Rusty's Blog

I failed to mark the actual day (Thursday, Jan. 29) that we bought our new house on my blog, but I do want to write something down. So here’s a summary of some recent events:

• The process of buying and closing on our new house went surprisingly smoothly. It was quick and there were no major snags to speak of.
• Everyone we dealt with was both nice and competent. Our agent and lender were awesome. I’m now Facebook friends with both the seller’s real estate agent and with the closing attorney. The seller left us chocolate and champagne in our fridge.
• To be that person who talks about social media and calls it by its name for a second, it’s a very small world now. As soon as we walked in the office for the closing attorney, we were instantly recognized from Flickr photos Amber had tagged “East Atlanta.” Tagging Flickr photos “East Atlanta” causes them to show up in a badge on the EAVBuzz website, which is where the attorney saw them. There were already people talking about us and the house on there (which was simultaneously nice and a little weird).
• We’re planning to paint three rooms before we move in: the bedroom, the guest bedroom/Amber’s office/pole studio, and the kitchen. In that order, meaning if I’m sick of painting or we run out of time after the first two rooms are done, the Tennessee Orange kitchen may have to wait until after we move in. I’ll eventually want to paint my office, but it can wait until later.
• Painting will probably take us longer than it takes some people because I’m a firm believer you always need to use a coat of primer, even if the walls are already painted. Some of you will probably think that’s overkill since the walls are a slightly off-white cream color now, but you’re wrong.
• I’ve been shopping for tool sheds. I’d love to build one, but time, money, Amber’s aversion to wood sheds, and my aversion to plastic sheds won’t permit right now. We need to have some sort of storage out there by the end of March. That seems to narrow the options to an Arrow Shed. I dread buying one of these because of all the people writing about what a pain in the ass they are to put together. If you have a better idea, please share it.

That’s it for now. The lease on our apartment doesn’t run out until the end of March, which ought to give us a decent amount of time to paint and get moved over there. That date will creep up quick though, I’m sure.

I like how sometimes people think I’m kidding when I say things like “I’m going to paint my kitchen Tennessee Orange.” I’ve mocked up an approximation of what this would look like in Photoshop for your viewing pleasure:

Technically this isn’t our kitchen until January 29. Knock on wood, everything seems in order to close on our new house that day. If you haven’t been reading Amber’s blog, here’s what it looks like:

She has more pictures and thoughts here.

A chapter in Things I Should Be Writing About that has yet to make it onto my blog is our house hunt. We’re aiming to buy something early next year, preferably before our apartment lease ends in March. Amber already documented some of the process in a couple of posts on her site. Here’s the most recent one.

I’m calling this a house hunt here because dwelling hunt doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but we’re still keeping our options open as to what we buy and where we buy it.

The only real dealbreaker is that we live ITP vs. OTP. We’ve been looking at neighborhoods all over town, just trying to get a feel for what’s out there and where we might like to live that we can afford. The serious search starts in December when our Realtor starts sending us listings for things we might end up buying.

I’ve become very partial to bungalows with big front porches like the one Amber put up in her post:

Bungalow in Adair Park

But we’re not ruling anything out yet. We’re leaning toward houses, but would consider a townhome or condo in a really cherry location. We’d like to live somewhere with something we can walk to.

On one level Midtown would be nice because that’s where we work and there’s a lot in walking distance there. In that case though, it would have to be a fucking steal in an amazing location, because the bigoted brand of NIMBYism prevalent in Midtown is a huge negative weighing against living there for me.

Here are some other quick thoughts on areas we’ve toured:

• Decatur is mostly out of our price range, which is a shame because we like it here
• Avondale Estates also is probably too steep
• Oakhurst is likely out of our price range as well, but it’s possible something could come up there by the time we’re ready to buy. It has a nice village area with restaurants, coffee shops, etc. which would be a real plus
• Toco Hills had houses that weren’t that impressive for prices that were out of our range, mostly due to being near good schools, I think
• East Lake has a few things we’d consider
• East Atlanta has more things we’d consider, and it’d be nice to get something close to East Atlanta Village
• We didn’t get a good feeling from Grant Park. The houses close to the park itself were out of our price range, and the stuff that was in our price range was either in a sketchy area or kind of hidden away in a non-descript area. Out of everywhere we’ve visited so far, I have the most trouble imagining myself living there
• The Westview/Adair Park area had a few neat houses there. Lots of neighborhood association flags and stuff, which I take as a good sign
• Edgewood has some neat houses
• There’s property down near Avondale Mall, Candler Road, etc. that could get annexed by City of Decatur eventually and is worth a look since the property values would almost immediately shoot up (along with the taxes, so there’s that). There are some other decent neighborhoods down Candler
• We didn’t see a whole lot down Lawrenceville Highway, but we haven’t looked very hard either

I’m missing a few, but there you go. There are still so many other areas we need to check out in more depth. Kirkwood, North Decatur, East Point, stuff near Howell Mill Road, damn near everything on the west side of the city. That’s only a fraction of them really.

The latest development is we got pre-qualified for a home loan (typo: home load) yesterday. Amber’s credit is a little better than mine, as I’ve got a bullshit collection from Cingular on my credit that I need to try to get stricken (and a couple of other dings).

A couple of years ago, I switched to Verizon and Cingular locked me out of my online account, which was set to “no paper invoices.” Turns out they hadn’t yet tallied the final balance yet, and never sent me a bill for it. By the time I found out about it, it had already been sent to a collection agency.

The lesson to be taken here is that if you cancel cell phone service and they never send you a final bill, it’s still your fault if it’s not paid. They’re dicks like that.

The worst case scenario is it might add somewhere between one-eighth and one-quarter of a point to our interest rate. Could be worse I guess, but that shit adds up.