My morning started nice and early.  I was online and working starting at a quarter until eight and had to keep working for the office until one thirty in the afternoon.  Almost six hours of work first thing in the morning.  Not the way that I pictured that I would be spending my Saturday mornings when I was a child – I probably thought that I would be busy watching cartoons and eating cereal – but it does help to pay the bills and with the house payments coming up soon it all helps.

At one thirty I quickly jumped into the shower and got ready to go.  Dominica and I were out the door at ten till two.  We met out real estate agent in Peekskill, New York at three.  We had several townhouses which Dominica had picked out to look at today.

The first townhouse wasn’t in the best part of town and had no basement.  For us the basement is very important because we need the storage space, the utility space and a place for me to have computer equipment that isn’t sitting in the “middle of the house.”  While we could make due in a house without a basement it is extremely unlikely that we will find a house that is cost effective for us without one.  Basements are cheap compared to a lot of other types of space, like extra bedrooms, and serve our purposes just as well or better, in many cases.  This first place was nothing special and the current owner hadn’t vacated like he was supposed to have done so we had a really awkward situation of being shown around by both the real estate agent and the owner and not being able to discuss anything.  There were even someone sleeping in one of the rooms that we were there to see.  Luckily we weren’t impressed with the place at all so it wasn’t like that swayed us in any way.  It just wasn’t the right place for us.  Not a bad place, just not a good fit for us.

Our next stop was to a townhouse down in Croton-on-Hudson.  That was its address but in reality it was more like Cortlandt – which might be even better.  This place, a three bedroom with a great deck and a tiny basement, was very nice and we were quite impressed.  The area was gorgeous and the neighbourhood seemed really nice too.  We were impressed with everything.  The price is a little higher than we were hoping for but technically within our range.  It even had a garage.  This one is the first definite consideration that we have seen thus far in all of our house hunting.  Our selection process has definitely improved.

Next we saw two, nearly identical, townhouses in Peekskill on the east side of town.  The first was amazing but expensive and really set up for adults without children.  Lots of living space but very little bedroom / bathroom space.  It would be great if we weren’t planning on having kids but it isn’t what we need now.

The next place was much better.  More modern than the townhouse in Croton-on-Hudson and with more space (1850 sq. ft. vs 1800 sq. ft.) in a more sensible design.  It is only a two bedroom but with three and a half baths, which is awesome.  It had a giant basement.  The yard, street and neighbourhood weren’t as nice as in Croton but the structure is much nicer.  It is also slightly cheaper although the Croton townhouse is a better market value making it a safer investment, but we are thrilled to have two places that we are really interested in on just our second day.

We looked at one final place in a different complex. It wasn’t a great place but the price was really good and we wouldn’t be unhappy if it was all that we could get.  Not a top contender but a decent fall back option.  Now that we know what we are looking for almost everything that we are seeing is a consideration and we know even more for next time.  This last place was smaller and not as nice.  The lack of space would be tough but workable.  If possible we will shoot for at least 1800 square feet.

It was almost seven when we got back home to Newark.  Oreo did pretty well with us being gone.  We would have taken him with us today but it was horribly hot – well over ninety degrees with a heat index several degrees warmer.  He would have been cooking in the car the whole time.  It was really uncomfortable being in the houses that we were looking at because almost none of them were air conditioned in any way, which didn’t seem like a good sales tactic to me.   I realize that keeping them cool would be expensive when no one was living there but it seems to me that making potential buyers feel more comfortable in the house would trigger a happier memory of it as well as make them less likely to want to leave as quickly as possible.  It definitely shortened the amount of time that we spent in almost all of the houses.

I ended up doing a bit more work this evening.  Another two hours throughout the night.  In between bits of work Dominica and I watched some more Third Rock from the Sun. Then she went to bed a bit after eleven and I worked for a while until almost one in the morning.

Today is my first day really working with OpenSUSE 11.0 which I finally got installed on my HP dx5150 desktop (AMD Athlon64 3200+ 64Bit processor with 2.5GB of memory) late last night.  I have it installed at home now and at the office in Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 SP1.  The install went pretty well and so far I am liking what I see.  It is not a major upgrade over OpenSUSE 10.3 which I have been using for the past six months but all of the packages are slightly updated and now FireFox 3.0 is included which is a very big deal.  The big, new “toy” in the system is KDE 4.0.4 which I am excited to try.

I started the day by finishing reading “The Thoughtworks Anthology”. I almost finished it last night but didn’t quite make it.

I managed to get a lot of Handbraking done last night. With all of the traveling that we have been doing recently that project has fallen by the wayside a bit and I am attempting to get back on track with it. We have some time before we will be traveling back home with stuff to put into storage, but I really want to get everything that we have here converted for the AppleTV before the next trip and there is quite a bit of stuff here.

Today was very slow at the office. Extra slow. Much slower than I would have thought that it would be.  It was the perfect day for it to be slow because I had to take off at four thirty to pick up Dominica from work so that we could drive up to Peekskill to do some house hunting with our real estate agent.

The first house that we looked at was 960 Orchard Street, Peekskill.  Orchard is pretty much right downtown.  We weren’t too impressed with the neighbourhood of old, falling down houses and loads of people milling about on the streets as we approached the house.  We had all but ruled it out as a possibility even before getting out of the car.  It sits directly next to a restaurant / Western Union check cashing location where the owner was arrested last July for something involving screwing over his employees of pay or insurance or something like that.  And next to that business is a cigarette and beer wholesale warehouse.  Um, no.

We figured that something was really wrong with the house since they put up no good photographs of it and the price has been jumping all over the place.  It was listed at $339,000 when we had agreed to go look at it and during the night it jumped to $380,000.  Fishy.

The first thing that we noticed was that the “completely fenced yard” meant that the front corner of the yard was fenced in but not the back of the yard nor the side against the driveway.  Just enough fence existed so that a perfectly positioned external shot of the house wouldn’t show where it ended just off-camera.  They even installed a locked from gate just four feet from the end of the fence.  It was quite clear already that the description of this house was going to be nothing but lies.

There “enclosed front porch” that they advertised was truly that but it was so narrow that we couldn’t figure out why they had enclosed it.  It is a completely pointless space that is unusable.  If you were to sit on the porch on a chair you would literally be one foot away from the outside wall staring straight into drywall.  Had the porch been left to be natural at least there would be fresh air and a view (of the cigarette dealer.)  As it was the space had completely zero value unless, given the neighbourhood it is in maybe this is the way to go, you just throw anything that you want to store out onto it and just forget about it looking nice.

We stepped into the tiny, outdated foyer and immediately noticed that the house was incredibly tiny and that all of the walls and ceiling in the foyer were completed destroyed and ripped out as if there had been some massive plumbing problem.  It was a complete disaster.  I can’t believe that they would even attempt to sell a house in that level of disrepair (but as we will see.. that was hardly the worst of it.)

The back yard, were we had thought that Oreo would get to play, had zero fencing protecting it from driveways on either side and the “nice landscaping” was nothing but half dead grass and dirt.  The back deck that we thought that maybe we could grill on was actually the back stairs and there was no deck at all.  Not like the porch which was just pointless and useless but there was actually no deck.  Total and complete lie, just like the fence.  No attempt at all to make a small, shoddy deck.

We went down to the basement.  The stairs leading down to the basement were ridiculously tight and dangerous.  I can’t believe that they are legal.  There was no railing as it wasn’t wide enough to allow for one.  The basement counted as one of the bathrooms and one of the bedrooms.  I am positive that that didn’t meet code as there is no safe escape from the basement through the house since the stairs are almost impassable.  The ceiling in the basement was approximately five foot ten inches.  I know this because I am five foot nine, more or less, and when standing float footed in the basement with shoes on my head hit the ceiling!!!

We didn’t bother going upstairs to see what was there.  We knew well enough.  Even stepping into the house was a waste of time as we had ruled it out outside.  This house was clearly bought by a “flipper” in 2006 just before the market collapsed.  It was someone who knew nothing about real estate and bought it for far too much money at the height of the housing boom in Westchester County thinking that they could do some drywall and simple stuff and make six figures of “improvements” and then flip the house as quickly as they could like people claim that they can do on all of those television shows that were popular recently.  Just like on those shows the people doing this one were definitely not qualified to do the real estate nor the repairs portion of a flip and the house was a total train wreck (if they could be so lucky to have a train run through the house and put it out of its misery.)

The house was originally listed at $450,000 which, obviously, is beyond ridiculous.  If this house was in Perry, NY it would literally have a hard time selling at $30,000 (yes, thirty thousand.)  And being in Perry would automatically put it into a better neighbourhood!  They dropped the price to $339,000 and fooled us into looking at it but apparently, we were told, did the math and realized that they couldn’t pay their bills if they sold it for that so now it is at $380,000 and only someone completely insane would pay anything near that for the house.  My estimation is that it is worth no more than $280K even being in downtown Peekskill.  The house is completely garbage, and I am very upset that they lied to get us to waste out time looking at it.  The whole thing is a scam to get a few bucks quickly off of desperate or unknowledgeable house buyers.  I’m sure that all of the work was just facade and that the place is likely to fall apart shortly after someone moves in (or, it would appear, before they even manage to sell the place.)

So we quickly moved on to greener pastures (or oranger as the first place that we looked was completely done in shades of orange.)  We went up to the Woods were there are a ton of townhomes and condos on the market right now and looked at several.  We didn’t find anything that would meet our needs but we got a feel for what is available up there and will be keeping a look out for something.  It is clear that house hunting is going to be hard.  When we wanted to move to Geneseo we pretty much found what we were looking for right away.  Now even looking over an entire county with the smallest towns being the size of Geneseo (and even considering a large town in Rockland County and some in Putnam) we are having a hard time finding something even remotely as nice as our place in Geneseo at three times the price!

We stopped at a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway and ate at Burger King.  We were encouraged that we could see the type of stuff that we are interested in becoming available in the near future but depressed that the first house was such a disaster and that nothing else fit what we were looking for yet.  It is still slightly early and we haven’t even done our mortgage approval yet so there are those steps to deal with sooner than later.

It was around ten when we got back to Newark.  We watched a little Third Rock from the Sun and fed Oreo and it was time for bed.