All of this I learned after stumbling upon this beauty awaiting its fate on trash day. (Further evidence that there is always a big dog pacing around in my 5-foot radius.)

A little research–made easy by the fact that I knew it was a speaker and it read Norelco in the upper right front of the unit–helped me determine that it’s the Rembrandt Norelco ‘Exhibition’ Speaker Enclosure in blond, developed and Guild-crafted by Philips of the Netherlands. T-7 Loudspeakers, too. Pretty badass, right? Check out this product ad that I found online:

Based on the file name of the image, I’m led to believe this was a new product release in the year 1959, and I’m so pleased to have found it because, hello, it’s going to look delightful in our new home.

So, here I was, lugging the f-r-e-e curbed speaker into the back of my car in a Rochester suburb, squealing in glee that the robust scent of basement that it eminated might mean that it actually stood a chance of working or being repaired within reason, and settled in knowing that if nothing else, it’s cute little legs would be great to repurpose on a different piece of furniture. Really, so perfect for our new to-be 50′s ranch.

Its backside, I knew would need to be replaced as it left a trail of debris along the backseat of the Subaru, but since it needed to be removed anyways for exploratory measures, I knew it wouldn’t be a problem to replace it with a piece of luan.

With a prybar, I loosened the barely attached back panel to reveal… nothing.

So, the entire interior has been vacated, with the exception of a random box component that had been rolling freely with nails popping out of it while I drove backroads through our neighborhood (luckily, didn’t puncture the screen). We’re pretty stoked.

I cleaned the existing insulation and dust out of the unit and am left with a solid hardwood mid-century vintage shell of a speaker, not so bad, and it’s cool enough of an encasement to make us wonder if we can fit it with a new speaker (techies out there, advise away!). If not, we should use it as a place in the new house to store electronics, like the DVR, Wii box, and wireless-related gadgets.

Any awesome salvaged finds on your own hands lately?

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I loved these canvas bins the moment I saw them, just as much as I loved the Phoebe doormat that I hand-selected and “reviewed” (a.k.a. swooned over) here. Functional storage? I always need it. Great colors? Check. Ikat-licious and reversible? Perfect little details. I knew it would suit our current house as well as any future house that we found (this is something I had picked out and ordered even before we had found the house we’re preparing to buy, but I knew it would translate to any new house we would purchase).

Now living with us, it has become a great piece of decor in our bedroom, serving as a place to store–of all things–my gym clothes, which I never seem to have enough room for in my drawers. The new house has plenty of storage though, so hopefully this charmer will be able to take up residence somewhere less riddled by socks and running shorts, like in the living room, holding magazines or extra blankets for the couch.

Up close, you can get a glimpse of how the bag stays upright so well. Two thin plastic pieces slide into sleeves and keep it lookin’ pretty and not floppy, even when it is empty. (Side note: Good tip if you’re ever going to DIY some fabric bins, yo.)

I know we just barely made it through Mother’s Day, but with Father’s Day lurking just around the corner (we’re sure you didn’t get any reminders of that whilst spoiling mom), you might want to see what gift ideas Uncommon Goods has up its sweet little sleeves. My favorite? These dog blueprints.

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What is different about this casual celebration is that it’s (dear-god-hopefully) the last of the years we’ll celebrate in this little home.

State of moving aside, we never, ever should have put off tending to our planter beds last fall when the flowering and harvesting season ended, no matter how distracted we were by banks and house shopping, or our wedding, or whatever it was that we were preoccupied with. Shame, shame. We just about deserve to be having to look at this daily. Death and overgrowth in the form of dried out and leafless tomato plants, and weeds so big that we weren’t 100% sure that they weren’t actual plants.

What makes me feel especially lazy is that working together, our clean-up efforts only took about 2 hours, and covered much more ground than our little square planters. With a little bit of hand weeding, tilling, and edging with a flat edge shovel, we left the backyard looking like this:

If you’re wondering what it is we left in those planters, they’re raspberries that either shot under the ground and up through the planter holes (big mama plants are in the back left corner), or, more likely, we experienced some significant bird poop seed transport. The babies that seeded are doing really well–and by that I mean most are already as thick as my thumb–so we decided to leave them to flourish. Also worth noting, a bunch of plants along the left fence were perennials from last year’s deck planters. They survived!

P.S. You can read about my second home-a-versary here, and last years, here.

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I had been not-so-patiently waiting for that taunting “for sale” sign to change its status, and as a result of the home inspection repairs and appraisal that had happened in the days prior, the change in signage happened lickety-split.

Regarding the much awaited FHA appraisal, the report we received on Tuesday morning is so much more comprehensive than either of us imagined; the property is rare one in the city, which already knew but were thrilled to have confirmed, and challenged the appraiser to find six homes (they had to expand their reach to include a 3-mile radius, and this part of town isn’t remote by any means) to compare home values and validate our potential home’s worth. Every property chosen needed to be discounted or credited in its own way; all of the homes cited in the report were still quite different, like, waterfront, where ours is not, or on a small lot, where in ours is almost 2 wooded acres, or having drastically different square footage, number of bathrooms, or a different home style (colonials and ranches were most commonly used in our case).

The assessment of the property thoroughly impressed us, and broke down the home value compared to the value of the lot itself, which was a surprisingly huge part of the overall assessed value. It identified most of what we already knew about the house and its specs, but shockingly did not ask for any repairs to be made, hallelujah; we were almost certain that we would be required to update the electrical box (it’s on fuses, not breakers!) and repaint some areas of chipping paint on the windows and doors just to be able to secure our loan.

The home was appraised for our contracted price, which was really something that we weren’t expecting. The previous appraised price that was linked to the sale of the home was actually $30,000+ below where our offer stood, and we were more than a little bit nervous that we wouldn’t be able to afford the home if we couldn’t get a solid loan from the bank. The good news is that the appraiser matched the home value to our offer, a.k.a. was able to prove based on comps that our offer was valid, meaning that we will be able to get the loan we hoped for, but on the bad side it means we can’t negotiate the price of the home down a smidgen more (we optimistically hoped we could shave off about $10,000 more with a low appraisal). And let’s not talk about how this is going to affect the tax situation–taxes are crazy in New York–let’s just relax and reiterate how totally safe we feel in in that we aren’t radically overpaying for this gem of a house, or trying to make up its home value with home improvement projects.

We’ve had a final few rounds of signed papers to deliver to our underwriter this week (how they could need to know any more about us is unfathomable, they practically know our respective underwear sizes), and hope to hear of more progress in the coming days.

In regards to other things, now that we’re this far along in the buying process and feeling pretty confident that we can make it happen, we’ve let our minds wander back to other projects, things we’ve been meaning to do, update, clean, etc. before we rent this house, so hopefully you’ll be back to seeing posts from me on a more regular basis.

Happy dancing all around!

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I’ve received a lot of emails over the last year inquiring about how we like them, how they’re holding up, etc., and for all the times that I’ve always been able to enthusiastically share that the vinyl resilient tiles themselves are holding up really well (are easy to clean, nice to look at, nice to walk on, add a lot to the room with their 12″x24″ span), I’ve had to disclose that the grout has been another issue.

The vinyl resilient special order tiles that we bought at The Home Depot were actually first used (tested, if you will) during our bathroom remodel. During that effort, we had done a lot of prep work to the bathroom floor in the way of installing subfloor in spots and underlayment all over. With it stapled within an inch of its life, we had a nice, solid even surface to be tiling on. While we’re having problems of mammoth proportions in the downstairs kitchen, the bathroom tiles and the grout have held up nearly flawlessly, which is kind of amazing considering that as our only bathroom, it gets a lot of foot traffic, and because it’s more inclined to get wet post-shower.

The main difference between the bathroom and the kitchen has to do with the condition of the floor, and more specifically, the bounciness of the floor. The kitchen, a wider span, has a definite case of the squeaks caused by gaps where the floor joists and the subfloor no longer sit together. The same can actually be said for the whole first floor of our home, and the bedrooms too. Squeaky place. Every little flex in the subfloor has had an impact on the condition of the grout in our tiles, because unlike the tiles themselves, the grout can’t flex without crumbling. And once it crumbles, it’s swept up and away, leaving me with… nothing except un-sweepable dirt in the gaps.

The damage is mostly in the areas that experience the most foot traffic, so it hasn’t been as bad in areas along the wall or near appliances. This is about as OK as it gets in our kitchen. When you aren’t so macro on it, it doesn’t look bad at all.

We’ve thought a lot about how to correct this. Our first mission (last fall, actually) was to do serious floor repair on the floorboards that we could access in the basement. Pete would stand in the kitchen and squeak the floors (he weighs more than I do and can make the squeaks happen more effectively) while I would stand in the basement with a piece of chalk and mark exactly where the squeaks were happening. I could usually see some bounce in the subfloor even if there wasn’t an audible sound. By making shims and installing them into the problem areas, we helped our squeak-and-bounce situation a lot, well enough to get through the winter without feeling so much compelled to repair our damaged grout, and probably well enough to keep the rest of the grout from loosening so easily, but not well enough to cure the problem entirely. And anyways, we had already lost a lot of grout by this point.

We talked about removing all of the grout and applying new, hopeful that the reduced bounce would serve us well and keep the floor in a better state, but that was before we were seriously talking about moving and hopefully renting the house.

Funny how something can change your course of action so easily, because now we’re talking about ripping the floor out entirely and replacing it with something that won’t be subject to grout crackage. Something cork, or something vinyl resilient that isn’t groutable.

Anyone else with groutable vinyl resilient tiles experiencing the same breakage that we are? Any tips for fixing that we haven’t thought of?

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I wasn’t sure if my silence last week was curious, but it was only because nothing dramatic has changed in our situation. The day after I shared our last update, we heard back from the seller’s attorney confirming that everything was legally binding and we could consider ourselves the official accepted offer. We also learned that our mortgage was a go-go, and we could definitely be approved for the amount we were asking for. Both approvals made us feel all joyous and elated. We celebrated with burgers.

It was a paperwork-intensive week, where we printed, signed, and scanned nearly 100 pages to get the details of our loan approved. Paperwork aside, we were back to sleeping pretty well at night.

We thought we had wrapped up the process of negotiating repairs that arose during our home inspection; we had asked for about $3,500 to cover venting, chimney, fire wall, electrical, minor plumbing, and sump pump repairs, but the sellers had negotiated with us until we reached an agreed upon $2,000 discount. Then something strange happened, the sellers went back on their word and decided to bid out the repairs and take care of many of them without involving us, presumably because they thought they could get them done for less than $2,000 and could get away with not offering us anything at closing. We let them go about their decision, expecting the whole while that the repairs they were offering to do would exceed $2,000, because we had priced our offer only covering with materials, and planned on being able to do most of the repairs ourselves to save on labor costs.

Turns out that we were right, and per the receipts we’ve been seeing, they did end up paying about that much to make some of the repairs with a local handyman. Additionally, they also provided us a quote for the chimney repairs–a whopping $3,750–and ended up crediting us $2,500 additional off at closing to help with those expenses. A.K.A. We think we’ve inadvertently won this battle, having most of the repairs made, and still ended up with a credit for closing.

Here’s some more beef that you don’t yet know about, but might benefit from learning from our experiences:

• We chose to get an FHA loan for this mortgage, but not because we were limited to a small downpayment. It’s because we went about getting this loan with cosigners, and no conventional mortgage allows cosigners. Don’t judge prematurely, there’s good reason.

• The FHA loan will require a new property assessment, which we pay for, and is used for the bank to guarantee a few things: that the home is in acceptable living condition (this is usually when they address things like missing railings, broken windows, and peeling paint, and require repairs to be made before closing), and more importantly in our situation, make sure that the property value aligns with the agreed upon price of the home. Banks are not inclined to give a mortgage to an FHA buyer if the sale price of the home (the amount financed) exceeds the property value, because they don’t want the buyer to be upside down.

Some fake numbers: Say you’re buying a home for $100,000, and you’re putting $10,000 as a downpayment (total mortgage, $90,000). The bank only thinks your house is worth $85,000, and therefore doesn’t want to give you a loan for the full $90,000 that you are asking for. You can use this information as leverage to get the price of the home down further, and maybe you’ll be lucky and the seller will drop his price to meet the appraised value, or maybe he won’t, and you’ll have the opportunity to walk away from the sale. In some instances if the seller won’t drop his price enough and the buyer won’t bail, there ends up being an exchange of funds at closing that aren’t related to the loan paperwork; a payout if you will. At least this is how we’re understanding it… at the moment we are anticipating having to be in a payout situation that will lessen the amount we can put down against our mortgage.

It’s not common for this to happen, at least not in the housing market we’re dealing within, and it’s probably even more rare for property value to be so much in question when there wasn’t a bidding war to drive up the price of the home.

If you follow me so far, this is sucky. And there’s a few more reasons I’m bringing it up.

• One good thing about the FHA appraisal, is that it will stick with the house for the next six months. So, the sellers will be obligated to share it with any future offers if ours falls through; for anyone else looking to buy with an FHA loan, they’ll know upfront what the appraised value is so that they can negotiate accurately from day 1. If the appraisal is substantially lower than the sellers want to earn from the sale, they’re bound to have a harder time selling. Reality check time.

• We’re those screwballs who appear to be willing to pay more than the house is worth. Want, want, want. We’re in the position where we already know that our agreed upon price is well-above the previously assessed home value (we unfortunately don’t know if it was assessed last year or last decade). We feel so stupid-greedy, but we swear up and down that the property has a lot of potential, and that it’s worth what we’re offering. The FHA loan has drawbacks, longer processing time, insurance premiums, but hopefully it’ll be worth it in the end. On the other hand, for reference, if we went with a conventional mortgage we would not held to the same loan restrictions; we would’ve been pre-approved for a certain amount with a certain downpayment and worked to stay within that pre-approved amount.

• Co-signers. Back to the topic that makes me feel oddly self-conscious of our situation, but I’m sure we’re not alone in exploring. Last fall when we got started in the mortgage process, the bank found a loophole in that Pete had been consistently an independent freelancer for many years. This discounted his total income, that’s for sure, it made him look like he made only about 20% of what he made at his full-time job, but because his last two tax statements didn’t reflect him being self-employed full-time, we were stuck with that reality. We had on record what he had been earning monthly for the first 9 months of the year, but it wasn’t enough for the bank to grant him a large mortgage himself. Too risky. Bringing me into the equation to have us both on the same mortgage application actually made us look worse. Because I didn’t have the freelance experience for 2+ years, they only looked at me with a person with one year of reported self-employed income at my then-and-now self-employed status, which made my debt-to-income ratio look wildly high when factoring in my car and existing mortgage debts. Everything on paper looks funny, I can assure you that we weren’t and aren’t in a precarious financial state. So, last fall, to make anything happen with the bank, I had the idea of bringing in cosigners, not anyone’s first choice for sure, but what we needed was a stable backer to make Pete’s financial situation look better on paper. Pete’s parents were happy to cosign (and for the sake of saying, we could have asked my parents too, although our mortgage team felt that the both parties having the same last name would make the process smoother). Miraculously, it worked, and all of a sudden we were approved for the mortgage we needed. I’m bringing this up because I think a lot of people shopping for homes–who are financially stable but not according to the bank–might overlook this option. Because something as simple as a cosigner can make or break your ability to buy a home, it would be worth looking into.

• Even though we don’t need cosigners on this new house, we’re still using them. This time around, on the house we’re in the process of trying to buy, our finances look a lot better on paper. With 2 years of solid self-employment 1099′s and tax returns, we would be fully qualified by the bank to buy a house together and afford something completely within the realm of what we are looking for. But here’s the thing: We have decided to keep our current house and use it as a rental property immediately after moving into the new house. By keeping the new mortgage in Pete’s name (again, with cosigners to make life with the bank a little smoother), and leaving me out of it completely, we didn’t have to bring the sale of our current home into the mix as a contingency for our new mortgage. Voila, we’ll own two homes (and hopefully with the addition of rental income, can pay off the first mortgage with the higher interest rate faster).

• Renters, huh? Yes, it turns out that you can watch too many episodes of Income Properties, and then do wild things like decide to sacrifice your beloved house to unpredictable renters. We repeatedly state that we are cautiously optimistic and willing to give it a try. The lot of our current house is small; just over 1/10th of an acre and requires minimal maintenance. The location, we think, is ideal for renters, and many other homes in our neighborhood are set up with rental units or two-family properties. As a single-family house for rent with a garage and fenced-in yard, we hope that it will be more appealing than other rentals in our neighborhood, and suspect that we can ask slightly more in rent than we pay in taxes and mortgage so that we can make a little bit of extra income along the way. I hope we’re not crazy. In any case, we won’t be putting too much effort into getting our house ready to rent until we know for sure that the other house is a sure thing. But we’re excited.

There’s for getting you up to speed; in the next few days, we’re anticipating learning more about the FHA appraisal and hoping to have one last chance to negotiate the price of the home. Excited as we are?

Read the next installment of our story right here.

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I am so unbelievably excited to be a part of this. Those are my little faceted clay push pins shown below, you can read the full post here. I also wrote about how to clean a top-loading washing machine, because gross, do you realize how often you should really be doing that?

In the likes of other Scripps Networks blogs like HGTV’s Design Happens and The House Counselor, Made + Remade caters to its unique audience of people that love to do things and make things by offering an assortment of trending topics in the categories of Make It, Fix It, Learn It, and Find It.

I’ve been really excited at the opportunity to see what the other DIY-loving contributors have been coming up with, and suspect you’ll like seeing more diversity in topics and projects from other ordinary peeps. The new blog does some double-duty by linking directly to contributor’s instgram, Pinterest, and other social accounts via their bio pages, so if you like their style, you can get even more inspiration from them through other channels. Also, in the right sidebar you can sign up for easy weekly emails to receive content to your inbox. Cha-ching!

Head on over to Made + Remade when you get a chance today or this weekend, and see everything that’s new for yourself.

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Our thinking and planning even 100% influenced our wedding registries that were set up last November, which we had organized through accessible–but modern and contemporarily-influenced–Crate & Barrel, CB2, and Fishs Eddy. Despite the current frying pan/pot situation (for which we plan on investing in within the next few months), we had really focused on the kitchen in our registries, knowing that that’s where we needed the most long-term help. It helped, of course, that upgrading our home to a more modern collection allowed us to start fresh and ask for classic “forever pieces,” things that aren’t trendy colors or likely to be swapped out next season. So far, it has been great, and the fact that we use our gifts daily is a bonus because I’ll probably forever think of Beth when I’m making a casserole (last week, Beth!) and Amy when I’m serving something delicious on our Marimekko plate (all the time, Amy!). In registering at the stores we did–and therefore receiving awesome things–we began to transform our kitchen in a way that could carry on to our new, more modernly-inclined home. And, I think it goes without saying that if you’re not in the specific niche to be creating a wedding registry to make over your entire kitchen, you can also gather classic pieces from these same retailers without breaking the bank (hello, affordability!).

We do have the dinnerware and glassware shown below, but also have a bunch of other items in mind that would be a perfect (and affordable) fit:

Newgate Wall Clock, West Elm // Fishs Eddy Flatware, Fishs Eddy // Oldham + Harper Puffer Fish Sauce Dish, Fishs Eddy // Fawn Mug, i love stuff // Calendar, Marimekko [out of stock] // Oldham + Harper Fish Dishtowel, Fishs Eddy // Marta Barware, CB2 // Lotta Sugar Bowl, Fishs Eddy // Mercer Dinnerware, Crate & Barrel

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For one thing, I unleashed a new board on Pinterest dedicated to designing our new pad, so go ahead, check out some images that are making us giddy. And be forewarned, from here on out I’m just going to talk about the house now as if it were a 100% sure thing; we should know more this week, nothing has been finalized yet.

And secondly, I’m not sure whether or not you’d know this: We’ve been storing a huge table in our house since early November. In our sunroom. And in our living room. (You would have had to have watched my latest home tour video from last fall closely to notice it.)

See, Pete and I found and fell in love with the beautiful, hand crafted Danish modern mahogany table last November at the The Shops on West Ridge (I actually alluded to the event here). The Night Of Lights event is a huge draw for The Shops, a co-op-like venue in Greece, NY, and it drew an equally humungous crowd the evening that we were there; everything in stock was offered at 20% off, and many other vendors had their own items discounted to sell, so when we found it, we couldn’t say no.

While it was sale priced to move at $295, with store discounts and a few gift cards, we actually only paid $125 for this beauty, a mere fraction of the price we might have paid buying a solid hardwood table from any retailer. We know from the seller that it was a handcrafted piece from a local woodworker who used it in his own home with his own family for decades. (The background of the next photo happens to be a clipboard, not the tabletop if you’re curious.)

The timing of the event and the subsequent purchase aligned perfectly with our cheery and mostly optimistic state after we had put an offer in on a house last fall. We already knew that the home’s open floor plan dining/living room would warrant a beautiful, huge table, and moreover, we knew that our current shoddy dining room table would never work well in the space. (Side note: The current dining room table seen here is in horrible condition–steer clear of Pier 1 if you’re looking for investment tables–mine was thankfully just a floor model marked down from $699 to $50, and I’m so glad I didn’t pay more because the surface has worn really poorly.)

Within the mid-century brick ranch house that we first fell in love with last October, the new table’s modern form and sheer size would have been perfect. We bought the table because, well, we wanted it for that house, but went into the investment knowing that if it didn’t end up fitting, or if we didn’t end up getting that house, or if the table wouldn’t work in another future house, we would just sell it and hope to get our money back. So, against the wall of the dining room it sat for months.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning just how big this new table is, because you’re probably asking yourself why we didn’t just replace our current table immediately when the new one came home (in two pieces, via two Jeep trips to The Shops). Measuring 8′ long and 42″ wide, it never would have fit. In fact, it extends 3 whole feet longer than our current table, so it would have either cut off a pass-through into the living room, or access to our sliding glass door. It would have looked ridiculously out of place with our small pendant lights.

The frame of the new table is also a bear, which is why it has held court in the sunroom since November.

But check out the pretty details, including the little metal feet.

Our only reservation about the table is that it’s slightly lower than our current table and most traditional tables, measuring 28″ from the ground instead of the common 30″. You wouldn’t think it would make much of a difference, but it does for knee space, which means we need to boost the height or source some slightly short chairs and hope that we can make it work.

Here I am, almost 6 months after the fact, still wondering if we’ll ever be able to put this table somewhere. We still hope it would work in the new home’s dining room (I did take measurements and am cautiously hopeful that it wouldn’t look oversized for the space).

In the meantime, it’s been in our house uselessly for so long that recently Julia asked us “how long that piece of wood was going to be against the wall.” “Seriously? You know it’s a tabletop. You were with us when we bought it.” “Oh, that’s right, the table, I forgot it was a table. A GIAAANNNNNNTTTTT table. Against the wall. Weird.” And she went about her coloring, and speaking of arts and crafts time, it’ll be a seriously great coloring surface someday. It’s solid, with no identifiable seams, and smoother than a baby’s bottom. It’s color, I adore, especially the way it pairs so nicely with the sideboard that I refinished last summer. It’s like it was meant to be.

Can’t wait to see it in place.

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• 7 months ago, we found a house
• 5 months ago, we spent a lot of time trying to buy the house
• 3 months ago, we were denied the house, and I was a very emotional, fragile shell of an Emily
• 3 weeks ago, we found another house

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

We never even got to the home inspection part of the home buying process with the first house we found last September. After 5 months of waiting on approvals and then learning that our offer was not selected, we slowly began to start from scratch. We were lucky to find a house just a few weeks ago, and even luckier to learn by last Saturday that both our lawyer and the seller’s lawyer had approved the contracts, making us the sole offer officially under contract. Cheers! We had already had a home inspection by this point (sometimes it seems like things move in an out-of-order chaotic pattern when you’re buying a home) and today, I’m ready to bring you up to speed with the rest of the details. Spoiler alert for all of you who thought we might have already closed and moved: we’re still in the process of getting to that point! In fact, a move might still be a month off!

There were a lot of differences in the process between the house we found last fall, and this new house, being that one was a short-sale, one was being sold by an actual human; for the latter, our finances were in much better shape and allowed the bank to pre-approve us quickly; for the prior, there was a nerve-wracking bidding war. With that background, we decided to hold off on sharing any home-related news on the blog until we knew we were out of “danger” and in a better, contracted position as a buyer. Still, anything could happen, but I’m not losing sleep at night like I was the first few weeks.

When we learned that we had an agreed upon offer, we acted quickly to get into the house for a formal inspection, because as with many offers, we had listed several conditions that needed attention before closing, the inspection being one of them. I still don’t understand why people would go without a home inspection, I even see families on Property Brothers allegedly removing the home inspection contingency from their offers just to get the house, and maybe that’s a sign of the competitiveness in certain markets, but it isn’t here. Or at least, if it were here, I wouldn’t settle without the contingency. Not only is it a great opportunity to spend time with a home expert and allow them to show you things about the property that a novice would never notice or think to focus on, but also answer questions and serve as a sounding board for what you might be planning to do with the house. It’s likely that a good inspector will be able to track and identify the purpose of every wire and pipe through the basement floorboards (if visible), they’ll be able to weigh in on electrical situations, and help provide a scope of costs to update issues in your home. They’ll advise on the condition of your roof, and strategies to eliminate moisture in the basement, and tell you flat out if it’s the type of home that’s going to cost you loads of money to repair. And they can tell you this without any liability (I’m pointing this out because while they’re a great resource, you’ll still want to check with a professional before moving walls or planning an addition.) We went into it knowing the general condition of the home, and hoped the inspection it would identify anything that might be dangerous or hazardous, and leave us with plenty of inspiration to make simple repairs ourselves to immediately boost the property value.

I know a lot more about homes in 2013 than I did when I was buying my home in 2009, but even still it’s not far-fetched to state that Mike Holmes had instilled a not-insignificant amount of terror in me, in both of us really. His shows give me the heebie jeebies, and I love them. I did everything I could with my networks to try and fly his right-hand man Damon in for the inspection, but no luck. We love that dude. In shopping around for an inspector, we took referrals from friends and talked to different companies, but ultimately decided to use the company that I had selected for my first home inspection 4 years ago. After looking again at his reporting of that inspection (yes, I saved it), it was both comprensive and thorough, pointing out everything that was wrong with the house that we have in fact realized is wrong with the current house (i.e. there have been no surprises). Furthermore, his business had expanded greatly since I worked with him, which gave me the impression that he was continuing to do great work and excelling at his business. He was still the primary inspector in our area, so we were able to meet with him instead of one of his team members.

He, Mark, met us at the house last Thursday afternoon for our nearly 3-hour inspection. We had special-requested a thorough chimney inspection and radon testing, and we had a chance to explore areas that we hadn’t seen on our initial walk-throughs, including the attic crawl space, the rafters of the garage, the roof of the house, and the two-story barn. We learned that the house had two septic tanks (what the hell, one scares me enough, thankyouverymuch) and had a chance to look closely at a set of original blueprints that the homeowners had left for us to peruse, so we actually know exactly where the tanks are located in relation to the house and certain parts of the yard (you know, in case we ever want to dig into the ground).

Our realtor was at the inspection with us too, which was great, because he was able to hear the feedback upfront and help us filter through the long list of items that would need to be repaired. We left our inspection feeling reassured that were making a good decision with this property, knowing what we needed to attend to urgently for safety reasons, and what we could begin to repair over the coming years (i.e. not urgent).

I also used it as an opportunity to take another 4,000,000 photos with my actual camera as opposed to my iPhone (my hard drive is now host to 8,000,000 photos of both homes we love) so that we could swoon over it while we’re away.

We were asked to write another letter to our seller, this one outlining the things that we hoped to have repaired by the seller (or credited in dollars at closing, so we could repair) as a result of our home inspection. Our realtor was a big help in helping us recall all of the details. Our overview wasn’t exhaustive–included minor electrical fixes, chimney repairs, venting, fire walls, and sump pump details, but omitted things that the sellers had openly disclosed during negotiations–because we knew in advance that an exterior light didn’t work, so we mandate for it to be fixed for us to be sold on their home. We chose not to bring up easily fixable details about the grading of the property, or glazing of windows either. We can do that stuff in a pinch in a weekend. And good news, there were no radon issues in the home, so I can sleep better knowing that.

We spent the first part of the week waiting (and rejoicing over the kind thoughts that so many of you have sent our way, it’s so nice to know 1) we are not alone, 2) that people are excited to read about our process.

By yesterday, we had learned that the sellers were not willing to credit us for everything that we had listed, but that they had still made a fair offer to discount a few thousand off of our price. Every little bit helps?

Nothing has changed on the mortgage side of the process; as of yesterday afternoon, our paperwork is still with an underwriter (who I keep embarrassingly mis-referring to as our undertaker) and in the coming week, we anticipate the results of an FHA home appraisal to help the bank to decide if our offer is valued appropriately for the mortgage we are requesting. If it isn’t, we have more negotiating and heavy-decision making to take on. The house is in no way ours yet, so I’ll continue to hold out sharing pictures, but I hope we can get to the point of sharing them.

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Thanks again for your excitement and interest, your response has been more than overwhelming and it’s so reassuring to know that you’re rooting for us.

Read the next installment of our story right here.

The post 1 Week Ago appeared first on .

Getting to this point has been a long, trying battle, and almost no one knew what we were going through until now.

I kept a digital journal of short posts to remember all everything that we were dealing with, and this week I’m sharing it with you. You can read Monday’s post documenting the first few weeks of our process here, and Tuesday’s post that overviews the negotiation process here. Yesterday, I told you the news from the bank, that we weren’t the first choice offer, and got all emotional like Nicole Curtis.

And then, about three weeks ago, we found another house.

I wasn’t eager to begin this whole process again; the process of getting approved for a mortgage took nearly a month last fall. It took over a month to get an agreed upon contract with the seller too, and then we had it ripped out from under our feet as they chose another offer after the fact. Breaking up is hard to do, that’s what they say, right? We’ve been breaking up with that house (and eating a lot of ice cream while coping) since last November.

But this other house that Pete found, it was a good one. Dare I say, it was a better one.

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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Pete found another house tonight. This one is in our dream neighborhood. Like, dream-dream. We already have a note into our realtor but are not getting our hopes up. Taking the family to Brooklyn for a long weekend.

(Extra note from Emily: I didn’t give this house more than two seconds of thought while we were out of town. It was a cool neighborhood, yes, but it was also out of our price range and listed over price. The perfect recipe for letdown, so I didn’t let it consume our weekend.)

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

We went to check out the other house with our realtor today. On the drive, we told eachother that we were already afraid that we were going to really, really like it. And then what would we do? We still have some vested hope that the first house we loved will suddenly open back up, since the chosen offer (that we were runner-up to) could technically void if buyer were uninterested or unable to get a mortgage. All I know is that they haven’t closed on the property yet, 2 months later, and that seemed weird.

The new house was immaculate. Perfectly maintained by its original owners, built in 1952, and flawlessly preserved in its intended era. Except for the vinyl siding, I’ll overlook that for now.

We love it, of course. It’s incredible, we would be so lucky to live there.

I had a call into our mortgage specialist within a half hour of walking into the house so we could get started on initial paperwork – namely to see if we would be able to make an offer on this house given it’s listing price and how much of a downpayment we would be able to make. I left the appointment early and took a work conference call in the car. Pete explored the property further, and reported back all kinds of cool findings, from deer lairs to a secret barn with a lot of damage. I can’t wait to see more of it another day.

Fingers crossed.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Good news on several fronts; we knew by dinnertime yesterday that we would be approved from a financial standpoint. Our mortgage specialist was able to make assumptions for our mortgage pre-approval based the documents she had worked with last fall, and the fact that we have updated tax returns helped that prove that we have had success as independent business owners for two tax seasons (my official 2-year is next month, Pete’s isn’t until late summer). We have a little more money saved to put down this time too, which helps, and hopefully if we make an offer early, we can avoid getting into a bidding war.

We took Julia to the house for the first time after picking her up from school. We walked the perimeter and let her explore the yard and the barn and poke in the windows of her potential bedroom. She found a dead squirrel, or pieces of a dead squirrel, which she was proud about. I think she likes it, I think she’s bummed that there’s not a killer pool like the one at the other house we sought. Like with the last house, we’re trying to keep her included with the process by telling her what has to happen for us to get the house in simple terms, reminding often that there is a lot of stuff that has to go right in order for it to be ours. Now she’s all “I know, I know, I know how it works, we might not get it, can we go home and go on a bike ride?”

There’s an open house at the property on Sunday. We’d love to cut them short and have a signed contract by that point.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

We made an offer! A low offer. Based on comps, the property is seriously overpriced, especially considering its dated state. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH….HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

This time, I gave it my emotional best and hand drafted a three-page letter to the sellers telling them about us, about what we do, about our current home, and about how much we love their property. I asked them politely to please let us buy their home. And I included about 10 pictures of us, living life. I’m sure they won’t fax well to the selling agent, but you’ve gotta try, right? Our realtor mentioned something about having an almost 100% success rate with clients who wrote letters, whether that’s valid across the board or not, I don’t know, but I’ll stoop to any level at this point.

Friday, April 12, 2013

We were supposed to hear back from the sellers by 6PM. They’re elderly (had to move into assisted living), and we were warned it might take extra time to hear back from them. Waiting game continues. We’re going bowling to get our mind of things.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

The seller countered while we were at bowling last night, but only came down a little bit in price. The realtor thinks they’re unrealistic and have a lot of pride in their home (they’ve lived there since 1952!). We immediately recountered, still much lower than their counteroffer to us, and learned this morning that we were flat out declined. An open house is scheduled for tomorrow, and they wanted to wait to see if anything comes from it.

We also learned today that the sellers are a family of used car salesmen, as in, they’re an actual family that owned and successfully operated a large dealership locally. They had their face on commercials, doncha know, and as soon as Pete heard his name he spit out the dealership’s ditty. It’s no one I recognize, I guess they’ve been closed for many years. All I know is, if I like one thing less than buying a house, it’s buying a car, and, to get all stereotypical about my impression of car salesmen, these people are going to be selling us their home like it’s their beloved Caddy. Help. It’s the last type of person I want to deal with.

Our realtor suggested that we wait until after the open house because an extremely low percentage of visitors actually make an offer right away, open house goers are more often nosey neighborhood folks who always wanted an opportunity to see the interior of the home. The realtor also suspected that they were simply anticipating us raising our offer, and we should wait silently to make them think it’s our best offer. It was suggested if we let them talk first, things might go in our favor. There’s a serious psychology that goes into home transactions, and I gave him this benefit of the doubt. We’ll see how it works.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

I planned to stop by the open house to poke around this afternoon (to listen to what other people at the open house had to say), but in the morning, the sellers came back to us with another counteroffer. YES, THEY BROKE THE SILENCE FIRST. We accepted on the spot. None of that back and forth shit with a car salesman, we’re not playing, we just want this house.

I went to the open house for 45 minutes anyways, because they didn’t cancel it on short notice. It was mobbed. I couldn’t believe it. There seemed to be a few couples inspecting closely enough to make me think they were serious buyers, but they walked away without saying anything to the realtor holding the open house. Mostly, there were plenty of locals who you knew were just there to discuss their neighbors taste in carpeting and appliances.

I took pictures, and spent more time exploring the intricacies of the old house. It’s beautiful. I hope I get to post some photos of it someday.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Our signed contract went to both our lawyer, and the seller’s lawyer today. They each have 5 days to get back to us (this Friday), but in the meantime, if other favorable offers come into play, the sellers can have their lawyer review them as well. Did you know the seller can have their lawyer decline your offer if a more favorable one comes in before the contract is legally locked? I didn’t. I’ll be nervous all week.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

We spent all morning re-filling out mortgage paperwork and scanning another 50 pages for our bank. We already know that our request for a mortgage will be approved easily based on our financial situation (namely the presence of a second year of self-employed tax returns), but we still need to do the due diligence to get updated bank statements and agreements back to the lender so that they can begin to process our loan.

We asked for a closing date of May 24th. This date is subject to so much that we don’t know whether or not we’ll get it yet. I keep explaining to people based on our experiences so far that you basically don’t know if you’re going to be able to buy a home until they tell you “Bring a check with $XXXX to your closing on (fill in the date).”

The suspense could kill me.

We know a few things: We’ll be having our home inspection tomorrow, just 10 days after seeing the home for the first time. Our home inspection is obviously a big deal to us–we sought out the Mike Holmes of Rochester, NY–and you know we would take that shit seriously after watching so many seasons of Holmes Inspection.

Secondly, we are required to have an FHA loan appraisal by our bank, which will tell us what the current home and property value is based on current comps and city data. This step is nervewracking, and it won’t be done until sometime next week or even the following. We already know that we have an offer in higher than the last assessed value, and if the new assessment doesn’t tell us that the property is worth more, they might not loan us the money we need to buy the house. We don’t want to get stuck with a home that we overpaid for, but we hope for it to be our forever home, and that counts for something. House buying blows.

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New house. New plan. Surprised? I’ll bring you up to date on everything else tomorrow.

Read the next installment of our story right here.

The post 3 Weeks Ago appeared first on .

Getting it has been a long, trying battle, and almost no one knew what we were going through until now.

I kept a digital journal of short posts to remember all everything that we were dealing with, and this week I’m sharing it with you. You can read Monday’s post documenting the first few weeks of our process here, and yesterday’s post that overviews the negotiation process here.

We went about our winter without a word from the bank managing the closing of this short sale property. We knew that it wasn’t unusual for it to take several months for a large bank (like the seller’s bank, Chase) to move on closing a foreclosure property; smaller/local banks are likely to move a lot faster. We were just in a waiting pattern, so we continued on our life; we got married, we celebrated Christmas and New Year’s with our friends and family. We honeymooned, bought new tools, and worked hard to keep adding to our savings (bigger downpayment, better financial situation).

We checked in with our realtor every few weeks to see if he had heard anything, mostly hoping for news that all of the other interested buyers this house had bailed after deciding instead to be totally practical and buy something more readily available instead of the trashed-and-hard-to-buy ranch. We hoped whatever flippers were interested in taking over ownership would bail for other springtime opportunities. We waited stagnantly. And during this time, the listing of “sale pending” changed repeatedly, head-spinning; some days the property wasn’t even listed for sale anymore. I didn’t have much to journal about during these months as we waited to hear back from the bank.

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Friday, February 15, 2013 (in an email to my mom)

The bank chose another offer. We’re #2 in line if the other offer falls through. There’s still a chance that they aren’t interested anymore, or that they can’t secure financing, we haven’t heard. Cross your fingers.

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We weighed heavily on this. Our offer was second best. That’s good! But that’s bad. I watched the property sale alerts in the newspaper, waiting for the house to show up in the sold property listings with its sale price just to have some closure. We were sort of surprised that the closing didn’t happen fast; our mortgage specialist had prepared us that the closing will often be expeditious for a short sale after a bank approval, even if it had taken many months to get a final approved contract. We had remained ready to act as soon as we knew we were a go.

In the time since this news, I’ve been mostly upset. Or, enraged. Yeah, enraged, really. I was getting all Nicole Curtis in my conversations about the property with our family and friends who knew that we were in this holding pattern, wild for the preservation of this beautiful 50′s home, devastated that the person who had the winning offer was probably a selfish flipper, someone who didn’t give a shit about the beauty of the original architecture, of the natural integrity of the home. I was convinced they didn’t have a family that they were eager to move in there and get settled, I was even sure that the winning offer was made by the plumber that had been so kind to us that day last October; he had really, really made it clear what a great property and investment it was, so why wouldn’t I point fingers and assume he would go and pull the rug out from under us? Ergh, that thought irritated me. We’ve toured enough open houses to see what people do when they’re trying to update and modernize outdated homes, and we were so saddened by the idea of someone doing that to our home. They’d do shoddy makeovers of the outdated bathrooms, do mediocre updates to the basement to disguise the damaged tiles, mold, and rotting paneling, they’d probably fill in the pool to pretend the mess that it was never existed, and bring new appliances into the kitchen, paint the yellow walls, and schmooze some nice little family into thinking that they were gettin’ a really fine home – for $150,000 over it’s currently assessed price. It’s tragic, it made me crazy, it made my blood pressure shoot through the roof. And here I am, going all Nicole Curtis again. Reading this long paragraph over and over makes me need to break to scream into my pillow.

After about a month and a half of waiting with no news, bringing us to mid-March, I started paying attention to the home listings again. And truthfully, I was paying attention to them for the first time in this whole process. We had still been dropping in on Sunday open houses as we came across them (nothing remotely comparable to the house we already found), flagging homes as “favorites,” and weighing the pros and cons of certain neighborhoods. This was the research that we hadn’t actually had a chance to do thoroughly last fall when we fell in love with our California ranch on a whim. We kept coming back to the fact that it would be really hard to beat the convenient location of that house in it’s perfect little neighborhood that we already envisioned touring with our kids on Halloween… no other properties measured up in any way. Rochester and its suburbs have some beautiful neighborhoods, but in the price range that we’re talkin’, it’s spotty…. how else can I put it.

We saw a house a few weeks ago with our realtor, a super dated 50′s home on a dead end that would have been great to remodel if it had any backyard to speak of. We weighed briefly the possibility of buying and adding onto our friends’ home that is going to be listed for sale any day, because it’s in a great neighborhood with a private yard. And there was a great house in our current neighborhood listed for sale recently, and we liked it a lot but it wasn’t the type of house that we had been traditionally gravitating to (it was a colonial, and we’ve been leaning towards ranch), so we agreed to keep looking while we wait for definitive news from the outstanding offer.

All I know is, if the winning offer is able to close, I hope they’re a beautiful family that would be attentive to the needs of the property for their long term benefit, like we would have been. Not someone out to make a quick dollar.

More tomorrow.

Read the next installment of our story right here.

The post 4 and 3 and 2 and 1 Month Ago appeared first on .

Getting it has been a long, trying battle, and almost no one knew what we were going through until now.

I kept a digital journal of short posts to remember all everything that we were dealing with, and this week I’m sharing it with you. You can read yesterday’s post right here.

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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Still no word from our bank on our ability to get a loan (it might be 5+ more days) but we scheduled an appointment with our realtor and a recommended plumber to assess the condition of the home. The seller’s bank still has not been of much help in giving us information about the state of the property.

A lot of the copper plumbing had been stolen while the house sat vacant. There were holes punched in the walls and basement ceilings to get access to it. The plumber did this inspection for us at no cost; I was a little surprised by this but then again, most contractors will come and quote your project for free. This guy happened to think it wouldn’t cost that much to make the repairs, and even gave us a lot of free advice about the pool heating and plumbing, which we hadn’t even begun to focus on. The pool needs a lot of work, probably a new filter and plumbing at the least, but it’s holding water and I think that says a lot.

I took about 4,000,000 photos of the house in its current condition for documentation, and for us to look back on. I’m not sure I can share them on the blog before we actually occupy the house. That’s a gray area, right?

Monday, October 15, 2012

The bank is still working on our case. The team we have working for us still doesn’t know if we’re approved, we’re barely approvable if at all. This is especially frustrating considering how much money we actually have saved and plan to contribute for a downpayment (it is more money than I have ever had, times a lot). We couldn’t be doing this at all if we hadn’t been saving very conservatively for as many months as we’ve been.

I’m flashing back to when I tried to close on my current house and, because some admin was on vacation, I had to wait until the morning of closing to learn, for sure, that I would be closing that day. I hate stress.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Our bank called to tell us that we were qualified for a mortgage, and that we should have it in writing by Monday or Tuesday. CAN’T BELIEVE IT. We’re so attached to the idea that we’re getting this house, that it’s now hard to imagine not having it. We’re hoping to have an offer written up as soon as possible. I’m going to go throw up now.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

We were in the middle of building our wedding tables this morning when the realtor called to tell us that the price on the house dropped. By $30K. HOLY SHIT. And here we were, preparing ourselves to make an offer close to their original list price.

We went into his office this afternoon to draft an offer so that we were prepared to submit it soon as the bank sent us our commitment. Our realtor recommended we go in low – significantly lower than the list price – because there was still a LOT of work to be done on the house…

My fingernails are stubbs.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Commitment letter from the bank is in! Our offer was officially submitted! It is an extremely low offer given the house’s potential, and we’re expecting a counter. We did ask for a closing the week of 12/24, which is also the week of our wedding. Could things be crazier?

The bank sent us a long list of things it needs us to prove before we close: personal letters detailing our 2012 income balance sheet (without direct deposits, we basically only have our record of invoices and bank accounts to prove our income, and they need to know how our year has been pacing), letters acknowledging Pete’s residential history (no idea why), a personal letter acknowledging his child support obligations, copies of dozens of pages of divorce paperwork, a personal letter to explain outstanding debts on his credit report that were not his so they wouldn’t affect our debt-to-income ratio (yes, that can happen, divorced people beware, sometimes it takes a long time for things to be cleared on your credit report, and those things can haunt both of you for many years), and even more stuff, I’m surprised they didn’t ask for Cody’s immunization paperwork. When you’re in a tricky mortgage situation, they want to know everything about you. It’s paralyzing and feels super intrusive.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

We drove to the house this morning to see if it suffered any damage from Hurricane Sandy. With all of the rain, we bet that the basement is a mess, but all of the trees, including the ones with large dead limbs, appear to be OK. Lots of down twigs and small branches. There were deer everywhere. There are always deer everywhere at this place.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Our offer was countered by the seller! And they only asked for $10K more! We were expecting a counter of $30K more! This is amazing! We accepted the counteroffer!

Our offer still needs to be approved by the bank, because it’s a short-sale bank-owned property. I’m still really confused about why our offer needed to be selected and approved by the homeowner overseas anyways… but it was. ???

Beer to celebrate.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

We still don’t have an approved deal because the seller hasn’t signed the final paperwork agreeing to the counteroffer he presented us. It was only an email or verbal approval to his realtor. He hasn’t faxed back anything with a signature that would be legally binding.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The seller’s agent received the signed paperwork confirming our contract. This is good news! Took long enough. At least the contract can be submitted to the seller’s bank for short-sale approval. The offer has to actually be approved by the bank, because they’re the ones taking a blow on the property’s value and outstanding mortgage they’ve been carrying. We don’t know whether to expect pushback from them or not (I think they could counter us and get us to pay even more).

Thursday, November 22, 2012 (Thanksgiving)

The house has been listed for over a month at its significantly reduced price, and we learned today that many other offers have come in. We hoped this wouldn’t happen, but the new price made it SO CHEAP that we expected it to be overrun with sleazy flippers. Unfortunately (impossibly?) we learned that the seller accepted an offer that was higher than our offer without giving us a chance to counter again. Yes, the signed agreement that we waited on for nearly a month was just tossed aside.

We countered our offer voluntarily, and came up $37K from our agreed upon amount. Holy hell, it does not feel good to change our offer that dramatically after getting used to the idea of having a super low mortgage. This counter is closer to the listed price that was on the house when we first fell in love with it, and about $17K more than the current low-list price. YOWZA, we’re talking about a lot of money, and we are not wealthy folks. We only went as high because the seller’s agent slipped and told our realtor a little detail that spelled out how much the highest bid was. We really want it this, so we tried to beat the highest offer.

All offers made go to the bank for approval. The seller is not the final decision maker. We learned that it really can take months for banks dealing with short sales to make a decision. MONTHS. LIKE, SIX OR EIGHT SOMETIMES. The waiting game is on. We’re getting married in one month.

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More tomorrow. My brain is hurting as I re-read through these entries. We struggled so much to get to this point.

Read the next installment of our story right here.

The post 6 and 5 Months Ago appeared first on .

I didn’t know when, or even if, I would be able to talk about everything that has been going on behind the scenes in our life. It makes me feel like a bit of a fool, to keep such a huge topic hushed, especially when I’m operating a home improvement and lifestyle blog, but we approached it like people approach pregnancy–we didn’t want to talk about it too early, even with our friends, just in case something were to fall apart. The process has taken a lot longer than we expected, and keeping silent about everything we’ve been dealing with has been a real challenge. It has obviously affected the projects we wanted to do on our home this winter; it’s affected the blog, my willingness to spend money on our home, and our day-to-day morale.

I kept a digital journal of short posts to remember all everything that we were dealing with, and this week I’m sharing it with you. Enjoy, I hope some of you can relate to and learn from our experience.

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Friday, September 28, 2012

Pete found the house tonight while we were working late. He browses for homes regularly (I blame Zillow although blame is the wrong word, I love Zillow) because the Zillow iPad app is so damn easy to navigate. We’re not ready to buy, but it’s fun to see what type of home we can afford in a new dual-income scenario, and what’s on the market. We’ve found a bunch of new neighborhoods to look at. The house we just came across looks pretty great in the photos, so we’re going to do a drive-by on our way to Lowe’s tomorrow.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

The house was vacant. The neighborhood was better than we ever expected it to be, a total gem, we had no idea it existed. Because the house was empty, we poked around the property and looked in windows. It’s hard to tell what it’s actually like in there (it looks like rainwater must be pouring into the basement based on the condition of one corner of the house) but it looks amazing, and right along the lines of the type of home we would love to be living in. It’s a huge California ranch, brick, with giant picture windows, an in-ground pool, and super wooded and private lot.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Our realtor/friend toured us through the property today. It was completely ransacked but expansive, the main level of the house exceeded 2,700 sq. ft. (and the basement was just as big, the same exact footprint). It’s just about as awesome of a house as we can imagine, and we don’t even mind that it needs a bit of work. There are numerous broken windows. BB gun bullets were definitely shot inside. We found condoms and a sneaker, and the copper was removed in every place trespassers could reach. We wonder how much that would cost to repair, or if we can sweat it ourselves easily. There is a LOT of mold in the basement, and even though someone tried to finish it off with vinyl tiles and paneling, it probably needs to be fully gutted. Sitting at home hours later I have dry mouth and a runny nose from breathing the gross, stagnant basement air. Other than that’s an insta-dream house.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

We decided we want it. We began the mortgage pre-qualification process with renovation loan mortgage specialist , because we’ll probably need a renovation loan to make this place livable. We shipped bank statements, tax returns, everything to the bank. We’re more than a little skeptical though, when I got my mortgage in 2009, it was hard, but getting a mortgage now might not even be possible for a few reasons:

• Neither of us have been self-employed full-time for 2-years. I’ve been solo since May 2011, and Pete since August 2011. We technically need to prove our stability with two years of tax returns, and we won’t have a second year until our taxes are filed in early 2013. I don’t know if you know this, but a bank will have no interest in you if you can’t meet this first qualification. Good for them for being stringent on who they loan money too, bad for us.
• As full-time contractors and freelancers, our income month to month ebbs and flows. No month is exactly the same as another month, as income is received from many different sources. Again, smart banks, bad for us.
• We don’t have direct deposits. This makes me furious. We independently deposit large checks into our accounts monthly, but no sign of corporate direct deposits (let alone the fact that the large checks weren’t consistently from the same companies) comes across as a red flag. Like, they see it as instead of earning an honest living without The Man, we’re dealing drugs. It’s insulting.

Friday, October 5, 2012

This is kind of amazing, but the bank found a loophole to getting us pre-approved!! Pete has been doing freelance work for small clients in the same field that he currently works (web design) for many years (even though our employer at our last full-time job made it seem like the act of taking on side clients was disloyal and unforgivable, even if they were completely non-compete, still curious to me). While he worked at his full-time 9-5 job, he did freelance projects at night, and the projects were sizable enough to be reported it on his tax returns. This means that full-time employment aside, as far as taxes are concerned, he has proved himself as an “independent freelancer” capable of sustaining freelance income for more than 2 years (even if it only looks like he was making a wee bit of money compared to what he made at the 9-5). I couldn’t be happier for us, this is a lucky, unexpected break. I’m cursing with enthusiasm. I’ve been cursing a lot lately.

We celebrated this GREAT news by taking Julia to the house after school. No cursing. It was her first time peeking into the windows, seeing the pool, seeing the ravine. She was excited. We hope she understands that it’s not a sure thing; we spoke very openly about how much we liked it and oversimplified the mortgage process for her 6-year old brain. If you’re in a similar situation with your own young kids, here’s how we’ve been explaining it:

• We like the house so we came here with our realtor; there are three bedrooms and two bathrooms and see that window? That’s the kitchen window!
• We have to ask the bank for money. When people want to buy a house, they have to get permission from the bank.
• We have to tell the family selling the house that we want to buy it, offer them money, and see if they will sell it to us.
• The family can sell it to anyone they want, and they might not choose us. Imagine it just like how you sold toys at the garage sale over the summer, you want to sell it to the person who is going to give you the most money in exchange.
• If they say yes, and the bank says yes, then we can live here. And fix the pool so we can swim in it next summer. We just have to be nice and hope for the best.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Our loan paperwork came through today. It was a surprise, this means we’re one step closer to getting a formal bank approval for our mortgage. We spent the day signing papers and getting details organized. I’ve never scanned so many documents in my life on our lame little scanner.

As of tonight, everything is signed and back with the bank. It could take over a week to hear back anything official. We can’t make an offer until we have this crucial documentation, and at this point we’re trying to remind ourselves constantly that we might not get the bank’s approval… our financial situation is borderline. If we can’t get it now, maybe we can re-try after our taxes are filed early next year. It’s really hard not to get our hopes up.

Monday, October 8, 2012 (my birthday)

It was a majorly emotional day waiting for details to come through from realtor. The house has been vacant for 3+ years. The owner is overseas somewhere. The bank that owns the house is unresponsive, making it hard for the listing agent to get our realtor any information. I find it hard to believe that a bank would be sitting on an abandoned house and carrying its mortgage and taxes and not responding quickly to people that want to buy it, but we’re learning that big banks (this is Chase) have a way of moving pretty slowly through these matters. Smaller local banks, we’re also learning, are more on top things. I wish we were dealing with a small bank.

We’re asking “hard” questions. Like, we want to know when it was last assessed by the bank; was the missing copper and broken glass taken into account during their last home inspection or is that new? Was anyone else looking at the property?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A lot more has happened since. I’ll share more tomorrow. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this whole experience has been a crazy roller coaster, and I hope documenting it also helps readers who are in similar situations.

Read the next installment of our story right here.

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That’s hardly likely. And if it is, don’t choose compost mulch.

In two posts published this week on DIY Network, I explore these vastly different arenas–oh, how I love that the world of do-it-yourself is so expansive–and give you insight on how to create a wedding guest book (for <$1) and how to pick the perfect garden mulch. It’s riveting stuff, the kind of topics that I’m thrilled to write about now that my own DIY wedding has come and gone, and the ground has thawed of its mid-spring ice. The backyard gardens are really demanding a pick-me-up.

Check them out this week’s post for yourself on DIY Network:

• How to make a DIY guest book
• How to choose the right garden mulch

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Remember when I bought that killer rug and simultaneously decided it was time for a refresh of the living room paint palette (which conveniently or inconveniently impacts the palette of the dining room and entire stairwell too)? It’s ON. Side note: Paint (and stain!) is 40% off at Sherwin-Williams from Friday-Monday the 19th – 22nd, so if you’re in the market to do something radical in your own pad, now might be a good time to make it shine.

It’s probably a good time to point out that despite all efforts, the swatches I picked up over the weekend still look oodles lighter in this photo than they are in real life in their jewel-toned glory. Be kind.

I’m still scheming towards an earthy-teal-emerald-aqua-blue-green-with-a-smidgen-of-edge, and I think I’m getting closer to making this thing happen. Of course, since the lighting in the house doesn’t really do the swatches justice, I’ll undoubtedly turn to a few paint testers to figure out which color is really the one for our sometimes-bright-often-shady north-facing living room. After much photoshop manipulation, I adjusted the photo to look close to the same shades that the swatches are in real life. Starred swatches are somewhat in the vicinity of what I hoped for all along (Left, Ionian, my fave; Center, Argyle; Top Right, Eco Green; Bottom Right, Kilkenny). Bring it on. We shall see how this progresses.

Side note #2: I do enjoy a good infographic, and this one from Sherwin-Williams is timely. Thanks for sending it on, friends at S-W. And reader friends, just note that I wasn’t compensated to be all Sherwin-Williams-y in today’s post, it was just good timing with the paint timing and the upcoming sale and the holy paint week!

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In a totally anti-Pinterest technology fashion, I’ve been scheming up a new way to organize my recipes. Good, ol’ fashion recipe magazine tear outs, you remember those, right? About once a month when I scour all of the publications we subscribe to, I find myselves with more and more recipes that we want to try, but moreover, what it results in is stacks of torn magazine pages covering every surface of our coffee table and kitchen island.

This obviously isn’t my traditional home improvement, decor type of post, but it is a method of home betterment and self-merriment, so maybe it’ll challenge you to get your act into gear too.

Before getting all of our recipes sorted in a sequential manner, I rehabbed a metal index card box that I picked up from the free bin at a garage sale last spring.

Rust is a little intimidating, it’s a sign of severe weakness, or at least Ron Swanson might accuse it as such. Plus, it can make anything ordinary seem downright filthy. To fix it up, I used a palm sander to smooth down the exterior of the box to rid the raised rust spots and take it back to being almost completely smooth, hand sanded the interior of the box for the same reason, and carefully applied three coats of glossy, glossy gray spray paint inside and out to get it back into shape. I love me some glossy, and even though I expected it to show off whatever leftover irregularities there were in the deteriorating metal, the finished result looks surprisingly wonderful.

For additional mental sanity, I added little sugru feet to the bottom of the recipe box to lessen any chance of it’s metal frame scratching up our smooth acrylic countertop.

This gets all foodie- and self-challenge nerdy when I start to talk recipe organization strategy:

• I sorted our dozens of magazine tear outs into simple categories. I’ve chosen desserts/breads (of which there aren’t many), side dishes, and main dishes. Obviously, you could go crazy sorting into different categories–and I almost did but I caught myself gettin’ crazy-eyed and pared things back–like chicken, beef, sandwiches, casseroles, smoothies, salads, etc.
• The recipes were arranged in the box, by category, folded into the size of index cards, and labeled with simple sticky labels that I picked up for $1.60. I folded the labels and wrote directly on them, so that they present like tabs). Re-labeling was a perk, making it easier for me to pick a recipe by a few word description (like “chicken enchiladas”) on the tab rather than by it’s foodie-tastic copywriten lingo (like “grilled lime-infused chicken with double-fire red sauce and cheddar-colby cheese enchiladas”). There are some vague “Soup Recipe” and “Leftover Steak Ideas” tabbed in there too, mostly from Real Simple magazine because that particular pub offers up many recipes of the same category on a single magazine page. And they always all look good. Side note: There’s never leftover steak. I’m feelin’ all carnivore-ish just talking about this.

• I challenged us (we both cook, not expertly, but well) to make each recipe at least once. There seems to be enough of an influx with new recipes where we can throw away a recipe for casserole that’s only so-so, or a dessert that ended up being too time consuming, or something that ended up having a radically expensive or pretentious ingredient. The recipes that are deemed winners can stay put and we’re reminded to keep them in our regular cycle of meals; you would be surprised how many times we’ve made chicken and veggie lo mein lately just because the recipe is there. Plus, I’m never without lo mein noodles in the house, ever since the first time we tried the recipe. It is so worth it.
• We try new recipes, and I keep the recipe tear outs under control. Win-win.

I still use Pinterest, but less so for family dinner night meals and more so when we’re in a pinch and looking for something that can be made quick and easy, especially if we’re on the way to a par-tay and want to try a fresh recipe pre-tested by foodie bloggers.

Sorting recipes into the box has been so effective and easy and simplifying that I’ve even disassembled two binders full of recipe tear sheets that we never bothered to reference because, hello, the binders are annoying to thumb through every day when we’re planning for dinner.

What are your tried and true recipe organization tactics?

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• Staining Process #1
• Staining Process #2
• Grand Kitchen Reveal
• 6-month Touch-Ups
• Before + After: Kitchen Edition

In an email from Diane, I was the inspired one after seeing how she took it upon herself to test the gel stain on her exterior wooden door (after already learning that she loved the product from a trial on an oak vanity and medicine cabinet). Wooden exterior doors need a little more TLC than the steel and fiberglass varieties, especially without storm doors protecting them from the weather and other elements, and it was evident that her door was in need of a fresh coat of something. Rather than rush out and paint the door – which seems like the most common solution these days, pop o’ color wizards! – or going through the effort to take the door off the hinges to apply a traditional stain while it laid flat, she went over the existing finish with the same technique and polyacrylic I did with the oak cabinets, resulting in a deep, flawless, java brown finish. It doesn’t always take a huge investment to do a project, one can save a little money along the way, and in her case she was using leftover stain for the job.

I think it looks great, an inspiring and easy change that anyone can do to any wooden doorway, exterior or interior:

How else have you used gel stain? I’d love to see more before and after photos; send them to me directly at emily@merrypad.com!

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