Housing update

Well... it's been a while and most know the status of things but just in case...

We were excited about the house and agreed upon price. Then we let our trusty home inspector loose on the place and, well, he inspected really well. While he spoke really well of the double masonry construction of the place, he found the dreaded termites. I think we would likely have been able to overcome the termites with some treatment but it turns out there were also issues with the drainage, basement dampness, and roof fungus.

Given the issues and the seller's unwillingness to adequately compensate us for them, we decide the best thing to do was sign a release based on our inspection contingency.

We also briefly toyed with the idea of just moving into something safe in South Riding but quickly abandoned that idea and will eventually continue pursuing something in Arlington or Alexandria.

For now, we're going to decorate the rental townhouse properly and relax and enjoy the holiday season. We'll begin the search again next year with a keen eye on the poor state of this economy - assuming we're not in an all-out recession by then, in which case, we'll hold off indefinitely:)

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.