theparkerfamily.org

Tag: Long Reads

  • inspection for park

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    first time home buyers are so cute.

    the inspection for our sale of park was tuesday, and by the end of the day some of the sparkle had started coming off of the prospective buyers for our place on park road.

    i should start by saying that we we’re a little cranky to start.

    part of their original offer to buy our place was “complete flexibility” for our settlement and move out — they were living somewhere month to month, and just needed to give 30 days notice. however, by the time the contract came, that had been revised down to “no flexibility what-so-ever” and we had to move out the same day as we settled on Monroe, which is a logistical nightmare.

    (in the end, we negotiated a scant 7 day rent back, but thankfully it’s all we needed.)

    as a result, we decided to be a little more proactive with their inspection of our place — we tried to gave them a bunch of information on our place up front, in an effort to make sure they got everything they needed out of their morning kicking our tires.

    unfortunately, they still couldn’t find our water heater — even though we had done everything short of drawing them a map based on our own journey of water heater discovery.

    they gave us a provisional list of issues they wanted addressed — including two that to this day i have no clue what is broken (and neither of those are the one where they want something “adjustmented”):

    • tiles near the base of the washer dryer to be regrouted.
    • gaps in the floor of the utility clause to be closed.
    • closet doors in both bedrooms to be adjustmented to close fully.
    • bathroom light to be replaced with wet area rated fixture.
    • high loop for dishwasher to be adjusted.

    (we opted to give them $500 to fix the stuff themselves.)

    as for the “missing” water heater, they asked to extend the inspection another five days — just long enough to put our purchase of Monroe in jeopardy. instead, we gave them a day extension, and Brandon suggested that I be there the next morning to talk them the place everything myself.

    what followed was a lesson in the power of eye contact — as it turned out that they were legitimately nice people, doing exactly the same sort of thing the lady sparkler and i would have done.

    mr. firsttimehomebuyer was detail oriented and focused on making a great investment decision (not unlike my own beloved). mrs. firsttimehomebuyer was a neo-hippie (much like myself) who was excited primarily about the community and the neighborhood.

    we talked about our place, the building and the neighborhood — and in the course of 20 minutes they went from inexperienced ogres who we’re screwing up the purchase of our dream home to people we’d totally have over for dinner.

    if the lesson of the last two weeks to our real estate agent is to take all his places off the market to make them sell quicker, the lesson for us is to meet any prospective buyers ourselves and take them out for drinks.

  • house 3.0

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    things are starting to sink in a bit, now.

    the contract on our new place has been fully signed and ratified (tho, i have no clue what that means, unless it involves a 2/3rds majority of the U.S. Senate).

    we’ve got our home inspection this saturday at 2pm, and the lady sparkler has been furiously working on financing and spreadsheets to make sure we’re all good there (and we are).

    assuming that everything goes well with our purchase and our sale, we’ll have a very busy Memorial Day. we’d settle the sale on Park Road on Monday, May 23rd. we’d settle the purchase on Monroe Street on Wednesday, May 25th.

    then we’d rent back our current place on Park Road from the new owners through Sunday, May 29th, so we’d have about 5 days to swap everything between the two places.

    in the meantime, we’ve been watching a lot of tv — the “worst” being holmes inspection on HGTV.

    the basic premise of the show is to find “homeowners facing massive repair bills and dangerous living conditions due to incompetence within the unregulated home inspection industry,” and then call in Canadian construction foreman extrordinaire Mike Holmes to “make it right.”

    about a month ago, we saw an episode of holmes inspection where all the supporting walls of a 100 year old row home had been taken down, causing over $300k worth of repairs to restore the collapsing floors — which is exactly what we thought had happened to the very first monroe place we looked at.

    this week we saw an episode where termite damage had done $150k worth of damage to a the first two floors of a different, but similarly aged rowhouse. the next day, we found out that the current owners of our future place have been monitoring termites on one of their neighbors’ front porches.

    (the current owners have been treating “our” new porch regularly for the past couple years to prevent the issue from jumping property lines, and the faulty porch is “due” to be replaced this year.)

    it’s nice to know that when the real stress starts settling down, we have some good “hypothetical” stress ready and waiting in the wings.

  • or, maybe not

    []
    well, that didn’t work so much.

    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:

    … 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.

  • coming unglued

    well, i think i’m about done with the real estate thing.

    this afternoon we took a long second look at a house on the 1800 block of monroe street nw, and the details didn’t look so good upon closer examination.

    it had been recently renovated, but the finishing just wasn’t where we’d have liked it to be — and if what we could see gave us pause, we were pretty nervous about what was hidden behind the drywall.

    this is the third place that looked at where all the original character was gutted during a recent renovation and replaced (seemingly) by whatever home depot had on special that week.

    our real estate agent calls it a “gaithersburg remodel” — gutting a District home and treating it as if it was just another townhouse in the suburbs — which would be funny if we weren’t absolutely weeping inside at the loss.

    so, after this round of bad real estate karma we’ve started coming a bit unglued — enough that we actually ventured over to capitol hill to check out a place (400 block of 6th Street NE) that just came on the market there.

    it was stunning and had everything that the last couple of places in mount pleasant have lacked — original woodwork, original layouts, period decor.

    to make matters worse, it was in our price range, had big beautiful bedrooms, was in the absolute best part of capitol hill, and was surrounded by excellent elementary and middle schools.

    we thought long and hard about putting an offer on it — even though we haven’t seriously been considering moving to capitol hill.

    but during the drive home to mount pleasant — along the tree lined streets, around the zoo, past our favorite restaurants and playgrounds — we realized we just couldn’t do it.

    our neighborhood is just too awesome to be replaced by even a spectacular home somewhere else.

    we’re not ready to give up on mount pleasant — not yet.

  • twitter saves the day, again

    I’m starting to think the office tweeter is the most powerful person in any bureaucracy.

    The internet is littered with stories about regular people getting their offline problems solved after complaining to corporations online.

    Heck, we did the same thing in the aftermath of a certain automobile recall last year.

    Turns out that corporate tweeters aren’t he only ones saving the day — the District government social media teams are jumping in, too.

    Our permit application to park a mobile storage container on city street this weekend mysteriously stalled earlier this week, and all of the lady sparklers efforts ended up in voicemail-laden dead ends.

    So, late last night I tweeted to the Districts official Department of Transportation account.

    hey, @DDOTDC – we have a POD permit app that’s been stalled/ignored for a week. who can help fix tmrw before it’s delivered this weekend?

    By 11:00 pm, I had an email address for the guy behind the twitter account, asking for details on our problem.

    By 7:30 am, I was CC’ed on an email from him, forwarding our problem on to a team of people to solve.

    By 8:30 am, the lady sparkler got a call on her cell phone from someone from DDOT saying they would clear everything up for us within the hour.

    At 9:04, my wife had the permit in her hot little hands.

    I don’t know how much of this little bit of awesomeness was caused by the social media phenomenon in general, or the epic person behind @DDOTDC in particular, or about just tunneling through the bureaucracy to find the actual human beings inside.

    Either way, whatever is responsible — thank you.

  • goob

    we’ll, we’ve been bouncing around a little bit with nicknames for sparklet — not that we’re giving up on sparklet for external marketing purposes, but it’s a little harsh/abrupt/awkward to use in daily life.

    for now, we’ve settled on some variation on the word “goober” — including goob, goober bear, and goober nut. (it’s important to be nimble.)

    now, on the surface, i can see how this might sound odd, but in our defense the the urban dictionary — one of the least polite chroniclers of slang on our fine planet — defines goober as:

    a goober is just a kindhearted, rather oblivious goofball. it’s term of endearment really. it comes from the ancient scottish verb “to goub”, which has to do with doing a dance and smiling sheepishly while doing so, exposing the goubs in one’s teeth.

    so, it’s actually kind of appropriate.

    i wish i knew exactly how “goober” worked its way into our collective vernacular — i have a feeling it was because we were calling her doofus during her “running into walls” phase and decided we should shoot for something a bit more charitable.

    either way, the nickname was cemented about six months ago when we first watch disney’s meet the robinsons — one of the two lead characters’ nicknames is goob, and he has that sort of sheepish, lovable quality that we see in sparklet at this age.

    of course, he also turns out to be the arch-villain of the story, but that’s for another time.

  • mount pleasant-er

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    we might be in the market for a house.

    we’re not moving — at least, not moving out of mount pleasant — but there are a couple things going on that make us (er, the lady sparkler) think that it could be time to upgrade.

    • interest rates are down 2+ percentage points from when we signed a last mortgage. when you add that savings to what we pay each month in condo association fees, we can have about a 50% larger place without paying a dime extra per month.
    • we were planning on moving in the next 2 to 3 years anyway, and *man* our place seems a lot smaller than it did, saaaay 16 months ago.
    • the market has stabilized enough that we’re sure we can get all our money out of our current place.
    • the economy is starting to show signs of life again, which means that housing prices only have one direction to go (and that would be “up”).

    that said, if we can’t find a nice little fixer-upper row house in mount pleasant that we can afford now, we’ll just stay put until we’re on the other side of our daycare payments.

    we love our neighborhood, and haven’t given up on the idea that we can raise baby sparklet here. we love our friends, we love our nanny. we love the fact that our vote for federal office is basically meaningless (wait, scratch that last one).

    and, besides, there aren’t a lot of other options …

    within D.C., we certainly wouldn’t move east of 16th street (too speculative), nor south or west of mount pleasant (we couldn’t afford it), and there really isn’t much in D.C. that’s north of us (all residential, little commerce, reduced transit).

    outside of D.C., we have the same problems we’ve always had: new england and chicago are too cold (for my beloved); texas is utterly without seasons (for me); the pacific northwest is really far away and people there actually slow down at yellow lights (the latter is a “third rail” for the lady sparkler).

    and besides, we all know how much my beloved likes change.

  • you suck, montgomery county

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    just got a “notice of delinquent parking ticket” in the mail from montgomery county, maryland for parking at an expired meter on november 12th at 5:17pm.

    there are a couple of problems with this scenario:

    • we never got the original notice of the parking violation for which we are now “delinquent.”
    • i wasn’t in montgomery county that day — twelve minutes before our “violation,” i took these pictures of kate at our home in mount pleasant and proceeded to upload them to flickr four minutes *after* our violation.
    • my wife wasn’t in montgomery county that day — thirty minutes after our “violation,” the lady sparkler stopped by pupusaria san miguel on her way home from work (for the best latin food in D.C., incidentally).
    • the “infraction” occurred on a federal holiday (Veteran’s Day) when parking restrictions don’t apply.
    • the citation *does not* list a make or model, so there is no confirmation that it was our car and not just a typo of our license plate.

    however, the only recourse Montgomery County provides is to appear — in person — before the 6th District Court in Rockville.

    given the cost of the ticket (at least in relation to my wife’s billing rate) and the distance between my work and the courthouse (55 minutes in decent traffic) there is no way in h-e-double-hockey-sticks that we’re going to contest the citation.

    you suck, montgomery county — yet another reason i’m never moving to the suburbs.

    PHOTO: Uploaded to Flickr by eddie.welker on 7 Sep 09, 12.59PM EST, via Creative Commons license.

  • Is there a Wedding Photographer in the House?

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    Steph and Jorge’s wedding photographer is going to be a no show tonight — so it looks like I’m going to “get” to shoot my first wedding.

    The maid of honor (not ours, but theirs) mentioned it in passing to the lady sparkler and my beloved volunteered me for the job — not that I wouldn’t have offered myself, but it’s awesome that my bride came up to me at the pool bar and said:

    Hey, I just told someone you could be the wedding photographer tonight — hope that’s okay.

    UPDATE: I’ve collected my thoughts and all my gear, and i’m actually feeling pretty legit — I’ve got the same camera a wedding photographer friend of mine uses for her weddings, four memory cards which can hold about 1200 photos, two batteries, and two pretty serious-grade lenses (both normal, and wide angle).

    That said, I’m seriously freaking out shot two things — well, three actually: 1) I’m shooting a wedding; 2) I’m going to blow through 1200 photos before the reception even starts which means I’m going to have to empty memory cards onto my computer while I’m still shooting and my laptop doesn’t have a battery; 3) I don’t have a legitimate flash, so shooting the outdoors-afterdark reception is going to suck something fierce.

    UPDATE 2: The “shoot” is over, and I have to say that wasn’t nearly as stressful as I thought it would be — though through no part of my own:

    • one of the bridesmaides had a professional grade flash (not to mention my exact same camera) which is the only reason we have photos from the reception.
    • that same bridesmaid was able to shoot the bride getting ready, so we got pictures from both halves of the preparations without it getting awkward or me being on two places at once.
    • friends jumped in several times throughout the night, dumping photos onto the computer and picking the camera themselves. and at one point we had amassed enough equipment that we had all three of us all shooting at once.
    • the bride and the groom were both incredibly flexible and were eager to line up the shots themselves, so all we had to do was point and shoot.

    I haven’t run through them all yet, but between the four of us we amassed over 3,000 pictures, and they all look pretty good considering.

    I promised the couple I would post everything by Christmas, but here are a few of the ceremony in the meantime.

  • parents of the year

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    at dinner tonight, the waitress came running up to us:

    excuse me! excuse me! nuestros cuchillos muy afilados!

    we look down at sparklet, and she is knawing on a set of cutlery wrapped up in a napkin, which is a relatively normal part of her dining routine.

    we were just about to say, “oh that’s okay” when we noticed instead of the usual table knife (the ones that can’t cut butter) she was gnawing on a steak knife.

    frankly, i’m surprised that the waitress didn’t call the costa rican version of Child Protective Services.

    she watched us let sparklet eat a steak knife, spoil her dinner with a blackberry smoothy, and adhere loosely to our version of the “five second” rule (which really works out to be more of a “minute and a half” rule).

    not our finest moments — but also sadly not our first.

    this morning on the trail to arenal, we had three separate groups of people stop us to “let us know” that sparklet was chewing on a stick (yeah, we knew).

    to make matters worse, perhaps you’ve noticed a new gash on sparklet’s head from a couple of days ago? yup, she ran into a wall in our hotel room.

    there’s also a (less noticable) bruise under her chin, which she got when she tripped over her own feet and landed chin first on the tile floor. oh, and when she fell she bit her lip, so that’s been bleeding on and off, too.

    and then, of course, there was that double gainer off the deck into the pool.

    come to think of it, maybe i should call CPS myself.