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New house!
OK, new TO US, and it's a rental, not a purchase, but still! House! Just got approved, sign lease Tuesday, official move-in date Thursday although we'll be slowly moving over the next couple of months as our current leases last through September.
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myrialux and I were tired of apartment living. While the location of the complex is awesome (1.5 miles from my work!), the walls are paper-thin and myrialux has annoying and STUPID* neighbors.
We spent some time looking about and pretty much decided that on our own we'd never find a house, arrange to look at it, decide, and apply in time on our own because we live right next to a university, and right now the fall students are coming into town, predatory, and circling all the available real estate in the area like sharks (which also means that rents right in this area are inflated, because these students think that a 2-bedroom house with 4 people in it, each paying $500/month, is a reasonable rent. In some areas, yes. Not here, with the bad condition the house is likely to be in).
So when a real estate agent posted in the school's weekly announcement newsletter that he was willing to find rental houses, I jumped at the chance and sent him a long laundry list of what we wanted. The first list he produced was near the school I work at, and was mostly duplexes and townhouses, which we were leery of because of the Student Problem. We talked, and I gave him more explicit parameters (previously I'd just said "within a 10-15 minute drive", and this time I gave him street names that were the outer boundaries), and he came up with 4 houses. Two of them were rented by the time we were able to go look, so we looked at 2.
The first was nice, but the kitchen was TINY. As in, smaller than my current kitchen. As in, smaller than my PREVIOUS apartment's kitchen, which had less counter space than my desk here at work does. Not something we really wanted. And it was 1500 square feet. The second house was further back from the street, didn't have a picture window looking directly on to where the plasma TV would be so Nefarious Evildoers wouldn't be able to scope us out too easily, had TREEEEEEES and had a MUCH MUCH BIGGER kitchen, and was over 2000 square feet for only $50/month more. It also had an almost unusable master bath - corners of the sink cabinet and shower stall are so close together that you have to get to know them quite intimately to get to the toilet. But there's a second, much larger, bathroom. It was down to the kitchen or the master bath, and we decided to go for the kitchen. (It's also right next to a country club. We are so bringing down the tone of the neighborhood.)
Anyway. The outside is great - did I mention the TREEEEEEES? And there's a pear tree in the back bearing fruit! And there's a covered brick patio to one side! And the edges of the yard are so surrounded by planting that you can't see into the neighbor's yards! - although the inside has some Issues that would keep me from buying it if I were in the market, but as it's a rental they merely serve to allow me to show people around while saying "OMG you HAVE to see this, it's so AWFUL!" There's a tacky, tacky, door knocker on the front door that depicts some sort of idealized Aztec or Maya warrior. There's a "garden room" which is obviously a walled-in porch which still has a brick trough full of dirt along one side.** There is the aforementioned master bath. There is a fireplace adorned with brass lion heads. On the good side, there is also an already-installed sprinkler system, and there is a birdbath/Water Feature right in front of the breakfast nook window which has a new pump installed, and which will entertain the cats for hours as they sit and stare out the window.
Here are some pictures from the listing. I'll go take a camera and get more after the move-in date.
Exterior. The grass is not actually brown and dead at the moment. Not sure when the photo was taken.
As you walk in. The photographer is standing on the step up to the entryway. The dark-paneled area will probably end up an office - the shiny stuff between panels is some sort of weird wall stuff - an attempt to be a Design Feature, I believe. The doorway on the left leads to the second bathroom and the (three!) bedrooms. The teeny little edge of doorway you can barely see at the bottom of the wall on the left goes to the kitchen. The garden room is off to the right, but you can't see the doorway. Yes, those are hardwood floors, yes the entire house has them except the kitchen and bathrooms, which are tile. Actually, not sure what the garden room has.
The kitchen. The entrance to it is off to the left of the photographer. The door at the back there leads to the garage. The refrigerator is currently inexplicably in the garage, but the owner says he'll move it in for us - it goes at the far end of the left-side counter, between the counter and the pantry door. The door you can barely see at the end of the right-side counter goes to the patio outside. No microwave, but I own one and a stand I used for it in my previous apartment. It will probably go at the end of the kitchen, smack in the middle of the picture. :) Off to the photographer's right, where you can't see, is the breakfast nook that looks out on thekitty TV Water Feature.
So. The process. Oh dear god, the process. At one point, Will, our realtor***, said that all his real estate transactions were just one pocket of ridiculousness after another, which is a really good description of the process. And I hear it ONLY GETS WORSE if you're buying, not just renting. I am shaking in my boots at the idea.
Thursday afternoon we take off work early and go to look at the houses. We decide on this one, and go back to the realtor's office to fill out the application paperwork. and fill it out. And fill it out. And I attempt to remember how much I earned at a job seven years ago, and what rent I paid at my previous place. We hand it over to Will, along with the ridiculous and nonrefundable application fee, and leave to go to Austin. Will says they'll fax our current and previous apartment complexes to get rent/late payment/etc. info from them, and that they'll fax the HUGE AMOUNT OF PAPERWORK to the property management company that is managing the house. All is well.
Get a phone call on the road. We need to also fax our most recent paystubs in. Mine's electronic, so I get a PDF copy and put it onmyrialux's thumb drive, so he can take it to Kinko's (oops, sorry, FedEx Office now) and fax it in. He does that Friday morning while I'm in the workshop, and sends a note that he'll send his paystub in on Monday.
I get a call that afternoon from our current complex. Ashlee, the manager, says that she can't send the info out without a move-out notice. Great. So I callmyrialux and have him take over, since he's working remotely at a Starbucks and I'm stuck in a class. Ashlee emails the notices to Toby, eventually, and after he picks me up, we go back to the FedEx Office, print and fill them out, and fax them in.
Mondaymyrialux takes his paystub in to the property management office. We find out that my previous apartment complex - the one where I reported a leak SEVEN TIMES and they didn't fix it until I brought in photographs of the bubble on the ceiling with water running from it - has not sent anything in. I phone them Tuesday and they claim they didn't get the fax. I take off part of the afternoon and go by the property management office to pick up a copy of the form that was faxed,w here I find out that our CURRENT complex still hasn't sent in the info. I call myrialux and tell him to take care of that while I take care of this. I drive across town and hand-deliver the form, then sit in the office until they fill it out and fax it in front of me.****
myrialux phones me and tells me that Ashlee is now at a new property so they need to get the new manager to sign off on it. *headdesk*
Thursday, still not in. I drop by the current apartment office at lunch and establish that somehow their fax machine doesn't want to talk to the property management office's fax machine and they can't send it in. I try to call to verify the fax number, but it's noon and they're closed for lunch.myrialux says he'll check in when he goes to pick up his mail. He does so, and finds they're using the correct number, but still not going through. He gets copies of the filled-out forms and brings them to me to hand-deliver - I have taken the afternoon off due to incipient migraine and 4 hours coming to me for working Saturday - and we notice that it says "NO" in answer to "Did the tenants give notice?"
ARGH. You wouldn't FAX THESE until we gave notice! So I got copies of our move-out notices and took them and the verification of residency forms by the office, made them copy the forms and put them in our file, then drove to the property management office and turned them in.
Got the call this morning that we were approved. Yay. Now to get the deposit money, sign the lease, and pick up the keys. YAY.
So. If I ever buy a house, should I just quit my job so I can spend the time filling out forms and hand-delivering everything?
---
* Multiple complaints to the complex did nothing to stop them keeping on playing VERY LOUD music. One night it was so loud thatmyrialux gave up and called the cops on them. When the cops arrived, they pounded on the door for TWENTY MINUTES before the inhabitants opened up. We assume they were probably Disposing of Stuff and airing the place out. So ... how stupid do you have to be to do drugs AND play your music so loud that someone calls the cops? Rule One of taking drugs: BE COOL ABOUT IT.
** If we arrange things so the cats can go in there - there's a door between the house and it - we'll either have to cover it up, or if I decide to attempt to garden again, cover the dirt with shell pieces, small pebbles, etc. that the cats won't want in their toes. Speaking of which, anyone recommend plants that do well in low-light conditions and which thrive on benign neglect?
*** "Our realtor." I feel so grown-up. And yes, I've seen the apropos XKCD comic. Realtor Will confessed he likes to play Rock Band. He's one of us. Although he can't be more than, like, twelve, so he always makes me feel old. XD
**** Using as my excuse that I need to ask about the pet deposit I never received. I've given up on getting it back already, but I'm not too concerned because when I first moved in, the previous company that owned the complex had a weird deal going on where you bought a $25 bond from this other company instead of paying the security deposit. Only they somehow marked down on my paperwork that I'd paid the full security deposit, so upon move-out, when I got the letter detailing all the damage done to the apartment they had to charge me for (i.e. carpet cleaning and nail holes in the wall, primarily) from the new owners which mysteriously somehow added up to the exact amount of the security deposit ... well, the joke's on them because I never paid the full security deposit. I can live without the pet deposit.
myrialux and I were tired of apartment living. While the location of the complex is awesome (1.5 miles from my work!), the walls are paper-thin and myrialux has annoying and STUPID* neighbors.We spent some time looking about and pretty much decided that on our own we'd never find a house, arrange to look at it, decide, and apply in time on our own because we live right next to a university, and right now the fall students are coming into town, predatory, and circling all the available real estate in the area like sharks (which also means that rents right in this area are inflated, because these students think that a 2-bedroom house with 4 people in it, each paying $500/month, is a reasonable rent. In some areas, yes. Not here, with the bad condition the house is likely to be in).
So when a real estate agent posted in the school's weekly announcement newsletter that he was willing to find rental houses, I jumped at the chance and sent him a long laundry list of what we wanted. The first list he produced was near the school I work at, and was mostly duplexes and townhouses, which we were leery of because of the Student Problem. We talked, and I gave him more explicit parameters (previously I'd just said "within a 10-15 minute drive", and this time I gave him street names that were the outer boundaries), and he came up with 4 houses. Two of them were rented by the time we were able to go look, so we looked at 2.
The first was nice, but the kitchen was TINY. As in, smaller than my current kitchen. As in, smaller than my PREVIOUS apartment's kitchen, which had less counter space than my desk here at work does. Not something we really wanted. And it was 1500 square feet. The second house was further back from the street, didn't have a picture window looking directly on to where the plasma TV would be so Nefarious Evildoers wouldn't be able to scope us out too easily, had TREEEEEEES and had a MUCH MUCH BIGGER kitchen, and was over 2000 square feet for only $50/month more. It also had an almost unusable master bath - corners of the sink cabinet and shower stall are so close together that you have to get to know them quite intimately to get to the toilet. But there's a second, much larger, bathroom. It was down to the kitchen or the master bath, and we decided to go for the kitchen. (It's also right next to a country club. We are so bringing down the tone of the neighborhood.)
Anyway. The outside is great - did I mention the TREEEEEEES? And there's a pear tree in the back bearing fruit! And there's a covered brick patio to one side! And the edges of the yard are so surrounded by planting that you can't see into the neighbor's yards! - although the inside has some Issues that would keep me from buying it if I were in the market, but as it's a rental they merely serve to allow me to show people around while saying "OMG you HAVE to see this, it's so AWFUL!" There's a tacky, tacky, door knocker on the front door that depicts some sort of idealized Aztec or Maya warrior. There's a "garden room" which is obviously a walled-in porch which still has a brick trough full of dirt along one side.** There is the aforementioned master bath. There is a fireplace adorned with brass lion heads. On the good side, there is also an already-installed sprinkler system, and there is a birdbath/Water Feature right in front of the breakfast nook window which has a new pump installed, and which will entertain the cats for hours as they sit and stare out the window.
Here are some pictures from the listing. I'll go take a camera and get more after the move-in date.
Exterior. The grass is not actually brown and dead at the moment. Not sure when the photo was taken.
As you walk in. The photographer is standing on the step up to the entryway. The dark-paneled area will probably end up an office - the shiny stuff between panels is some sort of weird wall stuff - an attempt to be a Design Feature, I believe. The doorway on the left leads to the second bathroom and the (three!) bedrooms. The teeny little edge of doorway you can barely see at the bottom of the wall on the left goes to the kitchen. The garden room is off to the right, but you can't see the doorway. Yes, those are hardwood floors, yes the entire house has them except the kitchen and bathrooms, which are tile. Actually, not sure what the garden room has.
The kitchen. The entrance to it is off to the left of the photographer. The door at the back there leads to the garage. The refrigerator is currently inexplicably in the garage, but the owner says he'll move it in for us - it goes at the far end of the left-side counter, between the counter and the pantry door. The door you can barely see at the end of the right-side counter goes to the patio outside. No microwave, but I own one and a stand I used for it in my previous apartment. It will probably go at the end of the kitchen, smack in the middle of the picture. :) Off to the photographer's right, where you can't see, is the breakfast nook that looks out on the
So. The process. Oh dear god, the process. At one point, Will, our realtor***, said that all his real estate transactions were just one pocket of ridiculousness after another, which is a really good description of the process. And I hear it ONLY GETS WORSE if you're buying, not just renting. I am shaking in my boots at the idea.
Thursday afternoon we take off work early and go to look at the houses. We decide on this one, and go back to the realtor's office to fill out the application paperwork. and fill it out. And fill it out. And I attempt to remember how much I earned at a job seven years ago, and what rent I paid at my previous place. We hand it over to Will, along with the ridiculous and nonrefundable application fee, and leave to go to Austin. Will says they'll fax our current and previous apartment complexes to get rent/late payment/etc. info from them, and that they'll fax the HUGE AMOUNT OF PAPERWORK to the property management company that is managing the house. All is well.
Get a phone call on the road. We need to also fax our most recent paystubs in. Mine's electronic, so I get a PDF copy and put it on
myrialux's thumb drive, so he can take it to Kinko's (oops, sorry, FedEx Office now) and fax it in. He does that Friday morning while I'm in the workshop, and sends a note that he'll send his paystub in on Monday.I get a call that afternoon from our current complex. Ashlee, the manager, says that she can't send the info out without a move-out notice. Great. So I call
myrialux and have him take over, since he's working remotely at a Starbucks and I'm stuck in a class. Ashlee emails the notices to Toby, eventually, and after he picks me up, we go back to the FedEx Office, print and fill them out, and fax them in.Monday
myrialux takes his paystub in to the property management office. We find out that my previous apartment complex - the one where I reported a leak SEVEN TIMES and they didn't fix it until I brought in photographs of the bubble on the ceiling with water running from it - has not sent anything in. I phone them Tuesday and they claim they didn't get the fax. I take off part of the afternoon and go by the property management office to pick up a copy of the form that was faxed,w here I find out that our CURRENT complex still hasn't sent in the info. I call myrialux and tell him to take care of that while I take care of this. I drive across town and hand-deliver the form, then sit in the office until they fill it out and fax it in front of me.****myrialux phones me and tells me that Ashlee is now at a new property so they need to get the new manager to sign off on it. *headdesk*Thursday, still not in. I drop by the current apartment office at lunch and establish that somehow their fax machine doesn't want to talk to the property management office's fax machine and they can't send it in. I try to call to verify the fax number, but it's noon and they're closed for lunch.
myrialux says he'll check in when he goes to pick up his mail. He does so, and finds they're using the correct number, but still not going through. He gets copies of the filled-out forms and brings them to me to hand-deliver - I have taken the afternoon off due to incipient migraine and 4 hours coming to me for working Saturday - and we notice that it says "NO" in answer to "Did the tenants give notice?"ARGH. You wouldn't FAX THESE until we gave notice! So I got copies of our move-out notices and took them and the verification of residency forms by the office, made them copy the forms and put them in our file, then drove to the property management office and turned them in.
Got the call this morning that we were approved. Yay. Now to get the deposit money, sign the lease, and pick up the keys. YAY.
So. If I ever buy a house, should I just quit my job so I can spend the time filling out forms and hand-delivering everything?
---
* Multiple complaints to the complex did nothing to stop them keeping on playing VERY LOUD music. One night it was so loud that
myrialux gave up and called the cops on them. When the cops arrived, they pounded on the door for TWENTY MINUTES before the inhabitants opened up. We assume they were probably Disposing of Stuff and airing the place out. So ... how stupid do you have to be to do drugs AND play your music so loud that someone calls the cops? Rule One of taking drugs: BE COOL ABOUT IT.** If we arrange things so the cats can go in there - there's a door between the house and it - we'll either have to cover it up, or if I decide to attempt to garden again, cover the dirt with shell pieces, small pebbles, etc. that the cats won't want in their toes. Speaking of which, anyone recommend plants that do well in low-light conditions and which thrive on benign neglect?
*** "Our realtor." I feel so grown-up. And yes, I've seen the apropos XKCD comic. Realtor Will confessed he likes to play Rock Band. He's one of us. Although he can't be more than, like, twelve, so he always makes me feel old. XD
**** Using as my excuse that I need to ask about the pet deposit I never received. I've given up on getting it back already, but I'm not too concerned because when I first moved in, the previous company that owned the complex had a weird deal going on where you bought a $25 bond from this other company instead of paying the security deposit. Only they somehow marked down on my paperwork that I'd paid the full security deposit, so upon move-out, when I got the letter detailing all the damage done to the apartment they had to charge me for (i.e. carpet cleaning and nail holes in the wall, primarily) from the new owners which mysteriously somehow added up to the exact amount of the security deposit ... well, the joke's on them because I never paid the full security deposit. I can live without the pet deposit.