My Beverage Station

When Shaun and I were younger, living in an apartment, we would fantasize about the customizations we would make to our very own house, when we finally bought one. First and foremost on our list was to add a carbonation station in the kitchen, loaded with Coke syrup (for me) and Dr. Pepper syrup (for him.) Was this the best we could come up with? Probably. I think we also added a bowling alley. Hey, no one said we were very creative.

When we were shopping for houses, we saw one in Kent that stuck with me. We made an offer on it but we didn’t get it, this being in the days slightly before the housing market collapse. This house that we saw had nothing on the one we actually bought. It was smaller, it was but one story, it wasn’t near work or family. But this house had a brand new kitchen. Kitchens sell houses, or so the hosts used to say when I worked on Sell This House, and damned if they weren’t right. That kitchen sold that house to us, if only our offer had been accepted.

The house we actually live in is quite nice, except that the bathrooms and kitchen need to be remodeled. I wish this were a post about how we are about to embark upon such expensive and photogenic endeavors, but no. Sadly, this is a post about how I realized, with my recent creation of a “beverage station” in our kitchen eatery, our dream had come true.

A few years back Shaun bought a newfangled SodaStream machine, a heavily-promoted small kitchen appliance for which the syrups are now ubiquitous. It’s how ordinary folk like yourselves can make gourmet soda at home. I tried but never cared for the soda stream as all of the syrups contain some sort of sweetener. As you may recall, I’m not exactly sweet on saccharin.

But as you also may recall, I developed a love for tea and recently exchanged my old plastic iced tea maker for a new-and-improved deluxe model complete with glass pitcher.

And as you also may recall, if you are my number one fan, I embarked upon some winter “spring” cleaning during my Christmas break, moving the microwave to a corner and adding Shaun’s soda stream to the kitchen cart with my iced-tea maker, finally bringing the long-contemplated idea of the beverage station to life.

Kitchens are important, no doubt about it. The lost kitchen in Kent would have made some very nice dinners. Maybe that house would have been great too (but my hunch is the oddly-shaped trapezoidal living room would have been way worse than our slightly off-kilter rectangular one) but it seems either way, our dreams would have come true. So long as you’re looking at the one very specific dream through rose-colored glasses.

Behold the Beverage Station

My Dad’s Columbus Day Storm Story

It is a time-honored tradition for parents to bore their kids by telling them the same stories over and over and over again. I am personally looking quite forward to boring my own child with my stories. First I’ll tell them to her, then I’ll make her read this blog. Yes, I’m going to be an overflowing fountain of quotidian repetition.

Perhaps I’m overcompensating a tad, to make up for the fact that when I was a kid I was rarely treated to stories from my parents’ pre-kid life.* The stories I did hear came from my dad, and the one story I heard over and over again, year after year, was the Columbus Day storm story.

I realize I’m a couple of days late posting this story, but not as late as you might think. In America we’ve taken to “celebrating” Columbus Day observed, which is reserved for a Monday so workers can get a three-day weekend. (Except I don’t know anyone who actually gets Columbus Day off save for the postman, and I only know that because I tried to post mail last Monday.) Actual Columbus Day is October the 12th and has been for over 500 years.

In keeping with my blog’s wishy-washy “should I actually post this story” theme, I hesitated to post this famous story because I wasn’t sure there was enough of a story to tell. As best as I can remember it, after hearing it at least 20 times, the story goes like this: My grandparents, my dad and my aunt all moved into their new house on Columbus Day, during a storm, and the electricity was out. That’s it. From beginning to end. Doesn’t seem like much, does it?

Upon fact-checking that actual Columbus Day was actually October the 12th, I stumbled upon a crucial part of the story that, for whatever reason, hadn’t previously registered with me. My dad’s family didn’t move into the house during a storm, they moved into the house during the storm. The Columbus Day storm of 1962. It’s famous. According to Wikipedia, the storm, “is a contender for the title of most powerful extratropical cyclone recorded in the U.S. in the 20th century.” And this year, being that it is 2012, was the fiftieth anniversary of that storm.

Officially, or perhaps finally, intrigued, I pressed my dad for more details on the infamous story. He said that the roads were a mess as they drove a van back and forth from Parkland to Puyallup several times, dodging branches and driving circuitous routes to  avoid the debris in the road.

So yes the storm was a big deal and yes it was an extremely ill-timed moving day, but if you’re wondering why I had to repeatedly hear a story about a house my father moved into fifty years ago, it’s because my dad still lives there. In fact, this home has been occupied exclusively by Scotts. My Grandparents had it built in the ’60s and my parents took it over in the late ’70s. It’s where I grew up. So not only was the twelfth of October 2012 the fiftieth anniversary of the storm, it was also the fiftieth anniversary of the house.

Circa approximately 1968, according to my dad.

Here’s a picture of the house the day I came home from the hospital.

And here’s a picture I took earlier today.

October 14th, 2012

So happy birthday house! I look forward to many more years hearing the story of your birth on a dark and stormy night in October.

*Hippies.

There’s no business like bloody show business

After a few weeks of silence, I am finally able to add another chapter to my househunting saga.  Shaun and I made an offer on the house I liked in Puyallup and it was accepted almost unconditionally.  The only change they made was to give us seven days instead of ten to do the inspection.  We accepted and the day after all the papers had been signed and everything was set into motion, I lost my job.  THE DAY AFTER.  One of the reasons I decided it was the right time for Shaun and I to buy a house was because I had the good fortune to be working on a long-running show that had recently been renewed for two seasons.  It’s really tough to get that kind of job security in television but that was precisely my biggest mistake – thinking I actually had job security.  There’s no such thing in my line of work.  I lost my job not because the show was cancelled but because the production schedule lightened up and the whole company is in the midst of its yearly down time, that the decision was made to scale back to just one editor.  I’m a bit sore they didn’t choose me as the one.  I’ve been there longer than the other editor but I haven’t been editing as long. 

At that particular point in time it was difficult to get me out from under the bed.  I was considering backing out of the house while we could still get our earnest money back.  And I was really pissed that after four years with this company I can’t have some itty bitty little piece of seniority.  The truth is that while I have outlasted countless people at the company, there’s still a top tier of people that have been there longer than I have and I won’t be able to get to that level unless some of those people leave.  Still, to be told my services were no longer needed the day after I announced my triumphant purchase of a big, expensive house felt like a slap in the face.  I was ready to leave show business all together.  Fortunately or unfortunately I don’t really know how to do anything else.  The powers that be (the company partners) assured me that when things started to pick up there would be more work for me and they would even let me edit again.  (It was another great fear that with only a year’s experience they wouldn’t trust me with a different show, especially a new one.)  So we decided to push forward with the house, figuring that by the time we had to make the first mortgage payment I would be back on track, and if not Shaun could handle it for a little while on his own.  

We also decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and get the inspection and let that help us decide if we wanted to continue with the sale.  The inspection, as we suspected, went extremely well.  There were a few minor repairs, some we will do ourselves and some we asked the sellers to do.  Overall the house was in excellent condition and I found the inspector’s enthusiasm both amusing and confidence-boosting.  One thing we did ask the sellers was to have their relatively new furnace serviced, a suggestion from our inspector.  They agreed and wound up buying us a whole new furnace when the service revealed a slew of problems almost as expensive to fix as buying a new furnace.  I must say the sellers are being very diligent, “overly diligent” as our realtor put it, and I feel quite confident about the whole transaction.  The past houses that we bid on had me thinking of the sellers as villainous, almost, but that may have been the fault of our previous realtor.  This time, our realtor seems at least competent, and he and I have both been very pleased dealing with the selling agent.  He’s just a decent guy.

I’m less enthused right now about our mortgage people.  We went with a big name bank when the mortgage broker we had been talking to admitted the deal they offered us was better than he could provide us.  Shaun’s mom works at this bank so I’m sure things will go smoothly, but one person in particular, a processor at the Bellevue branch, really got my dander up when she didn’t respond to my phone calls for days because she “didn’t want to respond until I had the chance to look over your documents.”  Please.  A courtesy phone call letting me know what was going on was the least this person could have done.  Anyway, I do believe we got a pretty good deal so as long as we are on track and close on time….

We can start moving next weekend if everything goes well.  We want to paint and get carpets down first, so it’s going to be difficult to coordinate everything and at the same time get our apartment rented out.  We are trying to find someone to take over our lease, which ends the first week in June.  We had a good prospect today, but we haven’t heard if they’ll actually take the place.  If they do, we’ll have to move for sure that first week in April, making things just a little bit more complicated.

I’d like to be super happy enthusiastic about this but I’m not.  That whole not having work thing looms large over my brain.  I do have a very good prospect with another company for freelance work which I hope comes through.  They were very excited I could work from home as their edit suites are usually tied up.  Since I was planning on working from home on my previous show, which took some of the sting out of living farther away, it would be nice to still have that option in some capacity.  Especially since this company is very, very far away from the house. 

I hope this all gets fun and exciting when we start moving and painting.  I’m sure once I’m able to get a cat or dog I will have forgotten all about this apartment which I love so much.  So for those of you still looking, happy househunting, and for me, I’ll see you on the other side with a blog about the disasters of fixing a house.

Decision Impossible?

Maybe not. After a disappointing Saturday afternoon, in which we came very close to bidding on a house before realizing it was on the Indian Reservation, I decided I was going to have to give our realtor the ol’ heave ho. When I asked her for time to think about the complicated and weighty decision of whether to bid on the house, she wanted to give me five minutes. It took me at least that long to talk her into giving me a few hours. She asked me to call her back at 6 o’clock, which is about the time I was figuring out this house was on the reservation. This little tidbit of information annoyed me, or at least the fact that it wasn’t disclosed annoyed me, and I didn’t call her back. She finally called on Sunday afternoon and I told her the situation with the house. I also told her I was tired of being pressured and I wasn’t making any more decisions on a whim. I know she’ll probably call back eventually but the next move is mine and I’m moving on. In fact, I may be moving on to the finish line.

My mom saw an open house on Sunday and insisted I come look. I wasn’t going to make that hour’s drive on a moment’s notice, but because I had today off, and the realtor hosting the open house was willing, I decided to take a look and also have him show me a few other houses.  The other houses we saw weren’t much to speak of, but the house my mom found is just about perfect.  Well it’s not perfect but we can make it perfect, and for the price I don’t see how we could afford NOT to make it our home. The biggest drawback is the location, because it’s much farther away from work than I want to be. However, looking at it rationally, the other homes we’ve liked and the ones we’ve bid on have all been “farther out” than ideally I would have liked. This latest location may add five to fifteen minutes from any other less than ideal location, and again, for the price, we could turn it into something really great. It may be the best way for us to get in on the market. We know we like the area and will be happy enough living there, and in a few years we will have some equity and may be better equipped financially to find a location closer to our places of employment, wherever they are at that time.

If anybody at this point is worried that we may not get the house for this price or perhaps there will be a bidding war, calm yourselves. This house has been on the market over two months and the owners are desperate to sell. They are ready to move and I am ready to take advantage of that. I hope to get a carpet allowance so we can redo the floors, and based on what the selling agent told me, I think that is entirely possible.

However at this point I’m going to stop talking about it.  I feel talking about it is what jinxed my view home out in Brown’s Point that sold before I got to it.  So I will leave it at this:  I’ve made my decision and I couldn’t be happier that I have actually made a decision. Proud too. Decisions are not my forte. My college roommate and I could take two hours to decide what to have for dinner, even if we were starving and dryer lint sounded good. I think Shaun is happy too, and he hasn’t even seen the place.  He’s seen many, many houses with me and has been, in his words, “just waiting for me to make a decision.” I feel good about this decision too, better than any of the other “decisions” I made when I bid on the houses I didn’t get. So now we just have to wait and see what happens.

Until then, Happy House Hunting!

The first rule of real estate

Another weekend of househunting has come and gone.  Some people, including the people at the seminar we attended last weekend, tried to convince me that this is a fun process and I should enjoy it.  I am not buying it.  This is a disappointing, disheartening and at time sickening process.  Let’s take it from the top.

 I picked out six houses I wanted to see this weekend and gave the numbers to my agent.  I asked in an e-mail if we could please start at house A in Kent, and gave her the address, and then we would work our way down through the other houses, ending with the house out in Brown’s Point, the one I really, really, really wanted to see and was convinced I would buy.  She called me back to confirm everything and spit out the address in Kent where we would meet.  I jotted it down since I didn’t have my information in front of me, and came to find later that it was the wrong house.  I wanted to start at the house I’d picked because it was furthest north and we wouldn’t have to retrace our steps.  But retrace our steps we did.  When we met up at the first house in the morning, she told me that the house I wanted in Brown’s Point sold the night before, and the other one we were set to see in the same area had been rented out.  So I only got to see four houses yesterday.  The fourth one we saw was in Auburn and my fiance and I both really liked it.  We were all set to bid on it in fact, although I was concerned about that first rule in real estate: Location.  It was just a few block behind the Muckleshoot Casino.  In fact, there wasn’t much in the area at all.  Still the house itself seemed to be in a nice enough neighborhood.  The real estate agent went back to her office to write up the offer but called me to let me know that because the house was new on the market the sellers wouldn’t accept anything less than a full price offer and wouldn’t pay closing costs, which was the only thing I wanted.  I told her I’d have to think about making a different offer and she told me to call her back in five, count ’em five minutes.  That’s not really what I’d consider good thinkin’ time.  I did call her back and told her I just couldn’t make the decision right now, and spent at least another five minutes listening to her lectures about house someone else could buy the house if we didn’t tie it up and she didn’t want me to be disappointed because she would be disappointed too.  She told me she had meetings but to call her back at 6, which was about 3 hours of thinkin’ time to tell her what I had come up with. 

I wanted not only to think about the situation myself and oh I dunno, maybe sleep on it, but I also like to talk about these big decisions with family.  They tend to think of the things Shaun and I don’t think of because we’re new to the whole buying a house game.  Talk with my family I did, and my father pointed out that being just a few blocks behind a casino might mean the house was on an Indian Reservation, and that came with complications like no government services like police and fire.  My father was absolutely right.  I researched the house and it was smack dab in the middle of Muckleshoot Indian Reservation land, and the Sherriff’s office considers the policing of the area a “joint venture” with the tribe.  So even though we’d found maybe the perfect house, it was in the wrong location.

At no time did my real estate agent mention that this house might be on the reservation, but I am convinced she knew or was thinking about it, because she mentioned it a while back for another house I found in Auburn.  She didn’t say it was a bad thing because of course she wouldn’t want to cost herself a potential sale, but at least she mentioned it.  We even had a copy of the full disclosure statement from the seller this time, and no where does it mention it’s on a reservation that I can see.  It just seems like something that should be disclosed.

So now I’m more than a bit annoyed with this agent.  She doesn’t listen, she’s putting too much pressure on me and on top of everything she’s not disclosing potential problems.  I guess that’s pretty much the name of the game.  Buyer beware.  I know in terms of agents I could do worse and maybe I can’t do any better – maybe just different – but I’m thinking of trying.  I didn’t call her back last night and I haven’t heard from her today.  She’ll probably call again and I’ll probably have to have it out with her, which I hate because I’m not a confrontational person.  Which is why it’s so hard on me to feel all that pressure coming from a sales agent, but I suppose that’s what you want  I think of Alec Baldwin’s character on “30 Rock” and the episode last week where he renegotiated an agent’s contract.  I should take a cue from him and be a winner, not a loser!

Further bulletins as events warrant and as always,

Happy Househunting!

Never going back to my old school

Shaun and I attended the zero down home buying seminar last Saturday in an attempt to blow the lid off all of this real estate and mortgage mumbo jumbo.   I hoped the seminar would provide us with the details to the cryptic codes on the websites promising lower interest rates and subsidized funds for down payments.  The nearly seven-hour seminar was as lucrative as reading “Who Moved My Cheese” – in other words, stuff I already knew.

The good news is we obtained the certificate we needed to be able to apply for the lower interest rate, for which we do in fact qualify.  The bad news is if we sell the house we buy with this lower interest rate within nine years, we will also, I’m quite certain, qualify for the hefty recapture tax associated with it.  While we can sneak in under the wire now and meet the income requirements for the lower rate, we really are sneaking in.  In a year or two we’ll make too much money to qualify which will leave us open to the recapture tax.  I didn’t expect to qualify financially for any down payment assistance, and found that most of these programs are known as “creative  financing” to mortgage brokers.  An example is a non-profit foundation offering you the cash to put down on a home loan only if the seller agrees to gift the same amount to the organization.  Unless you find an unusually magnanimous seller, they’ll only gift that money, say $15,000, to the foundation, once you have made an offer for the house $15,000 over the asking price.  We’re still meeting with mortgage brokers who deal with these government programs routinely to see if we can find a better option than what we’ve previously been offered.  I remain hopeful but skeptical.

That’s not why you called though.  You want the sarcastic, cruel remarks about the seminar.  Or at least, that’s what I want to provide.  So enjoy.

The seminar was split into two parts, the first half was taught by a real estate agent and covered house hunting, the second half was taught by a mortgage “consultant” and covered shopping for loans and mortgage brokers.  The real estate agent spent the better part of his class talking about how the real estate industry has changed dramatically in the past few years, and how the computer revolutionized the industry.  Isn’t it phenomenal, he projected more than once, that with one click of the button, all of the information about a house can be sent out all over the world to anyone who wants it.   Yes, yes it is amazing.  Welcome to the nineties.

The mortgage “consultant” was a confident and assertive woman who traveled to the class in her Delorian.  While we welcomed the real estate agent to the nineties, she welcomed us to the eighties.  She had her hair pulled back in a pony tail and her bangs greased and curled over the side of her face.  She had dark eyeliner around her entire eyes.  She wore a brown jacket with about 1700 buttons down the front and shoulder pads that made her look like a linebacker.  While the sleeves were baggy and ill-fitting the back was so tight and thin that we all could tell what brand of bra she was wearing.  It was Jockey, to go with her baggy riding pants tucked into and billowing out of her knee high boots.  It was quite the spectacle.  I kept hoping that at any moment Stacy and Clinton from TLC’s “What Not to Wear” would pop in and take her away from us.  No such luck. 

We are now set to meet with these people to see what they can do for us loan wise.  We may not opt for the lower interest rate and they may not have any better deals for us, but I’d still like to hear what they have to say as they were much more willing, at least in class, to crunch numbers.  Also, a second opinion never hurts.  Meanwhile, it’s only Tuesday and I want to look at the house I’m watching now, now, now, but can’t get out there with Shaun until Saturday.  I’ve thought about venturing out by myself but I don’t think it’s a good idea.  Even if Shaun doesn’t always say much, I’ll make a better decision with him there than I would left to my own devices.

Biding my time and biting my nails until the weekend,

Jen

Buying a house is not for the faint of heart

Who knew buying a house would be this hard?  I did.  Which is why in a way I didn’t want to do it, but my longing for my own place and a view of a yard, rather than a parking lot, made me take a deep breath and plunge in head first. 

 Why is it so difficult? Well first you have the money.  What an enormous amount of money to consider spending!  Youhave to get preapproved for a loan, and we have good credit so the lenders are going to give us any amount we want.  They don’t care if you can make the payments.  So it’s left for me to determine what we can afford, and getting a ball park figure of a monthly payment out of our mortgage broker was like pulling teeth.  I sent him four e-mails in which I asked the question, can you give me a monthly payment estimate with this amount down and this price, and he kept skirting the issue.  He finally gave me the numbers with the disclaimer that interest rates are changing all the time.  Yeah.  I get it.  But they’re not going to go from 4 to 20, so just give me an estimate.  That is in fact why they call it an estimate. 

Then there are real estate agents.  The last time we looked for a house, when we decided we couldn’t yet afford one, we tried two agents.  We went back to the one we liked, whom we liked because she was low pressure.  However, she has a hard time understanding what it is I am looking for and her efforts to find something for us have been off-the-charts wrong.  (I do all of the searching and picking of houses to see on-line).  After about three weeks of working with us she seems to be a bit frustrated.  I guess I can understand because I am all over the map and have lots of little reasons and rules why this idea or that won’t work, but on the other hand she’s going to make a lot of money off of me eventually so I think she should just cool her jets.  She was really pushing for us to buy this last house and when we didn’t, I think she was a bit disappointed.  She really wanted us off her to-do list.  I made a point of telling her that while I was excited to buy a house, I was in no hurry and I wanted to wait until the right thing came along.  I’m not kidding you, an HOUR after that conversation, I get a call back from her and she wants me to run down to Federal Way in the middle of rush hour to make an offer on this townhouse that just came on the market.  An HOUR.  I didn’t go because I don’t want to live in Federal Way and I don’t want a condominium or townhouse, and she knows both these things.  I haven’t heard from her since.  I know I am allowed to find another agent if I don’t like her services, and I might because I have suspicions she’s not doing a very good job closing for us, but I don’t want to be anywhere near another agent who threatens me at every house I see, “Oh my God you must buy this ugly shack right now or it will be snatched out of your hands!”

The actual physical househunting takes lots of time and effort but may not even compare to the virtual househunting.  I am glued to my computer all day long, searching endlessly on various websites to try and turn up one gem that I somehow missed and will make my life complete.  Never mind that I’ve seen every house in my price range in a 40 mile radius and am signed up for new listing alerts with three, count-em three different websites.  I’m still searching every day.  My attentions are now focused on a house out in Browns Point, an area I love but which I had completely forgotten about until it turned up in a search on a website I hadn’t yet tried.  It was at first too expensive for us, but the price just dropped $15,000 and I am convinced that this place is my new home, even though I have yet to see it and I know better than anybody that those pretty internet pictures are notorious liars.  However, the price is still much higher than the estimated value, and still more than I was hoping to get away with spending. 

I finally realized last night that I could channel all this househunting obsession into something useful, and I went to the HMBI website and finally figured out how I might get some money towards my new home.  There are incentives out there for first time homebuyers if they are low to moderate income, and since it is based on what we made last year I think we will qualify.  I had seen this website before and written to officials involved in the programs, but I had kind of given up because everybody was so stingy with the information.  But I clicked on the right thing last night and I found out that if you go to one of these seminars they hold and you meet the income requirements, you are eligible for a lower interest rate.  The seminars provide you with the info and a list of lenders who specialize in the House Key State Bond Loan program.  We could potentially reduce our interest rate by over 1%, and while that may not sound like much, could save us maybe two hundred dollars a month.  So now I’m channeling all my energies into getting this interest rate, and then I can get the house in Brown’s Point!  (I have vowed not to look at it until I have the money in place, however.)  There may also be opportunites for us to get money towards our down payment, but I’ve still had a hard time finding out exactly how to do this.  Hopefully they will cover it in the seminar.

Until next time, Happy House Hunting!

Jen