Decisions

On Saturday Linzy and I went to our builder's design center for the first planning visit on the new house. Having never built before it was an entirely new experience. Luckily we had worked with the development sales guy quite a bit on options so we had at least some idea of what we were getting into.

Until we actually got there of course, and realized the full scope of all of the decisions that needed to be made.

It wasn't just the expected things like what kind of flooring do you want, and what kind of granite, and what edge on the granite, but a million small things as well. Such as what kind of toilets do you want, round, elongated, or comfort height. Did you even know a 'comfort height' toilet existed?

How about sinks, do you want the standard 8.25" depth, the mixed 7.5" and 9.5" or the double 9.5" inch kitchen sink. Oh, you want the 9.5" inch? That's an extra $700. Are you still sure? How about roll-out shelves? $95 a piece, how many do you want and where? What about the grout color on your ceramic tile?

I don't think that I have ever made that many decisions in a three hour period. On one hand it is nice because we truly will be getting exactly what we want, or think we want. On the other hand it is sort of scary because you make 300 decisions and then 6 months later a house pops out with all those items installed. Better hope that carpet color you picked from the 3x3 sample turns out good when you have a whole house full of it. Or the paint color selected from a 1x2 inch swath, that the entire house will be painted. No pressure.

Then because we are gluttons for punishment immediately following the design center we went to Southern Lights and picked out all 39 of the light fixtures for the house. That would have been horrendous but the sales consultant (Michelle) was awesome and helped keep us from being overwhelmed and kept us on budget.

The end result is that other then a few custom options they are working out prices for, nearly everything is decided. So they should be able to start construction as soon as the permits come through.


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Storage

As we inch closer to finalizing the sale on our house, the current popular topic of discussion at home is what exactly we are going to do all of the stuff we have. About half of our things are currently packed in my parent's basement but that still leaves a substantial amount of things to box up and nearly all of our furniture still to deal with.

Since the new house likely won't be done until January, we have quite a while to store things. Since we'll already be imposing on my parents I am not necessarily keen on completely filling their basement (it's about a third full now), nor am I interested in trying to move any significant portion of the furniture over there.

That leaves some sort of storage as being required. We're debating whether that means PODs (or something similar), or a regular storage unit. PODs would be convenient in theory, since they could show up at the house, go away for five months and then show up at the new house. On the other hand they are expensive and so we'd probably do the moving to/from the POD by ourselves so I'd have to hit up friends to help move things.

A consideration with that is the fact that when we moved into this house I promised all my friends (who at that time were moving each other yearly) that I would not ask them to help me move out. Also there is the question of how to best protect the stuff in the POD, as moving blankets turn out to be crazy expensive, and the slightly concerning reputation of PODs as not being particularly careful when moving PODs around and things getting damaged even when stuff is strapped down.

A storage unit would be cheaper, or would allow us to hire movers for at least one direction of the move to/from the storage unit. But there is a definite question about exactly how much space we would need for storage and just how expensive that would get, especially if there were movers involved transporting the stuff in both directions. I must admit that the thought of someone else having to carry the heavy crap is appealing. But I'm not sure it is appealing enough to spend $3,000 on it.

We're also having a difficult time estimating the amount of space we'll need since there is all kinds of stuff that really won't stack and so takes up a much larger amount of space then you would normally think. We don't have as much furniture as many people, but we still have a disturbing amount when I think about trying to cram it and the garage and deck contents all into a 10x20 storage unit.

I'm sure we'll figure something out, but any suggestions would be highly appreciated.


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Topics: None

I've been in something struggling lately to come up with things to blog about. Right now with moving, almost all of my free time is related in some way to either selling this house or buying the new one. Throw in a work schedule that as busy as always, if not more, I'm not up to a very wide variety of activities.

The trouble with that, when it comes to posting is that all three of these are under self-imposed restrictions for writing about. The house we are selling, is on radio silence, of course. Work has always been only rarely mentioned in any way other then "I'm busy", or "I'm traveling to some exotic location", or "We went out and did something fun instead of work today".

That leaves the new house, and blogging about that seems destined to annoy just about everyone. While I am excited about it, blogging about it every day for the next six months seems like a good way to drive all three of you away.

The end result is that I've painted myself in a corner where there is nothing to talk about. I'll do my best to think up a solution, until then assume posts might be even more sporadic then normal.

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Pallet Walkway

I was talking with my boss today about the new house, and he mentioned something that I hadn't fully considered before. We were talking about all the things that we won't be able to actually have completed when we move in in January because of the weather.

Specifically we were talking about how when he moved into his house in February, there was no driveway, no sidewalk or stoop, nor a garage floor (!), and how by spring you couldn't even drive up the driveway any more because it was a giant mud pit.

I was expecting some of those things, but the lack of a garage floor would suck. As will not being able to drive on the driveway. I joked that I wondered if Linzy knew she had signed up for a full winter of parking the car outside. The dog will surely love the spring mud pit as well.

My current hope is that they can at least do the garage floor early enough in the process that we'll have that.

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Can't Stay Here

This weekend was filled with activities, none of which could really take place at home because we had multiple showings both days as well as an inspection on Saturday morning at 8am.

I foolishly thought once we had a fully signed purchase agreement, the showings would stop, but instead we needed to get through the inspection and even then didn't cancel the ones that were setup beforehand. I was amazed at the number of people who would go to see a house that is known to have an agreement pending. But I guess it was good to cover our bases, even if it did kill our ability to be at home during either Saturday or Sunday morning/afternoon.

So what did we do with all that free time? Well, spent a morning having breakfast with my parents, went to see The Hangover (somewhat funny, but not as consistently as other movies of the crass-humor genre), did some shopping, worked on annual reviews for work, etc.

Oh, and we bought a house. Or at least agreed to buy one in January when they finish building it for us. Next Saturday will be filled with design center activities, while they try to make back all of the incentive money we negotiated, and we try to resist the level 7 carpet upgrades. To show how this is likely to go, we just agreed to a price on Saturday and today were already back adding recessed lighting to the family room. Linzy insists we will hold to our budget, but we will see.

The house will be just a few miles down the road, so in the same general area. We're quite excited about having a brand-new house where we pick out everything, and I feel like we got a pretty good deal. We'll have four months completely debt free and then it will be back on the treadmill.


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Sold!

On Monday, after one week on MLS, we got an offer on our house. After a day of counter-offers, everything was signed and now it is all over except the waiting. And the inspection, and wondering whether the buyer's financing will go through, and packing, and buying a new house, and moving....

Okay, so it's not all over, but certainly a big milestone.

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Lost Album

Yesterday on the bus ride to work I was looking for some music to listen to while I played my DS. In an attempt to find something different to listen to, I ended up settling on Opeth. I was thinking this was a CD I had downloaded quite a few months ago and then didn't really like as much as I was expecting and so didn't listen to it again.

But yesterday I thought perhaps I hadn't given it a fair shake and so that I should listen to it again. But when the CD cover came up it didn't look anything like what I was thinking the cover of the CD in question looked like. I recalled the other CD having a more-or-less green cover with a person of some sort on it.

So then I was racking my brain trying to recall who the other CD was by. Then last night it was really bothering me and I was trying to figure out how in the world I would be able to find it. My music collection is very modest by many standards, but it is still over 12,000 songs and many, many albums. And without a name (of an album, song, anything), it was virtually impossible to find.

I scanned through covers, I looked through artist names for something I didn't recognize, I checked genres knowing full well that was completely pointless since I don't standardize those. It was quite the bizarre situation, something that could have happened with physical CDs except that I hadn't really lost the music per-se, as it was still on the hard drive, I just couldn't find it.

In the end, I truly started thinking the album had been lost during the computer shuffle last fall and so I was looking on Wikipedia for Opeth CD covers. The one I did not check was Watershed, as this was the grey-covered CD, so then I started checking other similar band's pages for CD covers. Finally on a whim I went into Watershed's page only to see the exact cover I had been expecting to see this whole time. The grey cover was apparently an alternative cover that iTunes had downloaded, where as Windows Media Player previously used the green cover.

So I had known which CD it was the whole time, and even worse, it still was as unpleasant to my ears as I recalled it being!

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