Matching Tracksuits

After seeing another batch of houses, we now can tell within about 90 seconds whether or not we're interested in a house.

One sure sign that it's not a house we want: a recently-deceased welcoming committee on the kitchen floor.

Another sign: cobwebs on the front door knob. If someone else doesn't want to see it, we probably don't want to see it either.

Still, Friday afternoon/evening we added two more to our "let's think about it" list.

Candidate One

A brick ranch (we seem to hit those almost exclusively), the first home we really liked had a few advantages:

1. Nice kitchen (though pictures don't do it justice)
2. Big dining room
3. Screened porch connected to an open deck
4. Fairly decent lot

Candidate Two

The big problem with candidate two: siding. We want brick. The more we think about it, the higher it moves on our criteria list.

	Top left: Good parking Top right: Skylight, openness, arch Left: Spacious kitchen

Candidate Two also had a wonderful little nook that could serve as a computer area, and it had a spacious, semi-wooded backyard with a lot of potential.

But siding...

Prime Candidate

The prime candidate is still the one with a wonderful backyard and a full basement. Indeed, it's the lack of basement in the above two houses that really make them less than perfect candidates. A basement means one thing: storage. An unfinished (or partially unfinished) basement also provides the opportunity for weekend projects that will, if properly done, increase the overall value of the home.

Today, we're going back to all three, though, to make some sense of them -- which could be a euphemism for making an offer...

Our realtor told us at the outset that she didn’t want us expecting to find the home of our dreams this first time out. Rather, she said that we need to be looking at the areas and determine which area of town we’d rather live in. Many people buy houses they love without checking out the area, and then they find that the services they want and need aren’t available or aren’t nearby. So they wind up with a house they love in an area they hate. The first step, then, is not to find a house, but to find an area.

Yesterday, we found the area.

And we thought we’d found a house. But it’s amazing what a night’s rest will do for your perception of a house.

Contestant One

Didn’t make much of an impression — little enough impression that I didn’t even take a picture.

Contestant Two

In a historic district, walking distance from two parks (!!!), Contestant Two had a lot going for it from the beginning. It was was a fairly attractive house, with plantation shutters and picket fence in the front.

The interior was pleasant enough, with a somewhat odd upstairs bedroom — the chimney goes through the middle of the room, dividing it almost in two. Pleasant enough, though requiring some work. “I love it,” K said. “It’s okay,” I thought. Until we went into the “basement.”

Duct tape on a foundation wall can mean only one thing: the owners are trying to hide something. The fact that it’s painted indicates that they’re really trying to hide something.

And then the back of the house: siding clearly put on by a less-than-professional. It’s fairly clear that there’s water running off the roof and into that siding. Which means one thing: water damage. No — it means two things: water damage and mold.

The final negative factor: it was literally covered with trees. Not good for a roof; not good for affordable insurance. At that point, it was decided. Add to it all the age and the possible problems with wiring and plumbing, and, despite the good location, the final verdict was a definitive “no.”

We left the city-proper and went to Maldin.

Contestant Three

First impression — standard brick ranch. The house looked good, but nothing spectacular. And then we saw the backyard: huge, wooded, landscaped — in a word, amazing. A couple of kitschy “water falls,” but nothing that couldn’t be removed.

Once we walked in, I thought, “Okay — this is a house worth spending some time in, checking out, really looking it over.”

The kitchen/dining area was open, with a fireplace in the corner. Opposite was the living room. Immediate thought: “Tear out the wall dividing them and what an amazing space!”

Downstairs, a real basement — no quotation marks required. Half of it was finished as a family room. The other half: man cave. Clean, cool cinder-block with a new furnace — everything screams, “Workshop!”

The price is great; the location is perfect; the home is an amazing first-home. And, after the first two disasters, I think, “Hey, there is good stuff in our price range!”

Contestants Four through Seven

It was all downhill after Contestant Three, but we looked further.

Contestant Four: lots of potential (with an amazingly large backyard, too), but requiring a lot of work. Porcelain tiles as a kitchen counter-top treatment just makes you feel like you’re cooking in a bus station bathroom.

Contestant Five: with roads on three of the four sides of the lot, it was a definite “no” before we even got inside.

Contestant Six: no! No! A thousand times no! The Portokalos-style fireplace just was so hideous that I ran screaming from the house.

Contestant Seven: What a kitchen! What an interior! What train tracks five-hundred feet away! What a flood plain! What a disappointment!

Contestant Eight

Contestant Eight had a lot going against it from the beginning. Far, far north; on a semi-busy street; few trees.

Then we stepped inside, where it became obvious that this was a case of “Flip this House.” However, as my father said, it was more like “Flop this House.”

At first, everything seems decent. New appliances; new tile floor — which goes all the way from the kitchen, though the dining/living area, down the hall.

And then a close look at the kitchen counter revealed a few things:

• The house-flipper had never done any work like this before.
• The flipper had never even practiced before doing it for real.
• The flipper thought all who looked at the house would be legally blind and not wearing their glasses.

Words do not do it justice, so I present “Counter-Top Edge”

Add to it the fact that the hardwood floor in the living room was finished in the ever-popular Spill-and-Smear style, we decided to give it a pass.

First house hunt behind us, we learned a lot about what we really want and what’s optional.

We’re about to begin the process of looking for a home in Greenville. When we did it in Asheville about a year and a half ago, we were heading out with entirely different thoughts. We knew that the prices were completely disproportional to our income (particularly since I was working as a teacher’s aid in an EC classroom), and we were just hoping to find something in our price range.

In said price range, we found

• a place with major cracks in two of the four foundational walls, allowing a whole corner of the house gradually to sink into the earth (Price to fix: too much to contemplate);
• a place that was in such bad condition that it honestly had no lock on the front door;
• lots of condos, with association fees upwards of $100;
• some pre-fab homes;
• a few double-wide trailers (which we didn’t even bother looking at); and,
• assorted cottages slightly smaller than our apartment.

When we began looking at real estate in the Greenville area in the same price range, we were shocked — and that’s one of the reasons we decided to move there. You can still get a house for well under $200k there! In fact, there are two-bedrooms listed for under $100k!

That’s like driving by a service station and seeing the price of gas at $1.89. (Which in the south does happen — it just means the station closed several years ago and was simply abandoned.)

We’ve sat down and made a list of wants and needs.

Non-negotiable

• Price: [redacted — same as in Asheville]
• Location: east side of town, but more importantly, in a location where houses sell fairly easily
• Minimum ft² 1,300; ideal, 1,500-1,700
• Big kitchen, open to living area (not cut off from where the action is when entertaining)
• Minimum 2 bedrooms (if 2 bedrooms, must be partly finished basement; otherwise, 3 bedrooms)
• One and a half bath
• Not on a busy street
• Not in a new house crowded into a new development with no trees
• Minimum 0.3 acres

Preferred

• Close to a park
• Garage and basement
• Trees in the yard
• Deck/patio

Would be nice…

• Brick
• Fireplace
• Hardwood floors
• Front porch

The most pleasant thought in all of it — that L will have a backyard to play in.

So tomorrow we begin our hunt. It’s kind of exciting, looking for a house with the intention of buying, as opposed to looking at houses with the hope of finding something affordable that’s not a complete dump…

My latest project -- the dresser.

We have a couple of plants that, in Little Shop of Horrors fashion, send out their long tentacles that wrap around just about anything.

The first plant is actually a pair, planted in an earthen pot out on our back patio. They've been climbing for some time, and one of the seed-like things (oh, I'm just too lazy to look up what it would be called) actually shot out two spouts.

We decided yesterday afternoon to rein them in a bit. Rather, like good parents, we tried not to force them to do anything they wouldn't naturally do, and instead provided them with string to wrap themselves around. We guided them, in other words.

In still other words, we finally put up a third line for it, untangled the two that were sharing a previously installed guide line (i.e., a bit of string), and viola!

Oh, what parents we're going to be!

Once everything was done, K decided the unruly plant in the computer/movie/guest room had to be tamed as well.

This time, K decided she wanted to do it herself. Rather, I was busy working on something else and she knew it would probably be easier just to do it herself. Rather, I turned up my nose at the suggestion of banging more nails into our poor walls and so K did it herself.

What would you do if you were walking into your apartment building and dropped a jar of hot peppers on the sidewalk? You'd probably come back and clean it up. Most people would.

What would you do if someone at your apartment building did it late Sunday morning and it was still there Sunday evening? (Apparently "most people" don't live in our building.)

In my "fury," I made a sign...

Immature? Sure, a little. "I'd have just cleaned it up," a co-worker laughed. That's sort of the point, though...

Oh well -- it was amusing at the time.

Kinga and I are looking to buy a house -- sort of. Kinga and I have begun something we expected to start only after a year and a half in the States: we’re looking for a house. Our thinking was based on our likelihood of getting a loan, our lack of any kind of down payment, and initially, our lack of a job or any sense of security. But we’ve been pre-approved at a couple of different places; we have decent jobs, with the promise of it only getting better; and we’re sick and tired of paying several hundred dollars a month for nothing.

Granted, the rent is shockingly low compared to what I was paying in Boston. In 1999, I was paying $850 for a one-bedroom with barely enough room to turn around in. That place is certainly over a grand a month now. We don’t even pay seven hundred for a two-bedroom place. In the summer, when we were looking at the place, I laughed when told that the apartment is spacious but the rent “is a little high.”

The real estate market here is simply going through the roof. It’s tough to find anything under $150,000 that doesn’t need massive renovation. It’s easy to find massive homes:

Two decades ago, million-dollar homes were a rarity in these hills but not anymore. In 2002, Buncombe County had 38 homes with an assessed tax value of $1 million or more. In this year’s revaluation, the number will jump to 484. […]

“It’s just boomed,” Roberts said. “What we’ve noticed is there’s a lot of new construction of those type of homes, with those type of high-end materials: slate roofs, unique woods, specialty tile. The other side of that is that people will take some of the older homes and greatly remodel the entire home or add a whole new wing, and that pushes it over $1 million.”

The luxury housing boom is not news to Ron Olin and his wife, who moved here 12 years ago from Texas. According to the new revaluations, the Olins own the highest-assessed home in Buncombe County, a new, 15,449-square-foot French chateau style house in Biltmore Forest valued at just over $6 million.

Olin, a money manager who loves the Asheville area for its scenic beauty, climate and amenities, has no problem paying his fair share of property taxes to support local government. But one point sticks in his craw.

“Once we’re in the house, maybe it’s worth that much, but we haven’t even moved in yet,” Olin said. “They did an interim assessment in 2005, and we know they raised it a lot.”

The assessed value last year was about $4.6 million, but as the home nears completion it becomes more valuable. With amenities including an indoor swimming pool, an elevator, a hot tub, sauna and seven fireplaces, the price tag keeps rising. (Citizen-Times)

It’s because of people like the Olins that this area is soon going to become so expensive that no one can afford to live here unless they’ve got a six-figure income. Maybe not that bad, but it is fairly ridiculous.

Interest rates are yet another thorn in our side. We think enviously of those who bought homes a couple of years ago when the interest rate was not bearing down on seven percent. My brother-in-law took his home loan in Swiss francs, and pays some ridiculously low percentage – under four, I think. At today’s rate of 6.38%, a loan of $130,000 would generate monthly payments of $808.06. At 4.00%, it would be $620.65, with about 40% of that going to the principal.

And so instead of looking at actual single-family homes, we considered a townhouse or condo. What do you actually own in that? If it’s a townhouse, you might own the land directly under your portion of the building, but nothing else. With condos, you jointly own the land, along with everyone else in the same building. At least it was something like that. I can’t quite recall how our realtor explained it. I’m not really interested in the land, I guess, so I didn’t pay much attention. In the end, we decided that all we’d be doing is changing landlords. And so we’re looking for a moderate “fixer-upper.”

One thing we’ve learned quickly is the sometimes-tragic effect of neighbors on property value. We found a very warm, two-bedroom place with hardwood floors and a nice floor plan that was completely ruined by the neighbor’s lack of any sense of responsibility for the appearance of his house. The yard filled with junk; Christmas lights still hanging; a balding lawn – it was awful.

“These people will never get their asking price because of that,” our realtor said. So you lose money because your neighbor’s a complete slob.

We went to the south of the city where we found a rather nice home just about a mile from Biltmore Forest – Ron Olin’s neighborhood. If there’s somewhere in you don’t have to worry about the neighborhood, you’d think it’s the area less than a mile from the most expensive neighborhood in the whole city.

Wrong.

We pulled into the driveway and new immediately that there was no way we’d even consider the house. The view from the back-bedroom window explains it.