when she was young, the lady sparkler legendarily got upset that they rearranged furniture in order to put up the Christmas tree. (i can neither confirm nor deny that this is why i shipped her off to austin during the move.)

so, in an attempt to protect life, preserve sanity during the move, i’ve been sending her pictures of the progress of Flickr and short videos (below) of the rooms as they’ve gone from project to completion.

i should manage my wife professionally.

it has been quite some time since your mother and i started living together — and for some reason daddy wasn’t smart (or brave) enough to blog about it at the time.

so, now that we’re all getting ready to move into house 3.0, it seems like a good time to flashback to the house (or two) that started it all.

when mommy and daddy met back in 2004, daddy was living unceremoniously in his boss’ basement in a place called “Glover Park.” it was in a neighborhood that was a lot like Mount Pleasant — only filled exclusively with 25 year old female interns from the midwest whose daddies were determined that their daughters would be geographically removed from anything that might possibly resemble a city.

(oh, and the 45 minute walk to the nearest metro stop, and the $30 a plate restaurants, and the whole foods, and the small children running around wearing designer toddler clothing that they would out grow in the next two weeks — other than that it was exactly like Mount Pleasant.)

mommy, on the other hand, lived about 30 feet from the (literal) wrong side of the tracks in “old town” Alexandria, Virginia.

on the rare occasion where it made sense for daddy to spend the night in Alexandria (read: we were flying out of national airport the following morning) it was a lovely experience (sweating, with no air conditioning) through the parts of the night (those without gun shots) through which we would sleep like lambs (in between freight trains).

considering that mommy had (obviously) even worse taste in living arrangements than daddy, i tried desperately to convince her to move into D.C. with me — not into my boss’ basement, somewhere else — but she’d have none of it. her love of strip malls and horrible drivers was just too strong.

the one legitimately nice thing about our living arrangement was the drive — daddy lived a couple minutes off the rock creek parkway, and mommy lived a couple minutes off the george washington parkway, a pair of beautifully scenic roads connected by the (equally stunning) memorial bridge.

so, when i came time to develop some kind of master plan for our residential future, we picked a neighborhood in Arlington (called “Rosslyn”) pretty much entirely based on the fact that it was located just off our beloved parkways, halfway between our two houses.

now, i actually remember precious little about the moves (plural, there were two houses after all) themselves. i remember that it was July, hotter than blazes, and mommy had managed to find a new job the week before and “just couldn’t take time off work to help out.”

the apartment (and the complex) was a pretty unremarkable place — probably best illustrated by the fact that we never bothered to take any pictures of it.

fortunately, the apartment complex’s website hasn’t been updated since the hoover administration and just happens to have pictures of our exact model:

so, there you go … the “house” that started it all, and the one that set us up for the first home you ever knew.

and with that, good night. ’cause daddy has to go pack. ’cause daddy is moving y’all into a new house in just 19 days.

love,
daddy

we spent three hours pouring over the place on Saturday, and really didn’t come up with nearly as much as we would have thought.

there was a loose toilet on the first floor which we didn’t want to start leaking, a couple small electrical issues and a joist which showed some possible termite damage — all of which the sellers agreed to fix.

there are some other issues which we’ll want to fix ourselves in the months after we move in: the boiler was installed in 1982, and probably is a little behind as far as fuel efficiency goes; the attic could use a little more insulation; and there are two code issues with railings on the porch and on the steps to the basement.

the first two will take some planning (and some $$$$) but the latter i can fix myself on pretty much any random Saturday afternoon.

oh, and even our termite fears turned out to be over blown. the porch next door does have a small termite issue, but “our” porch has been treated and got a clean bill of health — and they were actually replacing the offending porch during our inspection.

i think we’ve got one contingency left (our appraisal) but the last week of May seems a lot closer than it did even a couple of days ago.

MAP: From Baist’s Real Estate Atlas of Surveys of Washington, District of Columbia, circa 1919. “Our” place is #79, located just above the “M” in Monroe Street.

(UPDATED: We got the place. Keep reading…!)

it would have been a stretch for us at full price, but it’s been sitting one the market without any offers for more than two weeks now. that means that the market has spoken and deemed the price too high.

so, tonight we’ve put an offer for (effectively) 4% off the list price, with the expectation that will be negotiated back down to between 2% and 3% off list — which is much more in line with what we were thinking for a house budget.

the place *is* beautiful.

it was built in 1915, resides within a formal Historic District, has all its original molding and the original floor plan — things that no other house we’ve looked at has had. the view from the porch and the front bedroom is across rock creek park, and just stunning.

our only real complaint is the lack of a second bathroom upstairs and a kinda small third bedroom, but both of those things can be fixed with a small addition off the back — something that both neighbors have already done so there is every reason to assume it’d be approved by the District.

(also, if we ever get around to having a “thing #2″ of our own, the smaller third bedroom has it’s own porch so the demand between the two rooms will eventually balance out.)

our target house also has a rental efficiency in the basement that was (at one point) officially licensed by the city — a bit of a rarity as far as basement apartments go — which we can expect to take about $800 or $900 off our mortgage each month for as long as we care to rent it out.

so, all engines are go — let’s hope this thing works out.

UPDATE (FRIDAY @ 9pm): We’ve heard back from their Realtor that they’ll be responding tomorrow (Saturday) by noon. Responding is good, because it means our offer hasn’t been summarily rejected.

UPDATE (SATURDAY @ 11AM): The response timeline has slipped a little bit — from noon to “some point today.” It came accompanied with the story that the new house they’ve bought in New Jersey flooded this week, which seems to be reason enough to give them a break.

UPDATE (SATURDAY @ 5PM): Now we’re starting to get a little cranky. They reviewed our offer and decided that they wanted some more supporting (eg. financial) documentation. Seems like that was something they could have asked for, oh, say … 24 hours ago.

Brandon (our agent) said it’s because of how we structured the deal — instead of taking 4% off the price, we said we’d pay full price but they’d have to give us 4% of the value of the house at closing.

Apparently asking for the cash back can either be interpreted as (a) smart, because right now borrowing money is so cheap vs. having cash on hand; or (b) reckless, because the seller thinks you don’t actually have the cash to complete the transaction without the “subsidy.”

I don’t have the heart to break it to them that the only reason we asked for such a large number was because we assumed they’d chop the figure in half before the sent it back to us.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 11AM): More waiting. They got the financial stuff, and are going to meet (Realtor and sellers) this afternoon to discuss.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 1PM): They countered. They “kept” our 4% cash back at closing, but upped the price by three percent to take three-quarters of it back. We’re countering at exactly halfway between our initial offer and their list price (which is conveniently enough where we thought we’d end up anyway). Seems like a fair compromise.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 2:30PM): God, this is excruciating.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 2:45PM): The sellers are on their way to New Jersey (to their flooded house, presumably) but Brandon made it through to their real estate agent and she “didn’t see any reason why the counter wouldn’t be accepted.” I think that’s about as good a news as we could get without a formal “yes” — but i’m breaking out the hard liquor to numb the pain regardless.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 3:15PM): “The waaa-aiting is the hardest paaart.”

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 6:00PM): they agreed. we just bought a house. in dc. in mount pleasant. what the heck?!? good things really do happen all at once.

we pulled the listing on Monday, got our place back to living order on Tuesday night, but then got a call from our real estate agent Wednesday night saying that someone wanted to see the place Thursday morning.

we proceeded to explain to him what “being off the market” meant, but he was insistent that the showing was a good idea.

apparently, the prospective buyers had seen our place about two weeks ago, and had bid on another place and lost. now, they had narrowed the next round of their search to our place and one other — and had freaked out a bit when we took our place off the market earlier in the week.

so, we spent all night Wednesday re-staging our place for the Thursday morning showing.

and they loved the place. and they put a (nearly) full price offer on the place. and we accepted. and we settle the week of May 22nd.

which just goes to show you: the best way to get an offer is to take your place off the market.

shortly after the post about us putting down an offer on a place on the 1800 block of Monroe NW, we got word from our real estate agent that a grand total of two people saw our place over the weekend.

the market has judged our sale price, and found it wanting.

they love our particular unit, they just hate our building. and the high condo fees. and the dated common areas. but mostly the high condo fees. which, of course, are the two things we technically can’t control.

fortunately, i’m on the board of our association and there have been a LOT of conversations about dropping our fees this year. and the dingy common areas are up for renovation this year, too. so, hopefully i just have to nudge those conversations along a bit.

it turns out that we are actually an old school condo board in that we have pretty consistently high monthly fees, but not a single special assessment in memory (because we always have money in the bank). unfortunately, every other association on the planet has swapped to a different model, dropping their fees dramatically and just expecting that big expenses will mean big(ish) special assessments.

i know which one i’d prefer — but i guess that’s why i’m trying to move into a house.

it also turns out that our building isn’t pre-approved for FHA loans, which means that people can’t buy into the building with federally backed loans that require as little as 3.5% down payment. instead, our buyers right now need to get traditional bank loans, which require 10 to 20% down.

so it looks like i’ve got a couple “special” projects on my hands for the next month.

regardless, we backed out of making an offer on the Monroe place — and plan on doing what we can with the condo fees, common areas and the fha pre-approval process in (hopefully) the next month. that’d mean we (again) can go gangbusters with the selling and the buying in the first week of April.

for those of us playing along at home, we’ve now looked at a more than dozen properties, and have “tried” putting an offer down on a five of them:

• 3330 17th Street NW
• 3215 Walbridge Place NW
• 1822 Monroe Street NW
• 420 6th Street NE
• 1873 Monroe Street NW

… but haven’t actually bit the bullet on any.

i guess the good news is that places keep coming on the market. now, if we can get that one extra-special one off the market, we’ll be all set.

there is plenty of space, a potential rental unit downstairs, and all the little things that make a DC property great (molding, layout, finishing) are still there.

there are some quirks — one bathroom on the top floor, not a ton of closet space, and no parking — but we could easily see ourselves spending the next couple of decades of our lives there.

the seller isn’t even entertaining offers until Tuesday night, so we’re in no great rush — just pulling together all the details and hoping it doesn’t get into a bidding war.

i’m guessing we won’t hear anything until Thursday at the earliest.