Saturday, February 03, 2007

Boxes, bubble wrap, and real presents

We received a rather large box from the post office the other day. It was addressed to John and Grace from Grandma and Grandpa Williams and we told John he could open it with Grace after dinner. So dinner came and went and we gave him the go-ahead. The box was wrapped with packaging paper on the outside and John opened it like a present. He got a couple sides opened so that the box was now exposed, stopped, and in wide-eyed excitement looked at us and said "it's a Box!". It took some convincing that there might actually be something in the box worth taking a look at and finally he allowed me to cut through the tape so that he could open the inside. He then proceeded to pull the flaps back, reach in to the box, and grabbed out a folded up piece of bubble wrap. He pulled that bubble wrap close to him and gave it a big bear hug and tells Rebecca and I, "it's so cute!". Go figure.

P.S. He did like the robot once he made it there;)

Old Houses

So it's been a long time since I've posted and many changes have taken place since. We've completed the first part of our move back to Virginia. Our original plan was to have a short term rental while we waited for the Georgia house to settle and searched for a house up here. Between the market being unstable up here (the prices keep falling) and no inventory in the area that we're looking that we love, we've decided to move to a longer term (1yr) rental while continuing to look at the market - albeit less aggressively. We're going to simply keep an eye on prices without looking for specific houses. Once things being to level off, we'll start seriously looking again.

The short term house that we're in is an old 1940's cape code. It was remodeled right before we moved in but it's structurally defective and the windows are still old so it's cold. Since we're really looking to buy an old house when we do buy, the real purpose of this one was to give us a feel for an old house and see if we could really do it - since we've only ever owned new ones. Turns out we could do it but here are some things that I now know to look for:
o) Solid foundation - look at and open all windows, roll a ball on the floor, evaluate all exposed joists in the basement. Look for crooked inner/outer door frames.
o) Windows - if windows aren't updated, add an estimate to do so to the price of the house (it'll have to be done).
o) Electrical - see if the electrical system has been updated, if not it'll likely need to be as our appliances seem to kick the breaker constantly in this one.