O RLY?!

We experienced our first home inspection this past Saturday.  The house we are looking at purchasing is an older home, built in 1906.  Considering that construction methods in the 1900’s were much different than today, I asked for an inspector that was familiar with older homes and had experience with houses from that time period.  They sent me Bob Vila.  I swear, I felt like I was on This Old House.  He turned a two hour inspection into five and half hours.  He told me the entire history of the house, including every remodel and update that was done throughout 100 years.  He offered ideas about rehabing options for just about every room, informed me about what items were original, and gave plenty of ideas on how to turn the attic into a loft.

Overall, the structure of the house was solid, and he found no major problems.  The kitchen and bathroom had been remodeled in 2001, so that eliminates the two most expensive rooms from our decorating/remodeling plans.

We did discover that the A/C was disconnected and completely inoperable.  Why would you list a house as having central A/C and not even have the unit hooked up?  Naturally, I unloaded on the sellers and asked them to replace the A/C and have it hooked up properly.

Here’s some pictures I yanked from the realtor’s website, not the greatest, but it will give you an idea.

Merry Christmas

Abbey and I have been looking at houses on the internet for quite sometime now. The plan has been to move out of this apartment when the lease is up in April. I finally took the first step and got approved for a mortgage, so now we are planning on visiting some houses with an agent.

We ended up settling on Bexley as the neighborhood of choice. The very first place we started looking was Grandview. We both liked the urban setting and the houses are unique and each has its own character. Many local shops and restaurants are within walking distance and the school system is very good. Even though it will be a long while before we have someone in school, I’ve come the realization that good schools usually equals low crime and respectable residents. This turned out to be slightly out of our price range. We then briefly considered Westerville and Worthington. Not wanting to live too far east ruled out Westerville, and Worthington was a little too pricey as well.

Next on the list was Hilliard. Most of the houses in our price range were in subdivisions of mass produced houses built in the late 80s/early 90s. Every third house looks the same and they all have small yards with no trees. I could not get over how trashy a lot of these subdivisions were. A lot of houses had 4+ cars in the driveway…half of them broken down, garbage in the yards, horrible looking grass and landscaping, etc. Its as if they transplanted the ghetto into suburbia. Any neighborhoods that were even remotely friendly looking were way out of our price range.

That brought us to Bexley. Similar style houses and neighborhoods to Grandview, very good schools and infrastructure (which carries high taxes with it), and many houses within our price range. Don’t get me wrong, Bexley has its share of half a million dollar homes, but also many in the 100k-200k range sprinkled throughout.

Some things we are looking for in a home:

• 2 car garage (preferably detached)
• At least 1.5 bathrooms
• At least 3 bedrooms
• Some sort of a basement (finished or not)
• Fenced yard (to hold the monster)
• Good sized kitchen with updated appliances

I’ll post again when we come close to making a decision.

I don’t normally shop at the malls.  In fact, I would go so far as to say I hate the malls.  They’re full of over-priced pretentious stores that are severely overstaffed with sales people.  Anything you can find in a mall can be purchased on the internet, the only drawback is that you cannot try any clothes for fitting purposes.  Since I buy new clothes about every two years, that doesn’t really affect me all that much.
Of course, all this is amplified around the holidays, and I always end up with some reason to go the mall for a Christmas gift or two.

Today I found myself visiting the mall to buy a gift for my brother.

Observation 1:  The parking lot in the front is packed, some people are parked practically a quarter of a mile away from the main entrance.  Drive around the back of the mall?  Wide open parking lot.  I parked 3 spots from the rear entrance.  Come on people, you don’t always have to go in the front door.

Observation 2:  There are no longer just aggressive sales people in the stores, there are people offering credit cards, free gifts if you purchase $98070896 worth of merchandise, discount cards for that store, etc.  Can I go into a store and look around without being accosted by 4 different people?

From here on out, if I have to go to a mall store, I’m wearing a sign that says “No I don’t need help.  If I do, I’ll come find you“  (god knows there are 89769876 of them wandering around anyway).

/rant off