Sewer Time!

Yeay!  Welcome to our first official post as homeowners!!  We went to the title company on Monday and signed all the paperwork and on Tuesday afternoon we got the keys!  Now that the house is ours it's down to business.  Yesterday we started the sewer repair process.  The neighbors have already disconnected their sewer pipe from ours, so all we have to do is replace ours.  The current pipe exits out the back of the house and circles around the side out to the street, so we are completely removing the old pipe then laying a new, shorter pipe exiting out the side of the house.  The whole process amazingly involves only a few holes.  They dug one hole in front of the house where our pipe connects to the main line, one along the side of the house at the exit point and one in the basement where the pipe will be coming through to hook up to the plumbing.  Everything else happens underground.  Apparently they just suck the old pipe out and shove the new one right through.  It's all pretty impressive.

Price Tag

We invite you to listen to the following and consider it a soundtrack to this post :)

Yesterday we received a copy our final closing paperwork to review and had the pleasure of going to the bank and getting the cashier's check for the closing!  We are signing the paperwork and paying our down-payment first thing Monday morning and now we are all prepared.  

Purple in the Kitchen

In between packing I've been doing a lot of thinking about decorating the new house.  One of the first projects we'll have to tackle will be the kitchen.  We want to take advantage of the overlap of the house and apartment to make the kitchen livable before we have to start bringing in food and dishes.  I've always been a fan of light, bright kitchens, but for some reason my mind has been stuck on dark wall colors with the kitchen's already light cabinets and countertops.  Maybe I'm remembering Joi's dark gray kitchen with her white cabinets:

The Appraisal and Moving Forward

 

Today we finally received the report from the appraisal company.  The report brought great news, confirming that the house is worth the price we are paying for it.  In fact, the price we are paying is slightly lower than nearby comparable sales, so that's good news for us!  This is also good news because we can now be confident going forward that we really are getting a new house!

Washers, Dryers and More Questions

We've been questioned a few times now about whether Matt actually writes for this blog.  It is true that while Matt contributes ideas, helps with proofreading and is (obviously) involved in the home buying process as a whole, I do in fact do most of the actual writing.  Today, however, with Matt off from work for Memorial Day, I asked if he would like to write a post and he happily obliged.  So without further ado, Matt's first solo post.  -Caroline

Happy Memorial Day, everyone!  Memorial Day is a time for remembering loved ones and honoring veterans, but in our great American tradition it is also a time for some of the years biggest sales.  Fortunately for us, Memorial Day rolled around just as we came into the market for a washer and dryer.  This was an interesting experience as neither of us have ever purchased a washer and dryer before. The adventure involved price shopping all across Portland, several calls home for parental advice and even an offer from one salesman to fraudulently back date our purchase date so that we could claim an expired rebate.  Needless to say we did not purchase from that store.  Eventually, we found a good, and honest, deal on a great set we are very happy with.

Now where to put them in the basement?

Follow Us!

Hi readers!  While we're waiting on more house updates to share with you we wanted to take a moment to encourage you to follow us here on blogger!  Just because we've found a house doesn't mean this blog is going anywhere.  We want to make sure that all of our wonderful readers are with us while we transform our new house into a beautiful home.

Clicking the follow button on the left side of your screen will help you find your way back to us and will show us your support as one of our readers.

If you'd like to be notified whenever we have new updates about our progress with our new house you can also subscribe to this blog.  By subscribing you can add our blog to a blog reader of your choice such as your google homepage or your google reader.  Then whenever you open it up you'll be able to see if we've shared something new!

Now you can now also subscribe by email!  This is the easiest way to find out when we've made new post.  Each afternoon, if we've made a new post that day, blogger will send you an email letting you know and a link to the post.  You'll never miss a house update!

Finally, if facebook is your chosen mode of communication, you can also follow us on networked blogs.  Check out our networked blogs page here:  http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/two_seek_home.  Simply click the follow button on the right-hand side and if you'd like, you can rate our blog, too!

Following us in any (or all) of these ways will help us and you stay connected.  Not only will following us help you to return to twoseekhome so that you can continue to watch our progress as first time home buyers owners, but it will help us get to know our readers.  The readership of this blog has far exceeded our expectations in popularity in just a few months, and we would love to know who you all are! 

Thank you to everyone for reading, and watch for more house updates at the end of this week!

Status Update

We are learning that this process is ever-changing.  Yesterday afternoon our real estate agent called to break the news that on top of the five major problems we already knew about there are no permits for the majority of the electrical work that was done in the house in 1992.  Essentially, this means that there is no proof that the electrical work was done to code and if we were to have an electrical fire this might be a problem for insurance purposes.  This is a major problem because we need to seriously consider the possibility that the electrical wiring is a fire hazard and that in order to be completely sure that it is safe we would need to have the entire house rewired.  As you can imagine, this would not be an inexpensive undertaking.

Inspection Aftermath

So, as we mentioned yesterday, we really needed the inspection to go well.  And did it?  Sort of.  For a 101 year old house, it went very well.  The roof and structure are both in excellent shape.  The electrical and plumbing have been updated and are in reasonably good shape.  However, there were five major issues that will need to be dealt with immediately or in the near future:

Speaking of Resale Value

Okay, so we've been feeling a little bad in the past couple days about all this talk about resale value. The very nice couple who were the previous owners of our pending house accepted our offer because we are going to live in the house.  We believe that they received many offers, some possibly higher, some possibly cash, but they wanted to pass it on to a young couple who could love it as well as they did.  They are giving us the opportunity to live in their beautiful long loved and lived in home and here we are talking about resale value.

The truth is, we really are looking for a house to live in for the next five or so years and we never would have felt right if we didn't find something that we really loved, regardless of the resale potential.  After all, no matter how much money we might make off any given house in the end, we still have to live in it in the meantime.  Remember our needs vs. wants list?  Here are a few things we were committed to (to one extent or another) for personal reasons:

Some Other Houses

Sooo... while we're waiting on that inspection on Wednesday (Click Here if you missed the big house news!) we figured we'd share some other houses we've taken a look at in the past week or so. 

This is a truly beautiful house that we saw on the same day as the one we are (hopefully) buying.  It was in a great neighborhood just east of the one that got away.  We loved everything about the house except that with two bedrooms it was a little smaller than some other houses we had looked at and it had a lot more done to it, reducing our ability to increase its value.  Nonetheless it was a great house: