Category: House stuff

Posted some pictures of the house in various stages of construction. The drywall is up now so the house innards are starting to look more like house innards.A little bit of paint, some floors and a few lights and it’ll be ready to move in!

Today we head over to the tile place and pick out some tile for the kitchen and bathrooms.

Met with the selling agent today to go over our choices for the house innards. Chose stuff like wall colours, cabinets, flooring, tile and carpets. It all went reasonably well, although a few things we want will depend on the cost. If it comes in over our budget, then we’ll have to eliminate some of the upgrades we asked for and go with the standard choices. We have things prioritized though, and nothing will be really hard to give up. Besides, we can always go back in a year or two and have things re-done the way we wanted.

After that it was a stop at the house to measure out a few areas. Drywall’s been put up so finishing shouldn’t be too much farther away.

A trip to Sears netted us a swanky new refrigerator and washer/dryer thanks to the wife’s parents. All within budget (barely) too.

Next thing on the list to deal with are some forms that need to be filled out by the Payroll folks, setting up an appointment with the appraiser guy, going to the tile place and the lighting place and getting some insurance quotes.

Somewhere in all that I need to do taxes too…

Applying for a mortgage loan involves a lot of rummaging and running around, as I’m sure anyone who’s been through the process knows very well.

We opted to do our mortgage through E-Loan. So far the people I’ve been speaking to have been very friendly, helpful and provide most everything that needs signing electronically. And there are forms up the wazoo. Of course the signing thing still needs to be done on the dead-tree version, which means faxing it back to them. We’re in the processing and approval stage now, so there’s been a lot of paperwork that needs to be printed and signed. Hopefully everything goes through smoothly.

Along with the condofication of the apartments, there’s a lot of other stuff going on. A number balconies are being completely rebuilt, new landscaping, people driving around slow gawkingchecking out the place and installation of a gate. That’s right, it’s going to be a gated condominium community.

So now I have visions of us driving in late one night and suddenly finding the gate closed and locked and having no way of getting in. Whatever code we need to punch in to get in is tacked to our door (our usual way of getting messages from the apartment people) but of course we don’t know that because we haven’t been home yet.

That would probably suck.

After a weekend of doing a lot of driving around checking out places with our realtor, we found a place that we decided to put an offer on. We saw a lot of places that we were interested in, but most of them already had contracts written on them already so they were out.

The one we decided to put an offer on isn’t too far away from where we are now. Our realtor wasn’t able to get in touch with anyone from the selling agency over the weekend so we won’t find out until this morning if it’s still on the market or not. It’s a pretty big place at the end of a cul-de-sac. It’ll take us pretty much to the edge of what we can afford, so it’ll be tight for the next couple of years until our credit cards get paid down. But after that it should be smooth sailing barring any unforseen financial calamities.

Financing has been secured. Next step is to have the contract reviewd by a real-estate lawyer, then drop it off with our realtor and ‘earnest money’ check and hope someone hasn’t already beaten us to the punch.

Update: Gave the signed contract to our realtor and went over to the selling agency with her to check out our various options for things like flooring and cabinetry. Haven’t chosen anything yet, that will be Saturday. The selling agent didn’t seem to think there would be an issue with the builder signing the contract, so I think we just bought a house!