Advice on House Buying

(Due to technical difficulties over the past 24 hours, yesterday's entry appears today.)

I enjoyed reading Laura Rowley's What I Wish I Knew Then About Home Buying. She writes a letter to her younger self as her younger self was buying a house and passes on the wisdom on this subject that she has acquired over the last four years since that time.

My favorite: "I know you follow the 'Starbucks barista rule': The mortgage payment should be small enough so you can make the monthly nut -- even if your career tanks and you have to make lattes all day at Starbucks." What a great rule and a great name for it. Of course, most people don't feel they could live in such a low-priced place, but I love that philosophy.

Or maybe this was my favorite: "Don't be so quick to tear out the former owner's quirky additions. That weird foam padding on the back of the attic door? The plastic sheets sealing the attic windows? Before you consider improving the aesthetics, live through all four seasons in the home, including the first eye-popping winter utility bills. Those eccentric little upgrades will become your friends."

Here's what I would have told myself:

1. Do not trust your real estate agent in any way. That person has different goals than you do.




• Don't let on how much you can really afford. You will get shown only houses at the top of hour price range.


• Get a real inspector. A person who uses a checklist is not being thorough enough.


• Confirm any information about property developments in the area. That place next door to the place you almost bought never did get fixed up. They just built an ugly privacy fence between it and your almost future home.


2. Get an arborist to make an inspection also. Those big, beautiful trees shading your house are weapons, not investments, and will be gone in ten years.


3. Find the flood maps and check them. Also crime maps. And zoning maps. Not that these can't change (heck, even the street map has changed), but it's a good minimum. That apartment complex adjacent to your back fence is in the hundred-year flood plain. Your land is no higher.


4. One thing about ugly laminate countertops and vinyl flooring are that they are both durable and soft enough that if you drop a glass, it might not even break. The odd painted cork floors are good for dancing--smooth, yet cushy.

I already knew to get pre-approved for a loan, to not get a house if I was going to have to stretch my finances, to use an architect to help plan updates, to value a good foundation over a good paint job and to value a good location over curb appeal.

Oh, I just thought of an idea. Around here, real estate agents generally get 3% from the seller and 3% from the buyer. This works in your favor if you're selling because both you and your agent both want a high price. But if you're the buyer, I wonder if you could negotiate a specific amount. If you buy a house for so little money that they end up getting more than 3%, you both win.

PDA Replacements

I've decided my PDA is too expensive because it keeps breaking and I keep having to get a new one. However, I really, really loved some things about it, so I am going to try to find other ways to do those things.

First, I bought a new address book. My old address book from high school was just not designed well enough. My new one is not perfect, but it has a lot more space, it's smaller, and it's prettier. (More space, yet smaller? That's because the old one wasted a lot of pages for gift lists, birthday lists, and other odd things I never used much.) Also, it cost only $2 and came with a matching note pad, note pad holder, and tiny refrigerator magnet picture frames. I resisted it last week because I didn't need another address book, but then I re-evaluated my situation.

Now I've decided to take one of my blank books that are too pretty to toss and turn it into a price book. This helps me pay attention to how much things cost at different places, so that wherever I'm shopping, I can stock up on things that are a bargain at the place I'm at. I'm still trying to decide how to organize it. Purely alphabetically? Or will I find a way to continue to use categories like grains, dairy, protein, and toiletries? I have decided that I'm going to cut the page edges like they do on address books, so you can flip directly to where you want to go.

Another thing I miss is my section of restaurant reviews. I think I may have to build a hipster PDA for this. That's just a stack of note cards clipped together. You use one card for each place and can easily add a new place and take out old places and keep things alphabetized. So many restaurants have business cards, I may trying to make use of those along with other tiny business-card-sized cards. I'll have to see if there's enough room to write all the comments I want to write. If not, I guess I can just add a second card.

The last thing I miss is my list of things I'm looking for such as certain books if I find a good price. This category also includes measurements such as the size of my air filter and the size of my windows and the sizes of pants I wear in different brands. I haven't gotten around to thinking about a solution for that category yet.

**

Last week I gardened for forty minutes. Yesterday I counted nineteen bug bites from that adventure, just on my left leg below my knee but above my ankle. Remind me again why people like gardening?

Today I gardened forty more minutes. I got rid of some more johnson grass, beggar's lice, and that sticky weed that I've since heard referred to as "velcro weed." I also cut down a few evil trees, some of which I have already chopped down before, which have new branches growing out the sides of the old stumps. That's so not fair.

On the other hand, my rose garden was still virtually weed free.

**

I've been seeing more buildings around town that are being built in that style of one big building covering a whole block with shops on the ground floor and apartments above. If only those could come with parking and be more soundproof than apartments I've lived in before, that would definitely be my favorite lifestyle. I'd love to just have a patio garden and walk most places. But I also enjoy being able to jump around in my house and sing along with recorded music at any time of the day or night without worrying about bothering my neighbors. And I really don't want my friends never to visit me just because there's no place to park. And none of them live anywhere near good mass transit systems, partly because most of my friends are going the suburb route and partly because we don't have any. One couple does live near an edge of town that has some okay bus routes, and one lives in central condo.

Oh, right, I also hate condo fees and condo associations. I guess I'll keep working on this gardening thing.

Maybe the best idea is to own an entire fourplex or sixplex. Then you are the condo association! And the condo fees are much more predictable.

**

Woo hoo! Another one of my friends has started journaling online! (You never know what's going on during 24 hours of technical difficulties; the universe may be changing.) Mac the Mike begins by not setting your expectations too high: "Expect regular updates on when i cut my toenails, etc."