Searching for a House, the Online Edition

Alright fellow House Hunters and blog-readers, we talked a little bit about my 5 Must Haves earlier this week and I promised a conversation about the MLS. The MLS (or Multiple Listing System) is a tool that Realtor's use to list their client's homes, and search for homes for their buyers. If you're not a Realtor you would use various websites and services such as Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com. The danger of all of the sites is that they don't update regularly. They update about as often as your grandmother updates her facebook account. Or maybe as often as mine. You could have a very socially active grandmother, who am I to judge?

Zillow has, on multiple occasions, shown me a house for sale that I loved, only for me to find out that the listing was sold or withdrawn entire months before I even saw the home! I try to keep up with the various apps and services so that I can better understand what my potential clients are seeing, but sometimes I get sad.

Now, down to MLS. The wife and I decided to actually start taking one night a week to look at local listings. We have our "must haves" and we know where we would, optimally, like to live. We have a general idea what we want the bones of our home to be and that we don't want to have a crawlspace because snakes live down there. So when I went to input our search parameters I was relatively sure my search would be limited, with not a lot of options out there, right? Wrong. Even thought the current Real Estate landscape is definitely in the favor of the Seller, there are a lot of properties out there, they're just not all...perfect. Or you know...good.

I had to narrow and narrow my search, almost nitpicking the homes I didn't like. "Well, this one is facing north so, mildew might grow on it and there's a chance I could see Jesus' face growing in there and I don't want all the added attention... and this one is neon-purple in places it shouldn't be and who paints anymore?" I know, I know exactly what you're thinking, is there any place where neon-purple shouldn't be?

Didn't get enough club at the club? Well we brought the club to your room. Now you can club, even when you get home from the club.

You're welcome.

The reality is that the wife and I have been taught, through years of hard education, plopped down in front of DIY TV, specifically: Property Brothers and Rehab Addict...to look past the paint and current decoration or even layout. But at some point, you (the buyer) have to remember that, looking past the paint, the carpet, the kitchen, etc...it can get expensive surprisingly fast. If you find a home that's listed for 30K under what you're okay with spending then, yes, look past everything! If you have room to remodel and redesign then you should! Make your new home truly yours (well, if you have the time, desire and know how to actually do the work.)

But, let's say your price-ceiling is 200K and you find a home that you feel needs a lot of immediate work, listed for, let's say, 190K...unless you manage to get your lower offer accepted, you may end up living in a house you don't love...and a general fact of life is: if you don't do it (whatever it is) when you first think about it, then you probably won't. There's a good chance that if you buy a home with "plans to remodel in the future" that you'll just end up living in a house you don't like talking to your friends about how this kitchen is so getting redone next year.

So we've begun to narrow down our search even further. We're okay with purchasing a home that needs small amounts of work that I can actually do on my own, or is affordable to have done (say carpeting one or two rooms.) We're okay with problems that are mainly decor based, although after seeing pictures of about four homes with male, graphically, intensely-nude statues in the front yard and one home with what I'm pretty sure was a mounted jackalope on the wall, I understand why my clients sometimes have issues looking past what they see immediately.

Elmer Fudd's unicorn.

Since we aren't actively ready to buy quite yet, we also eliminated any houses that had just the one picture--of the front of the house. To me that says two things:

1) There is a good chance that this house isn't real, it's like Clint Eastwood real--a prop house that may or may not have been the background for a shootout or two. You know, the kind of place where you can walk in the front door, right into the backyard.

2) Or, entirely more likely: this is a horribly lazy Realtor (or the property is Bank Owned, or both.)

Many of the photos we saw on our first day of searching were like this:

Admittedly this would be fine for a hardware store, or a tile show, but this leaves out important information like...where is it? What does the rest of the bathroom (I hope it's a bathroom) look like?

Sweet! A curtain! Even if the Seller did decide to leave this precious gem behind for me to treasure forever, and possibly ever...I hope the Realtor knows that I can, in fact, buy a new shower curtain.

Buy the end of our first night of actually looking for a home I'd found as many ways to not be lazy as a Realtor or crazy as a home decorator as I had actual houses I was interested in. (And we found quite a few homes we were interested in.)

If you have any funny house hunting experiences or things you've seen that can't be unseen, hit me up in the comments below, or on facebook! 

The House Hunt is On

My wife and I decided awhile ago that our townhouse was no longer for us. Well, she bought into what I had been saying since the record breaking day where I knocked the same wall decoration off the same wall ten times via the exercise of moving from the hallway into the office/guest room. After about two months of this rinse-repeat process I had a really sore shoulder and our wall decoration became noticeably thinner.

Now, I'm not insinuating that we want to buy a home because I knock things off walls. This is simply an example of the problem. We have no work-space, where the Hell are we going to put our future little ones and I am most certainly not a dog-walker. One more night of me standing out in the rain/cold/heat/wind/humidity/mosquitoes staring angrily at my dogs as they smell one piece of grass so relentlessly, so deeply I think they might be trying to actually ingest it through their nostrils and I might break down into an outdoor rant about how much I hate walking my picky freakin' dogs. I want a yard so badly that when I look at my back porch I imagine adding chores like lawn mowing, gardening and building a fence with a smile. Something my parents would tell you I was not so quick to smile about in my youth.

So the time has come and we are on the house hunt. Conveniently I'm a Realtor, meaning I don't have to hire anyone, find anyone, vet anyone, or any other thing you do when person hunting for a house hunter.

The first step in house hunting as a couple, as those of you with some experience in this may know, is deciding what both of you actually like. In some relationships that would have been more difficult. Luckily for my wife she loves Jonathan from the Property Brothers and his sense of style and I was a clean slate with no opinions on anything involving what the inside of a house should look like. (Basically, we like mostly the same things.) So we put our 5 Must Haves together and discussed them.

Ours rounded out to something like this:

1) Must have yard.

2) Must have storage space.

3) Minimum of 3 bedrooms.

4) Must be in a reasonable price range. The modern economy has everyone in a bind, and typically I wouldn't recommend worrying too much about price, but rather worrying about your monthly bill. However, keeping track of interest rates and discount points is never a bad thing.

5) Must have good bones. I'm not afraid of work. I also happen to have a father-in-law who is very gung-ho about his daughter and would love to help us put the home we want together. The point here being, a lot of the times we have to look past the paint, the kitchen, and the general decorative arrangement and scheme of the house and see what we like about it. Room placement, room size, location (location, location) etc.


We can always adjust our "Must Haves" as the situation changes, but it's not a bad thing to put together. In fact, we've been trying to apply the idea to other things in our lives, such as Must Haves for our diet, exercise and general rules of our relationship. For example: she must be perfect in all things and I must be catered to relentlessly. Or did I get that backwards?

If you have any great "Must Haves" you think I should care about more, leave a comment, or even if you want to share your ideas. (Or good homes you know for sale in the area!)

Next we talk about the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and why it's weird to browse with your spouse. (Mind you, if you're not a Realtor you'd probably be using Trulia, Zillow or Realtor.com, but the general idea is the same.)

10 Year Reunion and the Fever

Tonight is my Ten Year High School Reunion. I'm making it sound proper to show you the depths of confusion to which this statement brings me. I mean...what the Hell happened? A few years ago my biggest concern was getting to Best Buy on time (And I rarely did. Alafaya traffic was a fickle mistress.) or even what movie to go see that weekend. Now my wife decides such things. No need for decisions here!

But then I started in teaching and I started in coaching and I went to bed one night and woke up here. Ten years out of high school and not sure where the time went. I don't know what to say to my old friends about where life has taken me. Just as I'm sure they'll have trouble telling me...because I'll be talking more and it's difficult to get a word in edgewise.

A few short years ago, I was an over qualified salesman working at a Best Buy. Then I was an under-qualified teacher working with kids with disabilities. Now I'm a perfectly qualified Real Estate Agent...I'm a husband. I'm a homeowner. I mean I blinked...like maybe one time.

As an aside--many, many years ago, I was sitting in the backseat of my father's car. Him, my brother and I were going to the grocery store. My mother was pregnant with Erin and we had to pick up something for her. Not sure what, I was nine years old at the time. It's been awhile. My father was tired and it was late, he was keeping the air conditioner at a little past iceberg, but before zero degrees Kelvin--he said it was to keep him awake. I was strewn across the backseat futilely trying to use my shirt as a blanket, stretching it out past my legs and loudly complaining to my father about how cold I was. To say that I regretted my decision to accompany them was an understatement. I was positive I was going to die with a cute icicle mustache and ironic frost goatee. As I lay in that back seat, slowly dying,  a thought suddenly blindsided me...one day I too would have a wife. I would have a wife and I would need to go to the bank late at night to cash a check for my job (Nine year old me did not foresee direct deposit, or the internet...) or I would need to go to the grocery store to get her something she wanted or my children needed...and because I was nine years old and far too young to handle the complexities of that concept, I sat paralyzed and freezing the entire way home. What a scary idea! It was gut-wrenching! Me! A dad! A husband! I was nine! I wasn't even in the Majors at my Little League yet...I mean we were still in Coach-Pitch! This was too much.

Fifteen years later and it was still too much. Sure, I had learned how to manage what little money I had. I had learned how to go to the grocery store and ignore the healthy stuff and get Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and feel proud of myself as I cleaned the kitchen. I dated, I had fun, but that same stomach churning fear was still there. Responsibility was coming straight for me, brights on and honking and I was wide eyed and stuck in the middle of the road.

Then I met Amanda and I just...wasn't. They tell me that's how it happens. It's like a switch in our heads--the male mind, one day you want to stay up late drinking with your friends and the next day you want to stay up late drinking with your friends and go home to your beautiful wife. It's a subtle shift.

Now my wife has a lot of more...adult friends. Somehow, through the entire course of my life I've managed to keep the same ten or so friends. I added two new friends right out of high school and one right out of college and I've sort of...plateaued. Now, I've made a lot of really great acquaintances, people who I consider "friends" but they all know the adult me. The guy who showed up for work everyday, the guy who posts on facebook about his wife and going to trivia on Wednesdays. The teacher, the coach or the salesman. But my best friends--they know me as the guy who plays World of Warcraft and talks about writing novels (a new novel idea each week, of course...) They know me as the guy who used to get them into movies and whose mom was a bit too scary to make fun of--she's always listening. And--not to belittle those friends, my closest friends...but only one of them is married, and while yes, he does have five children, it's easy to ignore him as an outlier, the exception to the Childless-Friend-of-Dave Rule.

Not so with my wife's friends. No siree, Bob. Her friends are all married and have been since college. Her friends are all having children. All of them. Like on rotation--like it's a damn job. Like they planned it and my wife is next.

Naturally they all have baby showers, as is custom. (We have one tomorrow in Jacksonville.) And as is custom my wife goes to Babies and Stuff (she's on her way there now) or wherever it is women go when baby shower invites go out and she proceeds to purchase baby products and says things like, "We'll need that when we have children." Or "Oh, we're definitely going to have ours off the boob by a year, ha ha!" "White noise machines are integral to getting your children to be able to sleep easily the rest of their lives!" 

Of course she ignores my stricken looks and confused faces. I mean, how does she even know all this stuff? Why is she even thinking about it. In my head you just kind of live life until you're pregnant then you figure it out from there. Not my wife...no. She is prepared. Like...she could teach a class on how to prepare for preparing to be a mom. We could call it  Pre-Pregnancy Motherhood and How to be Ready for Pregnancy, Motherhood, Pregnant Friends, and the "You should be a Mother Already Pressure" of Mothers, Mothers-in-Law and Grandmother 101. We'd have to shorten the name to fit it into the course catalog.

So I've been informed that my wife most likely (definitely) has Baby Fever. By "been informed" I really mean "been informed by my wife and every woman who talks to me or my wife up to and including people who don't know me that well through facebook." I've always heard jokes about Biological Clocks and been told by men with sorrow in their eyes to keep your bright, young, pretty wife away from jaded old mothers because misery loves company and women will convince other women to join them in their suffering and ha ha what a laugh!

Then it happened! Much like my High School Reunion being tonight sneaking up on me, so too has this. Yesterday I was on a couch with a girl I barely knew watching a Knight's Tale thinking about how kick-ass it was that a chick liked this super sweet movie and mourning over the recent death of my darling Heath Ledger, and then "blink." I'm a married man sitting in front of a computer thinking about cashing checks and selling houses and going to the grocery store in a needlessly freezing car just to try and stay awake.