Sheep Guarding Llama

Today we are back to house hunting again.  We looked at five houses on Sunday and we are going to look at five more today.

Work was pretty busy today.  This week is feeling pretty hectic.  This weekend we are traveling down to Houston as well.  Leaving Dallas on Friday night.  The Wests are moving down to Austin this weekend!  Very weird that they will be living in Texas now.  We have gotten used to them being very far away.  This will be the closest that Andy and I have lived to each other since Dominica and I moved to New Jersey in 2006.  Half the distance that we used to be from each other back in New York.

Nothing exciting to report during the day.  I left work early to pick up Dominica and Liesl at two thirty and from there we picked up our real estate agent and spent about two hours going around looking at houses.

Dominica had done some planning and the five houses that we were interested in were all pretty close to each other and she had mapped them all out so that we could hit them all very quickly one right after another.  It worked really well.

When we got to our real estate agent’s house and were waiting for her we noticed a house just one away from hers (one house in between – one of the two that we are considering from Sunday’s list, actually) had its for-sale sign go up in the yard while we were sitting there.  So we noted that that might be worth investigating as well although the house is a flip and we are very wary of flipped homes.

The list of houses for today was pretty weak.  The first house had a failed foundation and the house was literally falling apart.  We didn’t even look through the house.  Dominica was dizzy just stepping in the front door.  Absolutely not a house for us.

Pretty much each house that we saw had a show stopping issue.  Whether it was that it was falling down, that it required way too much updating or had way too many large, potentially dangerous dogs trying to get into its back yard – not an issue for us but with a little, blind, ten year old Boston Terrier who needs to have the freedom to go around the backyard in peace even loudly barking dogs right next door would be a significant issue.  He would never be able to relax and might wander within reach of them not knowing what he was doing even if they never did anything.

It was a good learning day, learning areas, neighbourhoods and what we would get for different price ranges.  We are getting more savvy even if we did not see anything today that sparked our interest.

When we got done, it was still pretty early.  So our agent called to see if we could get into to see the house up the street from her.  The flipper was just a few minutes away so he drove back to let us in himself and to show us around.  Of course, having the owner there is never good.  He directs you away from things that he doesn’t want you to see and focuses your attention on nice features that might not even matter to you.

The house was really nice.  Great 1960s build and look on the outside and completely modern and new on the inside.  Very nicely done.  It is really our style and plenty of space too.  It is a full three bedrooms, although only two baths, with a full office in addition and lots of open living space.

We definitely liked the house that we saw last the best of any houses that we have seen thus far.  Dominica really, really likes it.  I like it a lot but am concerned that it is above the price range that we had even wanted to consider.  Not by a lot, but a little.  But a little over the cap that we wanted to consider, but a little over what we wanted to spend.  We are trying to be very conservative with this house.  This is not our attempt to get the greatest house for us ever – it is an attempt to mitigate the financial loss of renting and the problems associated with being on the third floor and not having a yard.  We are attempting to be practical, not to get our ultimate house – which this is far from being anyway.

So we learned a great deal tonight and are hopeful that we will get to make a good decision soon.  At this point we don’t even know when our  current lease is up nor if we have any options for getting out of it.  We have not spoken to a bank yet either.  So there is a lot of unknown going on for us at the moment in addition to the house itself.

After we were done looking at houses I needed to get over to La Cima for the new members meet and greet cocktail hour that was going on there tonight.  I am not really a “new” member but this was really for members who have joined since the last one of these events which was something like April or so.  So this is the first one for me.  Funny to be welcomed to the club by people who, many of whom, have been members for years but have probably not used the club to the extent that I have already.

Brian ended up joining me this evening.  He has been a member for about a year but had met very few people at the party and just sort of crashed the party.  It was free drinks and food all evening too!

After La Cima I ran over to Jersey Mike’s and picked up dinner and brought it back home for Dominica and Liesl.

We talked a lot about the houses tonight.  We are very interested in the last house that we saw.  We think that it might work for us even being as expensive as it is.  We talked about the pros and cons and what price we might be able to get for it.  The lack of a third bathroom is big and there are a lot of little things around the house that we would need done like electrical that should have been done in the remodel rather than afterwards.  While we were talking we realized that we could not figure out, at all, where the window in the master was located.  We decided that it must not have one.  But it must, right?

We are planning on talking to the bank tomorrow and getting the full story on the house so that we know what our options are.

We are taking today off from house hunting.  Today is just a “normal” day.  Off to work this morning with nothing in particular on the calendar.  We are going to look at more houses tomorrow but today we are just thinking about the houses that we have already seen.

After work I brought home subs from Jersey Mike’s and we just had  a quiet evening at home.  I played an hour of Oblivion or so.  It was an early night for the Miller household.  All three of us were pretty tired.

Liesl really enjoyed house hunting yesterday.  She thinks that it is great fun going into other peoples’ houses and exploring.  She is looking forward to doing that some more.

Last night, Liesl said “protocol” for the first time.  Boy is she growing up quickly!

Today officially begins our process of looking for a house in the Metroplex.  We are very tired of living in an apartment, especially one where Oreo needs to go down a lot of stairs every time that he goes in or out.  We want a yard for Liesl too so that she can spend time outside. She loves being outside.

We had to be up pretty early this morning so that we could meet our real estate agent down at Waffle House at nine this morning.  We had breakfast and looked through the houses that we were interested in seeing today.

We had six houses on the docket for today’s looking.  One house, a foreclosure, we were not able to go see today and it was one that we were really interested in.  We never did find out why it was not available.

Overall the house hunting went pretty well.  We found a couple of acceptable houses and two that really stood out.  Unfortunately, from a decision making perspective, there are completely different making decision making that much harder.  One is a large house in one price range and the other is a much, much smaller house in a completely different price range.

Overall we were pretty encouraged by what we saw today.  We are looking in a very low price range so we were concerned that we would not be able to find anything that we would want to buy but there were definitely options after our first day.

This afternoon we got some time at the house.  Dominica and Liesl took a nap when we got home and I gave Oreo his bath.

I got a chance to play Oblivion a little this evening.  Not a lot of time but I am slowly making progress.  I manage to complete one or two quests each time that I play.  As of today I have almost exactly one hundred and fifty hours logged in the game.  I’m guessing that I have around fifty left to go but boy is it hard to gauge.  I am still finding new locations in the game on a regular basis!  I found at least five new places just today that I had never been.  Even having played for as long as I have there are massive swaths of wilderness that I have never yet explored or even visited.  There are places in the big cities that I have not seen yet too!  Truly a huge game.

I was up at six thirty this morning.  No days to sleep in this week for me.  Even tomorrow, Sunday, I have to be up at seven in order to get ready to meet with our rest estate agent to go look at houses around Irving.

All morning was spent working.  We went out for breakfast, got ready and as soon as we were clear this afternoon we drove out west to go to Dominica’s cousins to visit with the family for the afternoon.  I think that it was around three or so when we left Irving which is very early for us.  We almost never manage to go do anything that early in the day.

We had a really nice time visiting with everyone.  Liesl was especially excited to have access to stairs!  She spent the entire evening going up and down the stairs.  We taught her to hold on to the railing and to come down the stairs carefully.  She got a lot of stair training done tonight and wore us out because we had to stand at the bottom of the stairs for safety every time that she made a descent.  But she did very well and never really fell and only gave us one scare and Dominica was right with her at the time.

I got to play with an Apple iPad for the first time tonight.  I have to admit that contrary to my first opinions from seeing the details online, I really like it.  The screen is great and it is pretty easy to just pick up and use.  It was nice for checking the web and looking at houses on Zillow’s app.  I’ve heard from friends who have them that it is amazing for the first few days but gets old very quickly and you tend not to use it after a few days.  I feel like I would use it a lot, though.  I have so many times every day that I feel that I need something like that to make getting online less cumbersome for simple stuff.

We stayed down in Mansfield for dinner and hung out until it was way too late.  Liesl was tired and grumpy by the time that we went to leave.  But she did really well all evening while we were there.

We got home and put Liesl to bed. I fed and walked Oreo.  Then I stayed up watching Channel 9 MVC2 videos from Microsoft.  Tomorrow is our big house hunting day.

It’s Friday.  Got to work early today and needed to be there.  It was a crazy morning.  I didn’t have a spare moment all morning and I did not managed to even get out to take my lunch until one in the afternoon.

I just came home for lunch today.  I made myself a Tony’s frozen pizza and played a tiny bit of Oblivion while I ate it.  Liesl hung out with me and stole some of my pizza.  She went to bed shortly thereafter and then I ran back over to the office.  It was actually a short lunch today.

Even just taking a fast lunch I was all backed up with work by the time that I returned to the office.  It was totally nuts all evening too.

After work, Dominica just felt like something simple, so I drove over to Rockfish and got take out.  I had a drink while I waited and some volcano shrimp.  The volcano shrimp are the same as the fire island shrimp, just a new marketing name.  No idea why they changed it.  Everyone seems to agree that the name “Fire Island Shrimp” had more zing to it.

I ran over to Kroger too.  I had to pick up some snacks for Liesl and I grabbed a box of wine while I was there as well.  I’ve been experimenting with boxed wines with great success as of late.  Tonight we are trying a Old Vine Zinfandel that looks really promising.

It was almost eight when I finally got home.  We ate dinner and hung out for a little while.  I was quite tired and went to bed as soon as Liesl did – around eleven.  Tomorrow morning I have to be up by seven in the morning.  I have a bit of work going on tomorrow so it will be a busy morning.

Tomorrow afternoon we are all going out to Dominica’s cousins’ house in the DFW as her other cousins are in visiting from Arizona.  So it will be a family evening for us.