Monthly Archives: August 2006

Nothing

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Jeff is done looking at all the listings.

And they are all crap.

He has some good stories of locked doors, basements you have to enter from outside, pee smells, lack of insulation, signs of basement flooding, extremely slanted floors, people putting laminate flooring over carpet, etc etc.

That one on Rankin Lake Rd turned out to have a weird 5 foot addition on the front and it wasn’t all insulated and there were a million doors everywhere with a bad layout. He hated it. It’s hard to pay the absolute top limit of what you can afford for a house you’d have to rip apart.

There was one house that was really nice inside, this one:

http://www.mls.ca/PropertyDetails.aspx?PropertyID=4556692

but it has a bad location, in a poor neighbourhood – although with the new hospital going in it could change, but… I don’t know.

Actually there was one that was okay, nice enough house, didn’t need that much work – this one:

http://www.mls.ca/PropertyDetails.aspx?PropertyID=4871253

which has dropped from $209K to $189K but it’s more than we can afford. Even if we could come up with that kind of money, we really don’t want to be house poor for the rest of our lives. And he also said it’s on bedrock and half the utility room is a big huge rock coming out of the floor!

He’s going to talk to his new boss down there tomorrow. He refuses to buy an expensive piece of crap. We might just take my house off the market and he’ll move in with me until the spring and then we’ll try again. His agent says real estate stays active there until November, and then it dies until spring.

Or we can look at Nova Scotia, but we both would like to go to Parry Sound.

So he’ll be driving back here tomorrow. He filled his camera’s card with 100+ photos and he took lots of notes.

Oh I’m anxious!

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Jeff is meeting with his real estate agent at this hour and they have a full day of houses to see (probably only about 5 places).

By the end of the day I’ll have a better idea if we’re bailing and heading to Nova Scotia instead, or if we have a hope of staying in Ontario, or if we’ll be shackin’ up in Jeff’s little rented house here in the Sault for awhile.

I am liking that last listing I posted last night more and more. It needs some serious decorating work done, but it has a lot of potential and isn’t very old. Jeff is mostly concerned on how much it will cost to heat it because it’s quite big. But he recognizes that if we get in over our head, that basement would be easy to rent out as a separate apartment if need be. The current owner has a successful water bottling business using the well water. I wonder how much money selling water can bring in.

Anyway, send all your good wishes and good luck vibes through the airwaves to Jeff in Parry Sound. I can’t wait to hear how it goes!

Nova Scotia?

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Jeff still has to wait until tomorrow to view the properties in Parry Sound, but the idea has come up that maybe we’ll move to Nova Scotia instead, where there are jobs for him, where he might have had to move eventually anyway, and where big houses are less than 100K and have big lots (multiple acres.)

I really would like to live in Parry Sound so I’m still close to Northern Ontario, and close to all my family, but buying a horrible pit of a property and having to pay most of our income to a mortgage for the rest of our lives for a house we hate isn’t so appealing…

I guess we’ll see how tomorrow goes.

In the meantime, here is an example of what we could get if he took a job in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia:

http://www.mls.ca/PropertyDetails.aspx?PropertyID=4279357

(8 acres, 4 bedrooms, $85,000)

Another thought is buying a lot and buying a modular home for it, but that idea may cost more than we have to spend.

Photos from the Weekend

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Here are some photos from the Weekend:

Garage Sale – Day 1 – Before the People…
Before the Rain
Lots of Stuff for Sale

I still think it’s wierd that I didn’t sell the big things, like my BBQ, 2 dog crates, big Coleman cooler – but I sold an OPEN bag of kitty litter. Go figure.

Here are some photos of the house before I went to work this morning. I still have a bit of tidying to do, but you’ll get the idea of the magnificant improvements:

New laminate flooring, new baseboards, painted walls, painted baseboards, and all my stuff is boxed in the garage.
Hey Zeus snuck into this one! I got paint on the side of my leather recliner – any idea how to get it off?
My enormous kitchen ;-)
Look at the new vinyl flooring in the back room! It looks really nice. I wish I got rid of all the carpet in my house 4 years ago!

So how long until it’s sold? Okay…. how about.. how long until the first viewing? :D The agent is coming over tonight to pick up the key.

First Call from Parry Sound

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Jeff is down in Parry Sound now. I just got the first call from him. He doesn’t think he’ll be buying a house this week. Even the junk houses are WAY WAY WAY overpriced. There just isn’t anything there.

I’m glad I’m up here because I’d be so distraught down there. The ridiculous agent he has thought he wasn’t coming, even after he called her last week, so now he can’t go see anything until Wednesday.

What might happen is he’ll work part-time in Parry Sound and if/when my house sells, I’ll have to move into his rental house with him. It’s half the size of my house, but we have to do what we have to do.

Oh please real estate gods, can you list a house at an affordable price? And maybe through in a basement, garage, forced air heating, and just maybe can you make it more than a few feet off the TransCanada? And maybe within 15 minutes of Parry Sound?

Oh the Aches….

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At last, it’s the Sunday night I’ve been waiting for for two weeks. The night when everything is supposed to be done for the realtor to start showing the house.

Well it’s close.

I can’t possibly say enough good things about how much work Jeff has done to get this house ready to sell. He’s done some excellent handy work. The laminate flooring is in, walls painted, new baseboards painted and installed. We got the front steps scraped and painted. The fence has now been scraped and painted. Vinyl flooring is now in the backroom. There is a new light in my hallway. All that and we had a garage sale for two full days.

We brought in about $255 at the garage sale. Not bad. The second day wasn’t too busy. It rained on the first day. The things I thought would go first are still in my garage because no one bought them – like my dog crates, and BBQ.

Tips for holding a garage sale:
1. One day is enough.
2. Everyone is going to offer you half of what your sticker price is, so keep that in mind when you write the stickers.
3. A lot of really really wierd people come by and want to talk your ear off.
4. Be prepared to just give your stuff away.
5. Have someone else around. It was comforting to know Jeff was here and he kept an eye out when a loon stopped by the sale and he would take money and stash it inside so it wasn’t all on me.
6. Have some clear plastic sheets ready to cover the tables in the rain – people can still look through the clear plastic.

We still have about half of the stuff left so I guess it’ll go to the dump. We took a few things out to the street and put a free sign on them and only one thing is left. People love the word FREE.

I’d say Jeff’s western books by L’mour or whatever his name is (he must have had about 50+ of the suckers) were one of the most popular items. I sold my guitar that wasn’t any good anymore for just $20 and made an old lady’s adult children fight over it until she had to put it away!

Some neighbourhood kids spent a couple hours here. Good bargainers those kids were. They got some good deals. I sold the old laptop Dad bought for $5 at a garage sale to the kid for $2. They eventually brought their parents back and I guess I liked them because I “gave” them my lawnmower for only $30.

No clothes sold. Not one item. I sold my old AMD K6/2 computer for only $25. I wanted that as my back-up center, and even had Gentoo installed on it, but I forsee a new desktop computer in my future within a year (fingers crossed) so I’ll keep this VAIO around for back-ups.

I’m so covered in paint and dirt. Even after a shower. I even went to the dark side, the place I said I’d never ever go, and now I own a Swiffer. Stupid marketing B.S. but I didn’t know how else to clean that new laminate flooring. I’m terrified to scratch it so the vacuum isn’t going in there, and you can’t get it wet, so neither is the mop.

Jeff leaves in the morning on his paid house hunting trip. I trust him…. mostly… I guess it’s just hard give up control. Every house I’ve fallen for is over our budget so it’s up to Jeff. I’ll be way way to frustrated and stressed out if I go, although I’d really love to go and see our options and choices. Jeff said he’ll call lots and take photos.

I’ll spend the week on the final touches around here and getting started on the big web project I’ve got cookin’ up my sleeve. This is a good one that will blow my other online money streams out of the water I hope.

Anyway, I’m achy and tired and dirty and sleepy so I’m going to go lie down and groan for awhile.

[Yes, I know... I took J. out of the closet. Now he's Jeff. Bold move. I know. Hope he can handle it. He's warming up to the whole blog thing. Maybe someday he'll have a blog.... nah, can't picture it.]

PS. Photos maybe tomorrow…

Photos of the Renovations

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Here are some photos of the work we’ve been doing.

Living Room Floor
What we saw when we pulled back the carpet. Luckily the carpet was just stuck to the floor around the outside edge with some sort of thin two-sided tape. The underlay foam fell apart in pieces and some of it had to be scraped up, but it wasn’t too bad.
There was some sort of laminate flooring under the carpet – it had a wood look in an appealing pattern, but it wasn’t in any condition to save. But under the far side of the living room, which used to be a separate bedroom at some point, we found the most lovely flowery flooring!
And when I came home from work, the new laminate flooring was in! J. did a really nice job with it.
Another Angle

Tomorrow will be a late night. I have to get everything ready for the garage sale on the weekend. My friend should be lending us an air nailer so we can do the baseboards faster. I have them already painted and ready to go. J. rented a mitre saw from Home Depot for two days to cut the flooring so we’ll use it to do the baseboards and the trim in the kitchen.

We stuck little felt stickies on the bottom of all the furniture as we are putting it back in the living room so we don’t scratch the floor. I’m leery about the laminate flooring. We spent $1.29 a square foot. I think if I was staying in the house for longer, then I’d research to make sure I was getting some super durable strong stuff that would last for eons. I’m suspicious about this one, but heck, we just want it to make the house sell and smell less like dogs.

Okay bedtime. zzzzzzzzzzzz….

Snakes On A Plane

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AHH!!

I can’t believe I’ve neglected to tell you all that J. and I went to see Snakes on a Plane on opening night!

I had been listening to the hype for a couple months, and we really needed a break from all the house prep work.

I loved it! It was very entertaining. Great lines. Cheesy in a good way. Lots of scenes to make you jump out of your seat (even J. jumped higher than me once!)

I give it 5 snakes out of 5! Go see it!