Heather and I bought a house today.  Now it needs to be inspected and appraised, etc.  So, assuming everything goes well it will officially be ours at the end of June.  It is near 43^rd Ave and Union Hills.

Here is the listing

I also took pictures, and will get them up soon.  Heather and I are so excited, we finally bought a house!

We made an offer on a house!
I'll get pictures up soon, but the bad news is that someone else is also making an offer.  We will know tonight whether or not our offer is taken.  I will keep everyone in the loop as soon as we know.

Also, there is a new poll on the index page.

Whoa!  We sold our condo!  For the listed price!  And we're keeping our fridge!

We never even made the counter offer.  Our realtor was talking with the realtor of the person who made the original offer on our place and mentioned what we were going to counter with.  Instead of waiting for our counter, they just gave us another offer of the asking price without the refrigerator.  So, we sold this place in 5 days.  Pretty impressive, huh?

So, Heather and I are homeless now.  We have to vacate the premises by June 17^th.  In other words, unless we find a home we like and close on it before that time (not likely) we are shacking up with my mother-in-law.  (Thanks Ginny!)  Well, the sell isn't completely in the clear.  The next ten days is the "inspection period."  Assuming they don't find any problems with the place during the inspection, the sale is final.

After talking with the mortgage broker, it looks like we can afford a more expensive place than I originally thought.  However, if possible I would like to keep our monthly mortgage cost to a minimum.  So, I may still have to get a little forceful with our realtor...

Well, I better get back to boxing stuff up.  Oh, one cool thing about the realty company we are selling and buying with is that they have a moving truck.  So, that's one expense we get to avoid (although I guess we are paying 6% of our sale price for the stupid thing).

Our place was listed on Saturday for $64,500.  On Monday (yesterday), someone looked at the place and made an offer for $60,000 and they wanted our refrigerator (not part of the listing).  Today, two more people came to look at the condo.  It will be interesting to see if this high activity continues through the week.  We are planning on making a counter-offer and ask for our list price and not include the refrigerator.  It is still early in the game, and there is obviously interest in the place.

We went out looking at houses last Friday, and saw another one we liked.  I have posted pictures of the house if you want to check them out.  There were two problems with this last place.  They are asking $145,000 and we may need to come in under $140k (I'll know for sure tomorrow, the mortgage broker is running some numbers for us).  The other problem is that the yards are gorgeous and I don't know if I would be able to maintain them...  Oh, and the place is all right off of 43^rd Ave, a fairly busy street.

Our realtor is frustrating me.  She keeps showing us places that are out of our price range.  After hearing from the mortgage broker, I am going to be firm with her on the maximum price we are willing to pay for a house.  Either she is having problems finding houses in our price range (which I doubt because I am finding them on ZipRealty), or she is trying to sell us a more expensive house to increase her commission.  If she doesn't shape up, we may have to give her the boot...

We have to make sure our home looks nice before we leave in the morning.  Making the bed sucks.

My home improvement projects aren't usually as disastrous as Tim Taylor's, but I rarely take on projects that large.  I think the last big thing I did was replacing the kitchen faucet, and it wasn't too difficult.  The difficult part was removing the old one.  So, when Heather wanted to replace our bedroom curtain there was that moment of panic while I thought about whether or not it was something I could do.  It sounded easy enough, but that initial thought can be deceiving.  I tried to think of the dangers involved in installing a curtain rod.  The only things I could think of was that I might not mount it evenly, or that I would put many holes in the wall while attempting to mount it evenly.  In the end, I decided that it was a task I could undertake and replied to Heather's request in a way that conveyed my deep thought and consideration put into the decision.  I said, "Sure."  If you're curious how this all turned out, check out my Condo Improvement Pictures.

The pictures from our second house hunting experience are up.

Here are the listings if you want to see them.

We had the realtor by our house on Tuesday to take a look at the place and to get our listing put together.  We are going to list the place for $64,500.  At that price it is priced to move because the last two places were listed for a bit more than that.  Hopefully we get a lot of lookers and offers.  Once those are coming in we will feel a lot better about making an offer on a house (once we find one we like...).  It's looking like we aren't going to replace the carpet, but I think we are going to replace the linoleum.  I will post pictures of any improvements we make.  Heather and I are also considering painting the bathroom.  This home buying and selling stuff is really exhausting...

I've started looking up houses myself on ZipRealty, and I've found some nice places that I'm not sure why our realtor hasn't been showing us.  I'm sending her the information on them so that we can look at the houses.  The real estate market in Phoenix is pretty active, it seems that every time I find a house that I want to check out it is sold by the time we get a chance to look.  For this reason, we are going to try to start looking at houses on Friday afternoons.  I normally get every other Friday off at work, and instead I'm going to work a half day every Friday.  Heather normally works for half a day on Fridays.

Wish us luck, and if you're in the market for a one bedroom condominium in Tempe right down the street from ASU, come check out our place.

Good news: I got the pictures from our first house hunting foray up.

The pictures from those four houses filled up the 128MB memory card in the digital camera.  As a result, we've decided that we are only going to take pictures of houses we like.  So, after this weekend I hope we have more pictures, but if we don't like any houses, then no pictures.  Also, no more humorous bashing on other people's houses...

The realtors are coming to our place next Tuesday to look it over and make suggestions on what we should improve.  I'm not too excited about the home selling process. It is going to be weird to think that other people are walking through my condo when I'm not home.  Then there's the whole issue of trying to make your place as neutral as possible.  I think I have good taste, but I suppose that is subjective...

Have you ever priced comforters?  Those things are damn expensive!  All the decently priced ones look like poop.  It's like we judge our financial class by quality of decorative bed covering.  What happened to looking at the kind of car someone drives?  I swear, when I look at some of the ugly designs out there I can't help but think that they were designed with the clearance rack in mind...

The new version of my web site is now live!  Hopefully everyone likes this new layout better, and I would appreciate any feedback (positive or negative).  Also, let me know if you run into any blind links, or if something just doesn't work or look right.  I tested the site with the newest versions of Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Opera, so if you have any problems and you aren't running the latest version you might try upgrading.

Welcome to TRANSMATRIX.NET 2.0!

Heather and I looked inside four houses this Sunday.  I took pictures, so you can see the good, the bad, and the ugly.  I'll try and get them up soon.  We only really liked one of them, but hopefully that changes.  We're going out looking again this Saturday.  Wish us luck!