New neighbors

in

I went over to the house Monday morning to get measurements for all the rooms that we're going to be reflooring to get an idea of how many square feet of material we're going to need. While I was there with the realtor, she told me an interesting story. Apparently the selling agent had called her all in a snit because someone "matching my description" was at the house, and screwed up something with the pool, yadda, yadda. She was being coarse and rude, threatening to call the cops if I showed up at the house again, and my agent basically told her that I wouldn't have shown up at the house without an agent there. A little backstory: when I went to the general inspection, the inspector (who used to be in the pool business) was walking me through how to keep the pool clean, and noticed on the "filter timer":http://www.flickr.com/photos/feralboy/9974282/in/set-246911/ that it was set to only run for about 2 hours a day, which is part of why it looked "like it did":http://www.flickr.com/photos/feralboy/9974432/in/set-246911/. There were two small screws on the timer's clock face.. basically you just move the screws around to whatever time you want the filter to kick on or off. Because he knew that the sellers' pool service was coming the next day, the inspector left the one screw off so it would just run until the guy got there. I guess this turned into me sabotaging the pool.

And how did the selling agent know that it was me? Why, because one of my darling new neighbors took pictures of me, my car and "my license plate":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/001289/. Now, I'm all for neighbors looking out for each other, but if a house has a fucking "For Sale":http://www.flickr.com/photos/feralboy/10888666/ sign out in front of it, my guess is that there are going to be strange people looking at it. So, we have some busybody crusty old bags who like being in other people's business. I can't wait to get all up in their little passive-aggressive faces.

The thing is, the selling agent should know better. We're enabling her to make a good chunk of money by buying the house, so I don't know why she's being so difficult with us (not having the locks fixed on the house among other problems) and not telling the busybody neighbor to just mind their own business when they called. Kim's new co-worker (who happens to actually live 2 doors down from our new place and pretty much fingered the nosy neighbors) theorized that perhaps the selling agent brought in a new, higher offer and was hoping to pick up all 6% for herself. Whatever. I'm planning on calling her manager and starting the reaming shitstorm. Plus, she'll be at the closing, so I get to call her an unprofessional cunt to her face.

In happier news, the mortgage company's appraisal of the house came in at about $10k higher than the selling price. Built-in equity!

C'mon in, the water's green!

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C'mon in, the water's green!, originally uploaded by feralboy.

Today was home inspection. I went through and took "a bunch of pictures":http://www.flickr.com/photos/feralboy/sets/246911/ to get some redecorating/home improvement ideas while we wait for closing.

Weekend miscellany

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* It's time for me to turn in my geek badge. Saturday morning I was futzing around on my work machine, which really is my primary machine nowadays because I'm lazy, installing the latest version of "Firefox":http://mozilla.org/, when right after it completed my screen went black. Alright... I waited for a few seconds, and then just figured I should do a hard shutdown. Upon rebooting, my machine wouldn't go back to the windows login screen. It would show the XP startup screen for a few seconds, then kick right back to the BIOS screen and start all over. Nothing I picked worked; Safe Mode, Last Known Good, etc. I started looking online for problems relating to startup and "mup.sys":http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1082631480, which is the last line that would load before the reboot, and it sounded like it was more of a hardward issue. I took out one memory stick, and then the other. I even tried different slots, and to no avail. Figuring this was too important to screw up or try to do a rebuild on (and re-installing all that damn software, ick.) I brought it to Best Buy. Picked it back up yesterday, and it turns out that there were some corrupt sectors on the disk (head crash, maybe?). Fixed those, and now my machine is back to normal. All I would have had to do it pop in an XP disc to boot from, and try the repair routines, but I've tried that a few times and broken things enough to force a wipe and reformat, so I simply gave up and wussed out. * In the car I was listening to "Whad'ya know?":http://notmuch.com/ on NPR, which is one of my least favorite NPR shows, but it was on, so (shrug). It was the part of the show where he reads questions people have written down and gives his glib, unfunny answers. One was from a woman who wanted to know if she should be the one proposing to her boyfriend. Long story short, she was trying to use the peer pressure to goad him into saying yes. He sounded very un-thrilled, and then finally said yes. I would have probably done the same, and then screeched out of the parking lot and left her there for trying to put on so much public pressure. Show is "here":http://notmuch.com/Show/index.pl if you want to listen to the uncomfortable-ness.

* Poker continued to be good to me, and even with some ups and downs it was a +$500 weekend. I hit "another":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/001479/ ~$250 hand (this time in just a straight $3/6 hand, to give you an idea of how much betting and raising was going on), this time in like a 7-way pot with pocket kings. I've tightened my live and online play up considerably lately. A-x suited in early position? Throw it away. K-10 offsuit early? Throw it away. So far it seems to be working out well.

* House inspection tomorrow. I'll be bringing my camera and taking a zillion pictures, first to give you all a better idea of what it looks like inside, and second so Kim and I can start coming up with a bit of a strategy on getting started on the fixing up. Her lease ends 3 weeks after we close, so we're hoping that we can at least get the flooring and painting in the bedroom done so as not to have to move furniture all around after we're already in. She's quite the ebay maven, so we're going to try and find "everything":http://search.ebay.com/pergo_W0QQfkrZ1QQfromZR8 there and save some bucks.

We are a GO!

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Seems like "the house":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/001468/ is going to be ours. Got a call from our realtor person last night, and they're having a hard time getting both signatures from the previous owners. Apparently it's some sort of divorce situation, and the woman is in Florida and has signed our offer, and the guy is a long-distance trucker who needed to find a fax machine (the "mojo wire", as HST would have called it), but had given a verbal ok on our offer (and oh, what a fun story their divorce must be.. shades of Britney and K-Fed, that one). Their only counter-offers were that they _weren't_ going to have the place professionally cleaned (which is a damn shame, because it looks pretty shitty in there at the moment) and they weren't going to remove the metal shed in the backyard that was housing all the dog poop. The shed is no biggie, because upon further inspection Kim and I decided that it wasn't really that bad, and our realtor said she was going to pay for cleaning if they wouldn't. Seeing as how she's making $6k to do nothing besides sign some papers and send some faxes, I suppose she can afford it. Today we should be able to get some more ink on papers, and start escrow tomorrow. Inspection within the next 10 days, and I'll be going to observe, and I'll be able to take some more pictures of the inside. Yay, I'm going to be a homo-wner!

House, take 2

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Let's try this again, shall we? Yesterday Kim and I signed another contract, this time on "this place":http://longrealty.com/Property/search_details.asp?searchType=Residential&MLS=2508513. It's big (2200 sq ft., which is way too big!), in a decent neighborhood, and has loads of fixer-upper-ness. Apparently the couple is getting a divorce and trying to unload it quick (so quick that when we did a walkthrough there were still toys and loads of dog poop in the backyard), so this fits into our plan of buying, updating and flipping. New floors, new cabinets, new paint, and sell it for a healthy profit in a year. We should hear back Monday if our offer was accepted or not.. we'd close in 5 weeks if it is!

News flash

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Had an offer on a house accepted today. Wahoo! *Update as of 6:15 p.m.:* Contract signed. Earnest money check being dropped off tomorrow. Loan application being filled out tonight.

*Update as of 11 a.m. next day:* After some careful consideration, the house is too expensive per sq foot for what you actually get, so we're bailing. "Onwards":http://tarmls.com/scripts/mgrqispi.dll?APPNAME=Tucson&PRGNAME=MLSPropertyDetail&ARGUMENTS=-N632851996,-N282522,-N,-A,-N4761188 and "upwards":http://tarmls.com/scripts/mgrqispi.dll?APPNAME=Tucson&PRGNAME=MLSPropertyDetail&ARGUMENTS=-N632851996,-N282418,-N,-A,-N4761188!