Even though we officially started owning our new condo (and had the keys) last Friday, since I was away that weekend the plan has been to move in this coming weekend. Instead, I decided to surprise Jessi by moving the essentials (read: bed and Pigpen) yesterday so she could come home from work to our new condo. So, last night was our first night in our new home (where I’m also writing this post, stealing wi-fi from a neighbor). We also had our first dinner in our new dining room. Though, as the dining room table is still at the apartment, we had a ‘picnic’ dinner on a blanket on the floor, and, since all the pots and pans and food are also still at the apartment, we ordered Chinese through Foodler (which I’ll definitely be writing about).

I have to say, it’s a nice feeling to wake up in a place that’s your own. There’s still a lot to be done (Currently the only furniture we have here is the bed, a lawn chair that was on the deck when we moved in, and a tv dinner tray that Jessi brought over when she was doing some painting last weekend. The chair and tray are currently serving as my ‘desk’.), but it feels good to finally be in our own place. If I have time, I’ll probably bring some more stuff over today (last night we packed up suitcases full of clothes, so I’ll probably empty them, go back, and refill them), but the bulk of the work will be tomorrow when we’ll be bringing the remaining furniture over in a U-Haul and starting to actually make this place feel homey.

One other thing that we need to get done is internet. The essential utilities are already taken care of, but I don’t really want to keep stealing my internet access from an unknown neighbor. The choices, basically, are Verizon DSL or Comcast cable. Eventually I want to be using Verizon FiOS, but it’s not available here yet. In the meantime, I think we’ll probably go with Verizon DSL. It’s not as fast as cable—assuming we go with the cheaper option—and it’s significantly cheaper at around $25/mo for a 768 Kb connection or $35 for a 3 Mb connection (w/ ‘dry-loop’ activation which means we don’t also need to pay to activate a phone line we don’t really need or want) as opposed to $60 w/o cable tv or $45 w/ cable tv that we don’t really want (odd pricing structure, that). Jessi has left the Internet in my hands, so I just need to decide if it’s worth $10/mo for an extra 2.25 Mb/sec. It probably is.

I’ll probably be taking a ton of pictures, and have all sorts of more specific things I want to write about over the next couple of weeks, so look forward to that. (I insist!) For now, I think I’ll say that’s it for blogging this morning.

It’s been a while since my last post on the home buying process, so I figured I’d remedy that while I’ve got some free time this morning. I left off with the negotiations, a process that I actually found pretty enjoyable. As it was really just the two agents negotiating, we basically were just setting the negotiation strategy and letting Anne handle the tactics. That suited me just fine and, despite losing the first place we negotiated on, I think we proved to be fairly strong negotiators.

Having agreed to a price with the seller it was time to move on to the home inspection. When we were first talking with Anne about the buying process she had provided us with a list of inspectors and inspection companies in the area and given us some basic advice. Basically, once you have a list of inspectors you want to make sure you get someone who’s got a lot of experience, but still not hugely expensive. After going through the list provided by RE/MAX, we had a price range from about $250 to about $600, and all the inspectors claimed to have years and years of experience. The inspector we ended up going with, Mark George, was actually towards the lower end of the price scale, but has about 25 years experience and when talking to him on the phone he just ’sounded right’. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but when I was talking to him on the phone he just sounded like you’d expect an experienced and honest home inspector to sound. In general that’s probably not the best thing to base a decision on, but in this case it worked out because he was simply fantastic. Even Anne, who’s obviously worked with a lot of home inspectors, was impressed and said he’s probably the best she’s worked with.

The home inspection involved much more than him just looking the place over and giving us a report. Instead he walked us through the entire process. He pointed everything out to us as he saw it and explained what it meant and why it was good or bad. He explained the process of maintaining everything that needs maintenance, from the water heater to the wooden gutters (apparently you need to treat wooden gutters with linseed oil every so often), and actually explained why you want to do this things rather than just telling us we need to. He was also just a fun guy who enjoyed joking around (his very heavy Boston accent didn’t hurt either).

He even brought a ladder along and took us up on the roof to inspect that, something which, apparently, the buyers of the other two units in the building never bothered to do because when we got up there we discovered that the rubber roof, though in good condition, needed to be re-sealed as some of the seams had dried out and separated (something which proved quite useful to know). As a home inspector, Mark wasn’t allowed to recommend a roofer to fix it, but he was able to give us an expected price range on the work so we were able to use it when re-negotiating after the inspection (a process which proved to be very painless as we had a less than perfect roof above our top-floor condo to use as leverage).

All in all, I’d say the inspection was one of the most enjoyable parts of the process. Not only was it incredibly useful, and helped to reassure Jessi and myself that we had found a great place, but we also learned a lot about the things we need to be aware of and be sure we take care of after we move in. As I’ve said many times before, I think it’s extremely important to have good people supporting you when buying a home, and Mark George definitely fit the bill. As with everyone else I’ve worked with on this, I highly recommend him to anyone looking to buy a home in the area.

Next up, handing over uncomfortably large sums of money, more mortgage stuff, and actually taking ownership of our new condo (which happens tomorrow!).

I’ve been pretty busy lately, and don’t expect to stop being busy for the next couple of weeks, so posting will remain sporadic at best.

Anyway, spent a week in IL for Christmas and a weekend on the Cape for New Years as mentioned. Spent last week and will be spending this week getting everything back in order after the trips as well as preparing to move, because on Friday we’re closing on the condo. Immediately after closing on the condo, I’m getting on a plane again… So it will continue to be a pretty busy time for both Jessi and I.

But the end is in sight! Come February we will be moved into our new condo, there will be no more impending travels (except, possibly, a trip to Ireland in March), and hopefully time to relax.

Anyway, related to the move, we need to find some people to take our place in the apartment. If anyone is interested in sub-letting two rooms in our apartment (one is about 10×11 and the other is about 11×12), please let me know. More info is available in this Craigslist ad.

Say what you will about Central Square, or ‘Crack Head City’ as one of the cleverer denizens of my future home, Porter Square, labeled it on a map of the T, but living hear does have it’s benefits. Despite the occasionally shooting, there are definitely some good things about our current apartment. For example, both of the following photos were shot out the window of my office at sunset.

November Sunset:

December Sunset

Fortunately it’s not personally relevant this time, but Bank of America is pulling their support for the celebrity series. Boston.com is running a more detailed story.

I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but I am still planning on dumping Bank of America and moving to a different bank. As before, my top two choices are Leader Bank and Wainwright Bank. I haven’t fully decided which I’m going to go with yet, but it will almost definitely be with one of those two. Wainwright has the whole social responsibility thing going for them (hey, maybe they’ll take up sponsorship of the Celebrity Series), but after one of my previous posts about my banking quandary someone from Leader Bank actually personally got in touch with me and offered to answer any questions I have, which was really nice. Leader Bank also has displayed a commitment to embracing new technologies to improve the banking experience (although, to be honest, their web site doesn’t really reflect that) which I think is a very good thing. At any rate, I’m going to wait until after all this home buying and mortgage stuff is over before I start moving messing too severely with my account balances.

Prizewagon is down. Their servers appeared to have crashed. Oddly enough, this happened at the exact moment that I won a hand in the tournament I was playing in. I can only conclude that this is the result of some vast conspiracy aimed at preventing my success at online poker. Yeah, that must be it.

Anyway, on to real estate negotiations.

We actually ended up going into negotiations on two different places (not at once). The first one, was a fantastic 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath townhouse in Porter Sq. By some strange fluke it just barely happened to be in the high range of our price range and was an absolutely beautiful gut rehab. We still decided to make a very low offer because of the state of the market, and because we really didn’t want to go that high if we didn’t have to. After several rounds of negotiation the seller had made an offer that was very close to what we wanted, but just slightly higher. We decided to push just a little bit harder and countered with our actual target price. To be honest, I think the seller would have taken it, but their agent didn’t want to. Instead, the agent delayed and brought in one of their own clients who must have made a much higher offer because we weren’t even given the chance to match it. I can only assume that the actual buyer must have offered close to the original asking price whereas we had gotten the seller down by about $50,000. Suckers.

After losing the townhouse we started looking again. The next thing we found was again at the very high end of our price range. But, rather than a townhouse or a condo, it was a single family house. And not one out in the middle of nowhere, but literally just a block away from the Porter Sq. T stop in a very nice residential neighborhood (actually only about two blocks from the townhouse). It was listed as 1,500 sq. ft., 3 bedroom, 1 bath. The catch? It had been built as a farmhouse around 1900, and it looked like the only upgrades since then had been installing indoor plumbing. Despite that, it was a beautiful house with huge investment potential. Investing maybe $20,000 into it could have finished the attic, bringing it up to around 2,000 sq. ft. and up to 5 bedrooms, converted two of the bedrooms into a master suite, and upgraded the kitchen to something modern. The problem was that we wouldn’t really be able to afford to put in that investment for a while. So we’d be forced to live with it as is for probably around 2 years, and on top of that had to make bigger mortgage payments than we really wanted to (which wouldn’t really have been to bad because it had a four-car tandem driveway that could easily have been converted to 3 parallel spots and rented out). It also had an old oil heating system, so we would have had to pay for that all winter on top of everything else. It would have been a great investment, but eventually we decided that it was just a little more than we were willing/able to take on just yet, so we let it go.

The next one we found was the one we’ve now basically bought. Unlike the other two, it’s at the low to middle of our prize range. Previously we had been looking at 1,200 to 1,300 sq. ft. condos, but this one, at only 980 sq. ft., actually feels bigger than those thanks to a very good layout. Everything in it is modern and it needs no work. It’s the third floor of a three-floor building that had just recently been converted from rental units and the other two had sold within the past 6 months. It’s actually just up the street from the townhouse we first made an offer on as well, so a very good location. The only problem, which originally had actually been a deal breaker for us, was that the kitchen hadn’t been updated since the 60s. But it was still in working order, and after our experience with the house we had realized that we weren’t actually afraid of doing a little work on the place. So we decided to make an offer on the place. Negotiations (obviously) went very well, and we were able to get the seller to agree to almost exactly the price we had as our target. Having seen what we’ve seen and realized what is and isn’t possible for us, I think this place is actually just about perfect for us. It’s in exactly the neighborhood we want, it’s just about the right size, and it’ll last us for at least 5 years, which is pretty much the amount of time that we’re likely to want to stay there. Having found this place, I’m actually kind of glad that we didn’t get the townhouse and that we decided the house would be too much.

The next step: inspection. The inspection was actually, to me, one of the most interesting parts of the process. I’ll write about it in my next post.

As promised, the first stage of buying a new home.

Obviously, there are three very important things to know when going into the first stage of buying a home: where you want to live, what kind of place you want to live in, and how much you want to spend on it. In Jessi and my case, we wanted to live in Cambridge and within walking distance of the red line so that Jessi could still easily take the T to the office. We also knew that we wanted a condo with at least two bedrooms and at least one bathroom (duh…), but we didn’t really know much beyond that. We started our actual shopping online. It didn’t take too long to discover that by far the best web site for searching and getting the basics on properties for sale in the Boston area is Hammond’s. It has all the listing you’ll want to see and, in my opinion, the best interface by far of any of the options. It let us specify exactly what our search criteria were, including neighborhood. It really helped us get a better idea of what was out there and what was in our price range (and we were lucky enough to discover that, in the current market, there were plenty of places that met our criteria and were in our price range).

The next step was finding an agent. it’s not strictly necessary to have your own agent when buying a home, but it makes the process vastly easier, and the seller pays their fee so why not. Since we didn’t really know what we were doing and we wanted to be sure we got someone we could work with we initially talked to a couple different agents. We ended up, as I mentioned before, going with Anne Munson from RE/MAX Destiny in Cambridge, mainly because we just felt like she was a good fit for our personalities. Once we had signed the paperwork with Anne and told her what we were looking for she signed us up with MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and we started getting daily email updates on whatever new properties showed up that met our criteria. She also was able to give us copies of the Rosenoff Report, which is basically a giant printed out spreadsheet with info on all the properties for sale in Cambridge and Somerville. That was more Jessi’s domain, so I’ll let her write about that if she wants. Anyway, this is the point when it starts actually looking like house shopping. Based on the properties that came to us through MLS we would tell Anne which ones we were interested in and she would arrange for us to go see them. We also went to some open houses.

Around this time we also went to get our mortgage pre-approval. Chris Smith, of Capstone Mortgage, was recommended to us by a friend who works in real estate in the area. After telling her our financial situation she was able to pre-approve us for a mortgage that was in exactly the range we were looking for. Again, just to be sure, we also went to someone else to see what they would say. In this case we went to Cambridge Savings Bank. They weren’t quite as good. For some reason they said that, unless we got someone to co-sign our mortgage they would only approve us for around $15,000, significantly less even than the down-payment we already had. So we went with Chris.

Eventually we found a place we wanted to put an offer in on and went into negotiations. But that will be the next post.

In other news, Pigpen is now famous: Cat Art Gallery. Jessi says I’m going to turn into a crazy cat lady…

Now that we’re pretty much done with the house buying process, I figure it’s a good time to start writing about it. It’s long, it’s complicated, but it’s interesting. One of the things that I found really interesting about it was how many people are involved. It’s not just the buyer, the seller and their respective agents. Jessi and I have had to deal with: our agent (Anne Munson of RE/MAX Destiny in Cambridge. She’s fantastic and we highly recommend her to anyone else buying a home in the area), our mortgage broker (Chris Smith of Capstone Mortgage. Again, we couldn’t recommend her any more highly.), our attorney (Katherine Kurtz of Belesi & Conroy. Haven’t really worked with her as much, but she seems to be pretty good.), the seller (probably shouldn’t give out her name…), the seller’s agent, the seller’s attorney, a home inspector (Mark George of Home Inspection Assoc., Inc. Yet another amazingly competent person we were lucky to have on our team), and I’m probably forgetting one or two. In addition to those people, Chris also has to deal with an attorney (also Katherine in this case, which simplifies things and saves us money) as well as the various bank people. I don’t think I can possibly stress enough how helpful it was to have a good team of people to work with. Anne made the process of finding or place as painless as possible, and Chris exceeded all expectations in doing the same with the mortgage process. Mark is a fantastic inspector, I think I learned more about houses from him during the inspection than I’d ever hoped to know in the first place. I’m sure most agents, brokers, and inspectors are good people and good at what they do, but the people we’ve been working with have just been great. Even if you don’t go with the same people we did, you should really make sure that you like and are comfortable with the people you’re working with. You’ll be spending a lot of time with them and giving them all sorts of personal details, so pick someone you trust.

I really think that’s the most important thing to know about buying a house. There’s certainly a lot else to the process, but the people you work with, if they’re good, will help you through all of that. I’ll get into the actual process in the next couple posts.

And now for something completely different. The cameraman sucks, but you want to watch this all the way through anyway.

I’m writing this from The Druid in Inman Square where I’m stuffed to the gills with what was, by far, the best Shepherd’s Pie I’ve ever had in my life. Rather than the standard ground beef with some peas and carrots topped with mediocre mashed potatoes it was a fantastic lamb stew with vegetables topped with fantastic mashed potatoes. And they didn’t skimp on the meat either, there was plenty of nice big chunks of lamb to last the whole way through the meal. Plus they’re one of the few places around enlightened enough to offer free WiFi. So you get a fantastic Irish Pub with fantastic Irish food, good prices, great atmosphere, and internet access so you can spend the whole day here and still claim to be working. I think I have a new favorite casual eatery.

In other news, we met with our mortgage broker this morning to apply for our mortgage. When we were first starting the process we were told that applying for a mortgage was like getting a root canal. I’ve never had a root canal, but, if that’s what it’s like, sign me up! I think the mortgage has seriously been one of the easiest parts of this whole process, which is saying a lot considering every other person we’ve worked with on this has been really good and really helpful. I think we must have had one of the best possible house shopping experiences, and I almost can’t wait to do it again (Cape house, anyone? Maybe in a few years…).

So we’re now pretty much finished with buying our condo. Everything that we need to do has been done, and now it’s just up to our lawyer, agent, and broker to take care of the rest. We’re definitely on track to be moving in by our closing date of Jan. 12.

I haven’t been writing much lately, just too much going on. I’m very close to getting my first client who will hire me on retainer rather than just for projects, I’m trying to keep on top of various opportunities to pursue for the new web venture as soon as all the paperwork for that is all ship shape and Bristol fashion (as an old boss of mine would say), trying mightily to find the time to get the work needed on cellphonetechnews.com done so that it can really launch, and, of course, buying a house.

If you had told me when I started this blog, way back on June 21, that today I would be buying a house, I would have thought you were crazy. None the less, this evening Jessi and I will be signing the Purchase and Sale agreement for our new condo in Somerville (and you’ll notice that I now have a Somerville category to complement my Cambridge one), and handing over a cheque for more money than I’ve ever actually seen at one time before. Of course things won’t really be finalized until Closing, which will be happening mid-January to avoid complications with the holidays, but the really important step of signing the paperwork and handing over a lot of money happens today (and we’re meeting with our mortgage broker tomorrow morning to deal with that aspect).

So once again, this blog will be chronicling a move. This time I’ll be moving less than 2 miles as opposed to the more than 3,000 before, but I think it’s just as big a move in other ways. We’re moving from renting to owning, a big enough step in its own right, but more importantly we’re moving from a temporary residence in the area to a commitment to stay here. We had always planned to stay here for probably at least 5 years, but now that we’ll own our condo it’s a little more official, and much harder for us to just up and leave if we feel like it. So for the next 5 to 7 years, we’ll be living in Somerville. Other than college, this is probably the first time I’ve ever really decided that I’d be staying in one place for any extended period of time. The only question that remains is: How will Pigpen handle all this?

The process of buying a house is a very strange and convoluted one. I guess I had always imagined it as being like buying anything else: you find what you want, negotiate a price, and buy it. Instead it’s a long, involved process that involves hiring several different people to manage it for you, takes about a month, and involves several discreet steps any one of which could fail and bring the whole deal crashing down. I suppose, despite its apparent complexity, that it’s really probably one of the most well-honed business practices there is. People have been purchasing land for thousands and thousands of years, so all these steps are probably there for a reason and serve a very good purpose. I definitely intend to write more about the process, and our experience with it, in more detail, but I’m waiting until it’s all over so I can collect my thoughts on it.

And so, I’ll leave you with this:

An example of just how important editing is to film and our impressions of it.