Walkthrough

For those who haven't been inside yet, it sbows what the ground floor looks like. The basement doesn't look like much, but it is huge. I'll probably upload a clip of that once it's fully finished and furnished (to my liking), but that would be a while yet. Below, I've included (rough) current and potential floorplans for this house. I found out that one of the walls I was planning to knock down was load-bearing, so I had to rearrange some things, but the basic, non-shotgun idea is still executed, I think.

This is how it looks now. As you can see, I have two entrances for what is essentially two shotgun houses set beside one another with a bathroom between.

Again, a basic rendering of what the basement looks like. The basement is unfinished, for the most part, the empty lower right-hand third still has a dirt floor. At first, I planned for every single room to have a closeable door of some kind, even the living room. Then I realized that the living room didn't really need to have a door, and that would just stunt the openness of the space anyhow. So, I left it open and allowed it to feed into a hallway. This way, when visitors arrive, they have access to the public areas of the house as needed, but not the private areas. Now, I suppose a nosier being could sneak through the laundry room into my bedroom, but I could always lock that door from the other side if I felt the need. I wasn't originally intending on having a dining room, but that would eliminate the need to seal up the door between what used to be "library(?)" and the kitchen, though I still seal the door between the guest bedroom and the dining-library. Call me lazy for adding a master bath mere feet from the public bath, but it's my house and I'll be lazy if I please, thank you very much! ^_^!! I left the double deck doors because (1) they really don't look bad like that and (2) it would probably help in an emergency to have more than one route out of the back of the house. I would also hope that sealing the old western door between the kitchen and the bathroom would give me more space in both areas.

The entertainment room is going to probably have a large projector screen instead of a television, a pool or foosball table, comfortable armchairs, a refrigerator, video game systems, and so on. You get the idea. The storage area will be for, well, storing various items like the lawn mower and garden hoses and whatnot. The study/guest bedroom is large enough to have a decent sized bed and a desk. When no one is staying with me, I can set up my painting supplies there (or on the "deck" I guess), writing utensils, instruments for practice, and so on.

If you see any problems with the logistics of these plans, please let me know as soon as possible. Thanks.

The Thickness of a Thief

Why, why, why was my car broken into on Sunday night? This is the second time since March. Each time the thief attempts to steal my car, to no avail. They've harmed my ignition each time, but were never able to 'seal the deal'. Last time they took my laptop (a beautiful Toshiba Satellite A300 series *sigh*), which I can understand. This time they took $5 in quarters, dimes, and nickels that I kept in my arm rest to feed meters. I've never been a thief, but even I would not call that 'worth it'.

What was so interesting about this time, is that they ripped everything related to my radio console out of my dash board (faceplate, radio, cigarette lighter, etc.) but left every single piece sitting in my front passenger seat. So, essentially, all I have to do is put everything back together, and my car will be as good as new. So, again, what was the point?

NOTE: The thief completely shattered my passenger side window in order to 'accomplish' the above-noted feats, but my dad found me a new window, and even installed it for me. He saved me at least two-hours of wait time, and $75 in labor and fees. That's some kind of dad, I tell ya what!!

Mi Casa

I first began the bulk of the home-buying process on July 5th. I contacted a real esate agent that my loan officer referred me to. We'll call him Dork (you'll see why). Well, I began email correspondence with Dork the Sunday before we were to meet to drive around and view properties. My very first email to him is shown. As you can see, I gave Dork a general price range, some desired characteristics, and had even done some research for him, so he had a list of prospects already.

By Monday I had narrowed the options I noted earlier down to two: Ormsby and Gwendolyn. Terrica and I arrived at the Ormsby property, Dork showed up a few minutes later, and my father came a few minutes after that. We toured the house, and Dork told us it would not pass an FHA (the type of loan I have) inspection. Fine. We move on to the Gwendolyn estate. Pretty much the same story, simply a much larger house. Fine.

At this point, I'm thinking I will need to do some more research, maybe something farther from school, or with a higher price tag than I had originally hoped for. But here comes Dork, swooping in for the 'rescue'. It just so happens that he has a house on Greenwood that he wants to show me. So, he, my father, Terrica, and I drive west until we are AT BEST a mile from the banks of the Ohio. He shows me a house that has a huge gravel driveway (when I say huge, I mean I've seen houses smaller than that driveway) and a huge back yard (again, I've seen smaller homes). The house itself was not bad. Especially compared to the two monstrosities we had viewed earlier. The floors were painted wood, the attic was nice and roomy, and the placement of all the windows made the place really light up when the sun was out.

So, I'm thinking I'm gonna be stuck out here in Lala Land with a house with a yard that I would have to cut in shifts. I know my requests didn't seem like much, but location was at least 50% of my reason for moving; I wanted to be closer to school. About 25% of my consideration was price; I wanted to stay somewhere near my $25,000 'budget', though I'd actually been approved for much more than that. The other 25% of the influential factors would have had to do with things like appliances, color, neighborhood, size, etc. By being so far away from school (literally about as far away as I could get before I'd have to pay out-of-state tuition), Dork's chances of me buying his house had already dropped to 50%. On top of this, he wouldn't even give me a break on the price. I had Terrica's father, Papa Dos, (one of many on my crack team of real estate experts) to look at the house. He said, with the distance from school added to a bunch of problems he found with the house, I'd be crazy to pay more than $15,000 for the house. He also tells me to go to the records department downtown and find out how much Dork had actually paid for the house. I tell Dork this, he says there's no way he could sell the house for that little. Papa Dos guessed Dork had paid between 8 and 10 thousand for the house which would have meant that, at Papa Dos' suggested sale price, he would make at least $5,000 from the deal--not bad. But it turned out that Dork had actually paid only $6,800 for the house. He was trying to force a $25,000 price tag down my throat, which was probably only because I made the mistake of telling him that's what I was willing to pay. So he was trying to swindle me out of an extra $10,000 (at least) for no real reason.

But, again, I felt like this was pretty much my last resort. On Wednesday, I agreed to wait for his call Friday (7/10/09) morning in order to begin to write up a contract. At this point I was hoping to be able to bring him down to somewhere near fifteen grand.

Fortunately, a mix of (1) a fervant speech from Papa Dos about walking away from this deal, (2) a nagging feeling that I was being had, and (3) a conversation with Dork in which he tried to convince me that I could afford way more than $25,000, came together to prompt me to find something else--fast.

From 7:00 a.m. Thursday morning until I went to work at 6:00 p.m. Thursday evening I was phone/web-hustling to find a house that was closer to what I wanted and still in my price range. I guess I really have to thank Dork for putting the idea in my head to repeat my home search with a $30,000 limit instead of a $25,000 limit, and my real estate expert support group for letting me know that NOBODY EVER pays list price for a house, meaning I could get a few thousand dollars shaved off of the $30,000 price tag. In nine hours (4:00 p.m.) I had talked to about 7 different real estate agents about at least 8 different properties, and viewed as many details about properties as I could on two different Louisville real estate web sites. Talk about exhausting! (Mind you , this is the kind of work Dork should have been doing for me).

Finally, I ended up calling a guy who sent me a list of about five houses that were all near thirty thousand and every single one of them was within walking distance of U of L. What had Dork been doing all this time? He was supposed to be representing me as an agent, and I had done more in nine hours than he had done in seven days! But I digress...

The point is, I found the house. 1.2 miles from U of L; 3(+) bedrooms; fridge and stove included; just across the street from U of L's new development [The Bellamy] meaning my property value is going nowhere but up; a basement that is as big as the entire house; and a yard that's big enough to grill in, but small enough to cut without needing a cup of coffee: this is my new home.

At this point I had been emailing my loan officer back and forth about what had been going on with me and Dork, and about how he was completely adamant that he could not take a penny less than $25,000 for his house in No-Man's Land because he had put "so much" work into it. Then I got this email from her--

--stating that he had indeed dropped the price, even though he had told me that he had an investor friend who wanted to essentially write him a check on the spot for the house. Now, if I had to choose between $25,000 in my hand right now, and $25,000 maybe sometime in the future, I wouldn't waste my time dealing with somebody who didn't seem to be interested in my house. So, he's either silly or a liar. Moving on...

When the list agent for this house (we'll call her Angel) and I met at the Starbuck's in the Seelbach the next day (Friday, July 10th), we were having trouble getting my loan officer on the phone (she may have been at lunch), so she just took that hour-and-a-half to explain every detail of the contract I was about to sign. She answered all of my questions, made sure I understood all of my options, and never once made me feel pressured, scared, confused, or rushed.

In the middle of Angel and I's meeting, Dork called me. I had been dreading this call, because my uncle, who used to have a real estate license, told me that I needed to drop Dork completely, not to say that he had done a whole lot for me. I'm just not the dumping/firing type. I'm a dumpee/firee, at heart, but I must say I handled it much better than I thought I would. After formalities, he asked me what I was doing. This was at 1:30 p.m., he said he would call be that morning--I just wanted to point that out. Anywho, my loan officer called Angel's phone a few seconds later, so we're both occupied by people on our phones at this point.

I tell Dork that I'd heard about his price drop, but that I really wanted the house that was closer to school, and I'm sitting at a table with Angel and we're getting the paperwork all signed for me to make an offer on the house that I (really, really, really) want (really, really bad!). Complete silence for about 30 seconds. I didn't know if he'd passed out, had a heart attack, was mouthing profanity at me, or what. I gave him all that time to compose himself before I finally said "Dork?", ya know, to make sure he was still breathing and all. He then tells me (no questions, requests, suggestions, mind you) to tell Angel that I'm already being represented by him. Fortunately, I had moments before signed a 'dual-agent' agreement, stating that Angel would be an agent for me and for the seller of the house. I told Dork this. He tried to make me 'understand' that if he wasn't involved with this transaction he wouldn't get paid. I didn't know "get Dork money" was in my job description or on my birth certificate anywhere, but he seemed to think it was. He gave me the whole spiel about how he wouldn't get half the commission, she didn't have my best interests at heart because she was a dual agent, and that he had helped me and shown me houses thusfar. Considering most home buyers see about 15 homes before they make a decision, Dork really only showed me one house that he found on his own, meaning he only did about 7% of what he was supposed to do . And he really didn't do any research and 'find' that one: he already owned it. So, I found the house, Angel showed me the house, Angel was selling me the house, Angel was representing me during the transaction, yet Dork wanted 50% of the commission. Now, I'm no math guru, but that just doesn't add up.

I just replied with a flat "Okay." to all his little comments, let him finish, and told him I had already signed the papers, that I was going to go ahead and go with the flow on this, that his house was still an option for me. I told him we'd see what happens, and I'd call him if I needed him again. I thanked him for the help he had given me so far. I said good-bye, he said good-bye. Done deal.

Angel and I finished up. About an hour later she called to let me know that, for a house that was worth every cent of over $32,000, I had offered $24,000 (totally willing to pay more than the $30,500 they were asking for) and the seller had countered with a $28,000 request. I took it.

Angel went so far as to meet me during my Advanced Social Work Practice class that night and let me sign the papers. So, at 6:55 p.m. on July 10th, 2009, I officially purchased my first home.

Whew!

I got an awful lot done in seven days. Thursday was the real killer, but it was worth every lost minute of sleep, every missed meal. I can now call myself a home-owner. YAY!!