The MacDeskBlog

We closed on the house this morning!

We are heading up to the wine country for the weekend to celebrate. It’s time to open up our 2000 Far Niente Cabernet. Mmmmmm

I hope this is the last post in this category … ever.

We are in escrow on the Berkeley house. They removed their contingency on Wednesday of last week. I just signed the paperwork this afternoon. I’m not sure why I haven’t said anything until now. We accepted the bid on January 31st. The downturn on the housing market has made the entire process rather unsatisfying most of the way through. My outlook and perspective is ticking up now that the deal is essentially done. We close next Friday.

The buyers are first-timers, and I’m happy for them. That house was my first one too. I hope that they really enjoy it. They requested that I fix two items based upon their inspection, which we took care of last weekend. I had to go find a replacement rim lock and strike plate for one of the three remaining original doors. Berkeley has two house material salvage companies, one of which (Omega) carries original rim locks and replica strike plates. The rim lock cleaned up nicely, and matched the size of the original. The other item I had to fix was a “mis-wired” lamp, which actually just needed a new light bulb. Of course I checked the switches which the inspector said were “always on”, and they work just fine. Inspectors definitely fall into the Jack of All Trades, Master of None category.

We close next Friday!

I’m liking the sound of that.

We close next Friday.

This is a bittersweet time for us. The house is finally finished, and turned out the way I envisioned it. Yah! But we won’t be living there because we moved on a year ago.

I signed the listing agreement last week. The first brokers’ tour was yesterday and the first open house is on Sunday. The listing includes a photo tour and an artist’s rendition. I hope someone likes it as much I do.

The house has grown up quite a bit in the past three years, and I mean that literally. When I bought the place back in 1994 (and right up until the remodel started), it looked like this:

I’ve been MIA for months now. Ironically, I’ve been at home pretty much the entire time. I herniated a disc in my back in May. Spent June on Vicodin. Spent July and now August in physical therapy three days each week. The PT is much better than the Vicodin.

My plans to finish up a bunch of items on the house went out the window. However, things have been getting done. It looks like the home stretch. I met with our potential property manager, and with our potential realtor at the house today. The property manager had slightly more encouraging numbers than the realtor. I was leaning toward selling before the meetings. Now, I don’t know.

The place should be ready for a tenant some time in September, and ready for sale some time in October. We just need to figure out which option to pursue.

Michelle and I bought a new townhouse. We close today and move in tomorrow! I’m very excited. We purchased one of the model homes at a new development. When we signed the purchase agreement in January, the developer insisted upon a 60 day close, though pledged to try to close sooner. We put some mild pressure on them (just enough to convey that we truly wanted to close sooner), and they managed to deliver in a month and half instead of two.

The new place comes fully furnished, most of which we will be able to use. Living in the tiny house next to the money pit, we never were able to unpack. Though that situation made living there rather uncomfortable and inconvenient, it should make the move extremely easy. A few friends and family coming to help out will make it even easier.

The money pit still has a few more months of work before completion. After two and half years of it being six months from completion, we simply can’t keep our lives on hold any longer.

Montclair Construction is doing some great work, on a timely and financially reasonable basis. They wouldn’t sign up for the entire remainder of the project though, so additional work will need to be completed once Montclair finishes. Things like the kitchen, bathrooms, painting, and flooring all need to be installed. Not exactly minor tasks.

We started looking for a new place last fall. We looked at a couple dozen older homes in Oakland, El Cerrito and Albany, getting as far as putting offers in on two of them. We were one of only two offers on the first place, and one of three on the second, but didn’t get either. The first house is over a century old (like the money pit) and the competing offer had no contingencies, not even for inspection. Insane. That still boggles my mind. Anyway, the main point being that by the time we signed the contract with Montclair, we were pretty sure that we would never actually live in the house.

So, we’re moving in Saturday, and couldn’t be happier about it.

Picking paint colors is fun, challenging, and just a bit frustrating. Michelle and I starting painting the house today. For a variety of reasons, we didn’t have much time to actually paint, one of the reasons being that we had to go buy the paint this morning. We had already picked out the ceiling paint, so we only needed to pick it up.

We’re still in the process of picking out most of the rest of the interior colors though. (Exterior colors are selected but not applied) It’s really quite challenging to look at a one inch square color on a piece of paper and visualize how that will look on a few hundred square feet of walls. Fortunately, Benjamin Moore sells little sample pots for about 260 of their colors. Of course, like every other paint manufacturer, they have thousands of paint chips, and can match any color you bring in. Those samples are really helpful though, so we’re sticking mostly with them. (This is sounding like an ad, isn’t it. Sorry.)

You start off looking at a one square inch or smaller color printed or painted onto a piece of paper. You think “ooo, that looks awesome!” or at least “I think that will really go well in the living room.” You buy a tiny sample pot of it if you can, or a quart of it otherwise. You bring it home, shake it up, paint it onto a two or three square foot patch of wall. Then you think “holy $&!* what was I thinking?!?” Repeat a few times. Finally, you end up with colors that you’re willing (and hopefully excited) to live in for the next five or ten years.

While we were sampling exterior colors, I discovered pretty quickly that the colors looked different if they were painted on part of a board versus an entire board. I ended up getting half a dozen scraps of siding and painting each one entirely in a given sample color. Alas, this isn’t quite possible with the interior colors as we don’t have scraps of sheet rock anymore, and they’d be the wrong texture anyway.

We attended a house warming party this afternoon for a friend of mine with whom I commute to work. They have a nice little house about five miles away, nestled just slightly into the foothills, on a really deep lot. Their rear neighbors have a half a dozen small goats which remind me of my childhood since our neighbors had goats and chickens. But I digress. We walked into the house and the second thing we did was check out the paint jobs in each of the rooms. Jill and Josh did a great job painting. The colors are vibrant and rich. The clean execution comes across as professional though they did the job themselves in about two days. All of the colors look really good in their respective rooms. Okay, time to tie this back in. A couple of the colors made me think “those colors would not have looked good as a three square foot patch on a white wall.”

You start off with a chip which is way too small. You put it on a patch of wall and it’s still too small. And the surrounding color (in our case plaster white) provides a contrast which won’t exist at all once the walls are fully painted. In addition doing a spectacular job on their paint (and furnishings and yard …), Jill and Josh also took what looked like a leap of faith on the colors. And they won.

As we continue on our quest for the right colors, I’m going to keep that in mind.

Oh. And the PG&E crew for our area is down to one person right now. Until they get one more worker back from injuries or pull one in from Oakland, San Francisco, San Rafael or Pinole, we’re sitting in a holding pattern.

P.S. no more pictures at the moment. The ceiling color doesn’t really stand out from the plaster on the walls, so not much to show yet.