houses
After some searching, we finally found a house that we really loved on Friday. It's a three bedroom, 3 year old, 3 level house. The basement is unfinished, leaving plenty of room for improvement. (The tentative plan for the basement is a fourth bedroom, a rec area / projector area, a workroom, and another bathroom.) It's also got an amazing kitchen, a workable yard, and a lot of entertaining space on the main floor.
Downsides to the house:
* No real good location for the projector until we refinish the basement. We could do the unfinished-basement-projector-room thing or shove it into one of the spare bedrooms, but those are our only real options.
* Homeowners Association. These are inherently evil things and I hate them and hate the thought of being in one. On the flip side, this particular one is not too terribly restrictive. The only restriction that actually concerns us is a fence height limit of 4 feet. We're already making plans for circumventing this restriction in some way or another. (A trellis on top of the fence covered in vines could be argued to not be part of the fence.)
* The garage is duplex-style, for whatever reason. We get half of a four-car garage, basically, with a fire-wall between us and our neighbor's halves. This doesn't bother me particularly, but it's just weird.
* The topography is totally up in the air. The entire area is new construction, and they did a lot of bulldozing and dirt-moving before building houses, so the topography maps I can find from the 80s are unrelated to the actual law of the land. I don't think we're in a particularly flood-crazy area, but Urbana-Champaign was basically built on a swamp...
It's amazing to me how fast things go these days as far as house negotiations. We decided to put an offer in late on Friday, and by Saturday evening it was done. That was with a lot of back-and-forth negotiations.
The current owner is an idiot and seems to think some sucker is going to come along and pay him his inflated asking price if he just holds out long enough. He's been holding out over 250 days already, and oddly enough he still seems to think it'll work out for him. It only came together because our respective realtors have agreed to make up the difference between what I can pay and what he's willing to accept out of their own commissions. I feel bad that our realtor is taking a hit for no good reason, but at least we got the house we want for a price we're willing to pay.
EDIT: The online listing is gone! You can still see the pictures we took, however.
Downsides to the house:
* No real good location for the projector until we refinish the basement. We could do the unfinished-basement-projector-room thing or shove it into one of the spare bedrooms, but those are our only real options.
* Homeowners Association. These are inherently evil things and I hate them and hate the thought of being in one. On the flip side, this particular one is not too terribly restrictive. The only restriction that actually concerns us is a fence height limit of 4 feet. We're already making plans for circumventing this restriction in some way or another. (A trellis on top of the fence covered in vines could be argued to not be part of the fence.)
* The garage is duplex-style, for whatever reason. We get half of a four-car garage, basically, with a fire-wall between us and our neighbor's halves. This doesn't bother me particularly, but it's just weird.
* The topography is totally up in the air. The entire area is new construction, and they did a lot of bulldozing and dirt-moving before building houses, so the topography maps I can find from the 80s are unrelated to the actual law of the land. I don't think we're in a particularly flood-crazy area, but Urbana-Champaign was basically built on a swamp...
It's amazing to me how fast things go these days as far as house negotiations. We decided to put an offer in late on Friday, and by Saturday evening it was done. That was with a lot of back-and-forth negotiations.
The current owner is an idiot and seems to think some sucker is going to come along and pay him his inflated asking price if he just holds out long enough. He's been holding out over 250 days already, and oddly enough he still seems to think it'll work out for him. It only came together because our respective realtors have agreed to make up the difference between what I can pay and what he's willing to accept out of their own commissions. I feel bad that our realtor is taking a hit for no good reason, but at least we got the house we want for a price we're willing to pay.
EDIT: The online listing is gone! You can still see the pictures we took, however.