in very good condition. Of course there was quite a bit of hope in that statement as I hadn’t done any crawling around under the house. Never know what you’re going to find down there. Luckily I was right and there were only small stuff. Some of it stupid simple stuff like a couple outlets having reversed polarity or no ground. Some of it will be a problem if I don’t do anything about it. Like open up the crawlspace vents, which currently are blocked by some sheeting. Without the cross ventilation there will be problems. There are a couple missing sections of trim at the top which isn’t a major issue, it’s easy to fix as it’s that aluminum sheet covering. Buying about 5 feet of it will do all the missing parts. There are rats which need to be taken care of as well as putting up some screens to keep them out of the dryer vent and the like. The inspection recommends that a gutter system be installed. The roof is in decent shape, even though there are a couple shingles missing in one spot.

The big thing is that the air con was stripped of its’ copper a while back. I’m going to see if I can get that taken care of but I don’t know how likely it will be. It’s a short sale and the owner seems to have run out of money. We’ll see what I can get.

But I am very happy that there aren’t any time bombs waiting to go off on me. I’m nearing the end and soon I shall have my own house.

Well remember how I said that I had a house under contract? After putting an offer on it like a month ago? Well, we were suppose to do the home inspection today but the selling agent forgot to tell the owner to turn the power on so we can test the electric stuff. So it is postponed. Now it might be postponed for good because after doing a little more looking into it my agent thinks that they may not even be able to legally SELL the house. The lady’s husband is overseas and she may not have power of attorney. That means we have to wait for her husband to come back. If that’s the case then we are probably just going to pull my offer. This pisses me off to a rather great extent. My agent is raising hell and hopefully they will be able to come up with some documentation that shows the deal can go through. I’m keeping my fingers crossed but unfortunately it looks pretty grim.