virginia and jon . com

Everything is going well and according to plan. The sellers have offered to let us close a few days earlier since everything is going well. We spent most of the day packing and cleaning. The current plan is to spend this week getting everything packed up, and then we have a full week to get everything moved to the new house and clean the apartment. It’s certainly going to be a busy and stressful week.

Jon & Virginia

I never knew how much work goes into buying a house.  Jon and I have been looking for about 5 months(right after we got married).  We looked at about 50 houses , and definetely saw some hideous ones.  When we finally decided on one is when all the REAL craziness started.

You have to get the other party to agree in a timely manner to your price and conditions(carpets cleaned, septic pumped etc. . . ), then you have to get an inspection.  The inspection consists of paying a man to let you watch while he goes through EVERY system of the house.  Including being on the roof, in the attic and down i n the icky crawl space.  If your doing this in the winter, make sure you wear a coat, I did not and froze my butt off.

After the inspection you have to figure out which things that were broken are livable for you, and which things you want the seller to pay to fix.  Which then takes time and stress(hoping that they will fix it so it is like a new house).  Once you settle all that there is still the mortgage , escrow, enerest money, and TONS of paperwork to sign and find(as in old W-2’s, paystubs, bank statements etc. . . ).

Thats about where we are.  We will be getting our keys on March 31st, which seems so soon.  We have so much to do outside the regular house buying stuff.  Organizing the apartment, and figuring out how the heck we plan on moving all of our stuff down the 3 flight of stairs we had to haul it up when we moved in 1 1/2 years ago.  So if your local. . . . HELP?!?

We will TRY(notice the emphasize on try) to keep you updated

Virginia

We are on our way to buying our first home. The deal is still in process, but we have an agreement with the seller and we are working on the details.

Pictures here.

It is amazing to me how far mapping technology has come. But, be careful not to put all of your trust in online mapping services, they will undoubtedly let you down at some point. For instance this weekend in Portland, OR I ended up driving the wrong way up a street reserved for the metro train system. Fortunately we quickly realized it, the train headlight about 3 blocks away provided a good clue. I am sure that one day they will be able to use a GPS system and a highly detailed mapping system to let cars navigate themselves… But let’s face it, we aren’t there yet. Imagine what would happen if your car tried to follow Google’s directions to merge onto I-95 while driving to the Newark airport.

Exit left into the sign pole...

We have our table cameras back and just got them developed. There was a little problem with a couple of the rolls had bad film so the pictures came out grainy on those. And one or two of the cameras may have had a light leak and got these really weird red shadows on the prints. Overall we were really happen with them and all of our pictures. We have so many!

Check our your pictures here.

Is the time that you spend waiting in line the same thing as paying a poll tax? Could you afford to wait up to 10 hours to have to vote? The real question, can you afford not to? Make you’re vote count.