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No, we did not get a Hugh Laurie. Sadly.

Home Economics

For the uninitiated, getting a house is a lot of work. There is a lot of physical, mental, emotional, and most importantly, financial exertion involved. Alison and I had casually started looking at online listings as early as last July. That's when I learned about her negative feelings toward garage faces and strong preference for nice big kitchens.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it...

Back in February I finally broke down and got a real estate agent. I was referred to her through USAA, and so far, she has been very helpful. I told her up front that we were playing the long game. I thought the long game meant that we weren't actually looking to buy until next year or something.

Well, Houston has become a pretty active buyer's market. In the past few months, inventory has shrunk and prices have started creeping upward. With mortgage rates at historic lows, it started seeming like we needed to act soon. We stepped up our efforts, pounding the pavement. With Alison working in Porter and me working off of 249, it became increasingly apparent that our search was narrowed to the NNW segment of Houston.

We're still in our lease for several months, and resale houses are disappearing within 15 days of their listings. We're looking to build, because that offers some pretty significant advantages: lock in a lower price, choose exactly what goes into the house, lower utility costs, lower maintenance costs, and a longer lead time to closing.

By now we've probably looked at 10 different model homes. Each builder touts their "upgraded" features, their energy efficiency, and of course, their excellent financing options. Despite all this, judging the builders by their track records and value, four builders in our price range come out on top: Meritage, Ryland, Plantation, and David Weekley.

The Plantation home that we looked at was very nice, but there was something off about it to us, because it was awfully inexpensive for the features that they were offering. Plus Ms. Realtor didn't seem to be thrilled by the area. David Weekley isn't building anything in our area. That left Ryland and Meritage. Our agent preferred Ryland to Meritage, but only by a small margin. That's when the real decision making happened.

Ryland homes are pretty nice, but the floor plans we liked the most were out of our price range. We were able to find something that we liked well enough. The neighborhood is gated and butts up against a railroad. The noise didn't really bother me, but that gate did. I've lived too long behind gates.

The other option was Meritage. They make a big to-do about their "green" features, including their spray foam insulation that they install in all their homes. I'm pretty impressed with the stuff; it seems much more robust and reliable than fiberglass batts or insulation. The stuff doesn't flake off as much or make you itchy (I hated going up in the attic when I was a kid because of it). Alison and I saw one floor plan and immediately fell in love with it.

Not the house we are buying...but it could look like this

This is a 3 bedroom, one story "starter" house. We've been so heavily advised by various sources to upgrade features that it seems downright luxurious to me. But...according to some of my spreadsheet wizardry, it can be affordable.

An interesting note is that despite Ryland's lower overall cost, it isn't all that more expensive than the Meritage home due to the difference in tax rates. That's been one of the biggest eye-openers for me during the process: the principal/interest portion of your "monthly payment" for your home works out to only be about half of what you pay for taxes, HOA dues, and homeowner's insurance in the price range we're looking.

Now, here's the catch: the community is nothing but cleared dirt. No roads, just a bunch of clearings in the middle of trees. It makes it kind of hard to envision what the final product is going to be. We've been promised a recreation center along with the sun, moon, and stars...of course, we might have to just settle with a couple of little flecks of comet dust by the time it's all said and done. There's a baseball park nearby (and I mean that literally, there is room for parking, 4 baseball diamonds, and nothing else), as well as a "convenience store." It feels pretty "country" out there.

Then there comes all the questions about what you have the builder do versus what you do yourself. Should we try to install sprinklers ourselves? Should we consider a gas dryer rather than electric? Should we attempt to do our own landscaping? Our own window treatments? Is the nice 17" tile worth the extra five grand? I'm hoping to clamp down on all the upsell, but I'm afraid we may run up our budget another ten grand before I even realize it.

The next step is to sic Ms. Realtor on our Meritage sales guy and see if she can negotiate on any items, including the steep lot premiums. Big thrills...

In other news, Alison didn't, and now has, her full-time position at her high school. Her administration was almost a classic case of tsundere.

I eat a Frosty with French fries.

I take a surprise picture of a few of Alison's family friends.

I make a strange Chuck connection with a sales agent.

Chris Brown has a lovely dinner setting.

Alison and I finally participate in something nice and counterculture, like RECORD STORE DAY...

...in which I find the one true diamond in the rough.

FIN

Spring Break (and change) in Pictures

Gordon's mentioned some of our recent grand adventures already, and I say amen to his assessments of LaMancha and Clapton.  Here are some other happenings from the past few weeks.

Spring has come to Houston!

Gordon introduced me to a Vietnamese soup called Pho.  I can't believe it was this long before I tried it. 

If you have not, go now.

Yum!

Since I was on spring break, I got to go on a girls' road trip with my mom and friends to San Antonio!

 (Poor Gordon was not on Spring Break, so he did not get to come.) It's always fun to go with Debby and co. on such adventures. This one mostly consisted of a visit to the San Antonio Temple and lunch at a delicious Japanese restaurant.  

View going up to the temple entrance
 (If my phone hadn't died,  I would have snapped some shots of the stained glass.)

The best surprise on the trip was running into Gordon's Grandma James at the temple.  I knew she volunteered as a worker, but I didn't know we were going to be there at the same time.  We just happened walk into the same room right before her shift, and we got to chat and catch up. I was sorry Gordon couldn't be there, but I'm so glad I got to run into her!

A super cool (and extremely generous) lady we met at church, Carol Busbee, is very sew-savvy.  She helped me make my batiks (the ones I've been toting from house to house since my first Malaysia trip) into a duvet cover! Two days, many giggles, and lots of delicious food later, we ended up with this:

cover, sans duvet

And now it lives in our bedroom.

No complaints so far!

Here are the remains of a very long grading session towards the end of the week. 

Thank goodness we had Clapton to make up for it! 

(Okay, I can't not mention this concert.)

Warning: terrible videography to follow.

This was sooooo cool!

(Ignore the Coke ad behind us.)

The last day of Spring Break was St. Patrick's Day. We celebrated with a See's Irish Potato from my mom.  

Huh, it looks like a potato to me.

Does it taste like one too?

What? There's candy in this?!

A right clever trick, See's!

Yar! Happy St. Patty's Day t'ye all!

(Pirate and Irish accents are sort of the same in my head.)

Finally, we went to a great egg place this morning - The Egg and I.  Maybe you've heard of it?

We approve!

and just for kicks:

Clap On, Clapton

So weekly updates are difficult. Life is hard. We have to do church and chores and Alison's grading and...

Well if Cosby doesn't have the patience for my complaining I guess y'all don't. Well, we've had a couple of fun adventures over the past couple of weeks.

First, as part of my cultural education, I was requested to attend The Man of La Mancha, which was playing downtown at the Hobby Center. I had guessed it was some sort of love story based on Don Quixote. Boy was I wrong! Like the Spanish Inquisition, no one expects it...

Instead, he will sing about how he's not worthy of love. Or something.

 I got this killer deal on tickets through Travelzoo (seriously, you should check them out--more interesting deals than Groupon), so we were sitting pretty close to the stage. Closer than I ever had before.

A perfect view of a grey head and Statler/Waldorf wannabes

The original intent was to go with Alison's mom, but she bailed on us and we took another Allison instead. We ate at a nice little Italian restaurant called Perbacco and enjoyed the show. It was pretty incredible. I never had heard the music, although I think I heard the Mission Impossible Dream song before. The actress playing Aldonza was excellent: very emotional and believable. The lead, naturally, was also very good. So far my opinion is that all new musicals (Catch Me if You Can) are weak but strongly attended, while the classics are classics for a reason...but only a small crowd of old people attend.

Not bad

Later on, we did another house "peeping" trip. I call it peeping because I'm not quite ready to make the leap just yet. We checked out one builder that was making a pretty hard sell, and then went to a Plantation Home which seemed miles above in terms of quality. The sales guy there wasn't as pushy, because the features of the home seemed to sell themselves. They were touting some pretty impressive features, especially w.r.t. energy efficiency, which I'm finding is one of my prime concerns. The price they were asking was almost unbelievably low, and when I asked my realtor, she kind of gave me the runaround. She said that Plantation is a good builder, but the "neighborhood wasn't her top choice" for us. Something about "lack of amenities." Honestly not sure what one would expect or need...I don't even use the pool and tennis courts in my current townhouse community, so why would I start in a home community?

Every 3.14 is Pi Day. If that's not useful enough, you guys can wait until 6.28 and have your Tau Day. But good luck taking advantage of the word play, because you can't get super tasty desserts to rhyme with tau. How? Cow? Chairman Mao?

Chocolate Satin, Cherry, Pear, and Grapefruit

We had a couple of couples from the ward participate in the festivities with us. We made a shepherd's pie for the main course. Alison seems intent on making a host out of me. Maybe by the time I'm old I'll get the hang of it...

After a long grading session, this last Saturday we headed downtown. I've always loved downtown areas of major cities, and Houston does not disappoint...I just went a little crazy with my phone in the parking lot.

But the main reason we went downtown was not just to ooh and ah at the skyscrapers, but to find a cool restaurant to eat at! Oops...all full. Murphy's Deli it is, a little sandwich shop tucked away on the corner of Lamar and Fannin of the One City Centre building. The manager there had a bit of personality--he asked me if I wanted a beef or pork chicken pesto panini. Hahaha...

OK, the real main reason we went downtown was to sit in the Toyota Center.

Look at all those empty seats!

We went to The Wallflowers concert! It's too bad I didn't know any of their songs besides "One Headlight." Plus the band's singer seems to have busted his voice, because it wasn't quite gelling. The band's musicians seemed talented enough, but we got a nice bonus after the concert was over: my phone died and I could take no more pictures.

And Eric Clapton came on stage.

If electric guitar is your Norse religion, seeing this man in concert is probably Valhalla. This guy makes his solos and riffs look like an afterthought. Well, after 40 years or so of playing, it probably is to Slowhand. In short, it was incredible. It was nice that Alison humored me on my little rock-and-roll pilgrimage.

Until the next update!

This is blasphemy...this is madness!

No. THIS...IS...March.

Leonidas isn't so mad now

That means it's no longer freezing cold and we can walk around outside without parkas. On one of our walks we found that our area of Houston appears to be part of a larger scavenger hunt.

Can you find it?

Well, it never really was cold enough to constitute parkas. Comparing a winter in Houston to that of, say, Odessa of '06 is really kind of silly. The Gulf of Mexico doesn't freeze, unlike the Black Sea.

Yes...we were standing about 20m from the shore.

Anyways, some of our new friends in the ward suddenly made the plunge into home ownership, right after Alison and I started thinking about houses. There's a bit of a trick to it, since I still have another year on the lease. Regardless, we went and started looking.

The Great Expanse of 2920

I had picked out a few new developments to poke around through some internet searches. Most of them are farther north of our current location. The first development we looked at was near the soon-to-be-completed Grand Parkway, for better or for worse. We stopped into a model house, where we were greeted by a salesman who assured us that by the afternoon we could have the house we want, financed and agreed upon. I decided this wasn't the way I wanted to go about it.

Not that it wasn't nice.

They were all semi-custom houses, and we could rearrange things however we wished. Problem was that it all cost about 50% more than I was even imagining. After a year of saving. I wasn't about to get myself in all kinds of trouble.

The salesman had to go, but he asked his assistant to collect our information so he could harass us further. I recommended that we sneak away and head over to Hufsmith-Kohrville. This was a bit farther off the beaten path, but I liked it much better.

The houses in the neighborhood were built by D.R. Horton, someone I at least had heard of. The sales guy was much more laid back and understanding of our situation. Plus it helped that he offered drinks and snacks while we looked about. He gave us oodles of information about the neighborhood.

I have to admit, I was almost sold on the first street we turned in on. "Knights Quest." There was a major medieval fantasy theme going on here, with other street names like "Magic Spell," "Maidenfair," and "Arthurian Dream." With some amusement, I wondered what it would be like to tell Bill that I bought a +3 house.

-$200,000, +8 reputation

Well, now that the house-hunting bug has bitten me, it seems like everyone and their dog are relocating. Everyone's talking about how Houston's house market is one the hottest in the country. And we're kind of stuck in our current place, at least for the next little bit. However, with the time we have to wait, we're thinking that maybe having a new place built for us would be the best option. It's all a bit much to take in, but I guess we'll have to grow up sometime!

It turns out USAA offers realtor recommendations, and I sort of impulsively called in. We've now got a nice lady running housing searches around our area. Her huge list includes some 100 properties, that are all quite attractive. We just can't buy anything yet!

Of course, our current place is quite nice. Sometimes we get cool looking sunsets.

Our ward can be pretty fun too. The Cub Scouts were doing a Pinewood Derby last weekend, and even though I had no reason to be there, Alison did, so I tagged along.

Ahh...the memories of graphite and having my dad do all the work

Maybe 10 years down the road I'll be doing this kind of stuff?

Well, time to get back to work. We're going to have guests.

The phone provides a worthy distraction while waiting for stuff to boil