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Shivering with Antici........ pation!
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Tomorrow is the home inspection. I'll be meeting our agent at the house along with the Inspector. While the inspector is inspecting, I plan on taking measurements of all of the rooms, so I can make a floor plan of the house in Visio. I will also be taking a lot more pictures, making sure to include every room so I have a visual reference to go along with the floor plan.
We should be able to use the floorplan to map our where we are going to put our furniture. We can also start thinking about color schemes for painting and decorating.
And yes Mom, I'll remember to take a picture of the front of the house.
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Our New Home
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Believe it or not, it looks like we're finally going to be moving into our own home soon. We made an offer last Saturday and it was formally accepted yesterday. What's makes this home special is that it practically fell into our lap. I've been looking at hundreds of houses online for the past couple months and we were going to be lucky to find a home over 2000 sq ft that we could afford. Most of the 4 bedroom homes we were seeing online were 2000-2300 square feet and priced about $270,000 and up. It was pretty discouraging.
We got serious about looking for a home about a month ago. We had some communication problems with our first agent, but we found a terrific agent about a week before we saw the house we wanted. We were planning on meeting our Agent in person on Saturday. On the Friday before, Nate was browsing houses online at work and pointed one out to me right as I got out of a meeting. The house looked very interesting; so interesting that I left work early to pickup the family so we could drive by it.
It was in a nice established neighborhood looked to be in terrific shape from the outside. We called our Agent immediately and asked to see it the next day. She was very flexible and met us first thing the next morning to show us the house.
The house was amazing. It's essentially 2 2-bedroom houses, one on top of the other. Specs:
- 3200 square feet
- 4 bedrooms
- large living room with a fireplace
- dining room
- large (although dated) kitchen on the upper floor
- small (but newer) kitchen downstairs
- great room (hello home theater!)
- den with second fireplace (hello game room)
- 2 bathrooms with showers
- 1 bathroom with a jet tub
- a laundry room with another toilet (4 toilets!)
- swimming pool (above-ground)
- deck with stairs down to backyard
- large backyard (1/4 acre) with raised gardens
- four large mature trees providing shade in the front and backyard
- 2 car garage with a long level driveway for our van
- less than one mile from the Max (train station)
- 2 blocks to major shopping (Target, Home Depot, Lowes, Safeway, Office Depot, Petco, etc)
We put an offer on the house the very same day we saw it. It was verbally accepted on Monday and formally accepted in writing on Tuesday. Our loan has already been pre-approved. The inspection is next Wednesday and the bank appraiser will be out shortly after that. We should close on or before June 20th.
We are very excited to find this unique home. It appears that the folks who lived there before used it as an in-home daycare, which is perfect since we have 4 kids. We are almost doubling the size of our living space (our rental is 1750 sq ft).
You can see some pictures of it here.
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Houston, We're Go for Failure
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I have 5 Microsoft certification exams under my belt (MCSA 2000). I passed them all on the first try. Of course I studied diligently for them all, but I managed to score well on all of them without too much sweat and tears.
This morning, I achieved failure on my 6th certification attempt. The test was 70-294: Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure. I put in about 10 hours of total study time over a period of about a week, about 75% of the amount of time I put in on my previous tests. The good news is that it was easy to tell where I was failing. I had two kinds of questions: the ones I was sure how to answer and the ones that produced confusing, paranoia and a general sense of self-loathing. I should have studied more. Oh well, it's just $125 down the drain. I will reschedule the test and take it again early next week. Hopefully World of Warcraft will go down so I can study more diligently. :)
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