Wendy is Thankful for...

It is very easy to take things for granted and forget how good I have it.... So, in honor of the impending holiday, I decided to break it up and make a small list of the things I am thankful for.

• My family and friends. Y'all are the best!

• The most wonderful hubby a girl could ask for! Love you bunches and bunches!
  

• Health and happiness.
  

• A roof over my head and a warm place to sleep... our lovely home!

• Food on the table (and in my tummy). This year especially since there are so many families who can't afford to put a turkey on the Thanksgiving table.

• A job, car and a few dollars in my pocket.
  

• And of course, Riley!

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

xoxo
Wendy

So Wendy told you about our "drive-by" strategy the other day. Yes, we like to do things efficiently. If the for sale sign is on her side of the car, she's getting out to grab the flyer. My side, my flyer. We hit the neighborhoods at a somewhat leisurely pace, taking mental notes about which streets were busy, which weren't, why so many houses were for sale in some areas and not others.

After a good month or two of all of this and looking at these houses from afar, we decided to take the plunge and visit a few open houses. We were pretty sure that we knew exactly what these houses were going to to look like because we had already seen like TEN photos of the house online. What more could there be to it?? Well, we later found out that people only take pictures of the TEN good parts of the house. Which explains why some houses only have 4 or 5 photos, or some houses only have 3 photos of the house, 2 of which are the back yard...

So, Wendy and I decided to get a down and dirty strategy when it came to Open Houses. Basically, you just need to get out there and check them out, all of them. Most of the open houses that we went to we happened to stumble upon. Sometimes we were driving through the area and saw a sign, decided to pull over and then give it a run through. We weren't so concerned about what the realtor was going to think of us being there. We checked the whole house out, asked the realtor whatever questions that we had and moved on. The more houses the better. Whether they be good or bad, the more you see the more you will know what you want. The hard part next would be actually finding a house that has most of what you want, as little as possible of the stuff you don't want and one that you can actually afford.

-Allan

Party Time

OK, posting at a reasonable hour this time! Woohoo! The housewarming party this past weekend was a great success! There were plenty of late nights leading up to it but in the end we got everything finished up that we wanted to finish up and the party turned out just as we had hoped.

Since we pretty much spent every waking second that we had cleaning up the house before people started showing up, we decided that it would probably be best if we just called in an order for some grub ahead of time. Earlier last week, Wendy and I went with her sister's family to the "Taste of Maitland" which was an event put on by the local chamber of commerce that a lot of local restaurants attended and dished out plate after plate of delicious food. I wasn't sure it was possible to be hungry and full in 3 different cycles in a matter of only 2 hours, but I can now fully assure you that it can happen. Afterwards, Wendy and I were really raving about the new BBQ joint that was there. Once we decided that we should order some food instead of taking the time to cook it, we knew just where to order from.

4Rivers Smokehouse!


Their brisket, pulled pork and barbecue sauce was awesome! Probably the best brisket I have ever eaten. For all of you in Orlando who are looking for some good 'cue check them out. They are located on Fairbanks in an old repair shop. Get ready to wait though, the line was out the door for the entire time I was there... We decided to order 6 pounds of brisket and a couple quarts of baked beans. Good choice! Wendy baked some cupcakes and brownies, and we had several other dishes that people brought. So the food was great! Why do I like talking about food so much? I thought this was a house blog???

Anyways, everyone really loved the house and all of the work that we have put into it. My dad was totally amazed that I was actually able to install a ceiling fan without even a little wobble in it and even more amazed at our painting abilities. I'll just give myself a big pat on the back, ha! I guess Wendy deserves a little credit too...

We also figured out that we can "double stack" our old sofa behind the new sectional for a poor man's stadium seating set-up for watching the game. We capped the night off with a Gator victory, so I gotta say it was a great day! Also, we were in bed at 8:45... on a Saturday. And it felt great.

Allan

Pleasing the Puggle

I guess we should start at the very beginning of our little house hunt story. As Allan said, after we got hitched we decided to buy our little puggle doggy, Riley, a home of her very own. But Riley had a pretty long wish list... like three or more bedrooms, at least two baths, a little charm and character, and a nice kitchen with lots of storage, a nice, safe neighborhood, a big back yard, some sort of outdoor living space, a pool... oh wait, that was my wish list! Anyway, with all of Riley's demands, we had our work cut out for us.


We started our search by doing some drive-by's. No, not the shoot 'em up type, the ones where you scoop out the nice neighborhoods and also the not-so-nice-never-would-live-there-ever neighborhoods. We definitely worked out a strategy for our drive-bys. We had to take turns getting the flyers out of the info tubes. BTW, how aggrevating is it when you get out of the car, walk to the sign, only to find out it is empty!!!! After several months of neighborhood-scooping, we decided on Winter Park, Maitland, or the downtown-ish area, which was where we were living at the time (across the street from a sex-offender, I might add. Allan decided to keep that one a secret from me until recently. Maybe we can share that story at a later date with a tutorial on how to find a sex-offender near you).

Ok, back on track now. In the meantime, we got pre-approved for a mortgage and decided on our budget. Well, Allan had decided on a budget and I decided on a budget, the two didn't exactly match. We were also frequenting the websites Allan mentioned in this post. Then we started actually going inside houses...... which is where we will pick up next time.

xoxo
Wendy

P.S. Allan wanted to write a WHOLE POST on getting pre-approved for a mortgage. Just think of how boring that would have been! We would have lost all two of our readers. You can thank me later for saving you from that yawn fest.

Who knew that while I was fast asleep in our spruced up, newly painted master bedroom (more on that later), the hubby would start our own little blog?! Honestly, I was a little shocked but it was a pleasant surprise. I am so excited to be able to keep a journal of our home-owning adventures... ok ok, misadventures too.

There should be lots of goodness to come. Stay tuned for a house tour, lots of before and afters and maybe even a meet the puggle post.

P.S. Sorry for my puny little first post, it is almost my bedtime.

P.S.S. Yes, I am an old lady, home improvement will do that to you.

House Hunters, Newlywed Edition

OK, it is now 3:37am and I am still awake, still excited about the upcoming housewarming party and now really excited about this new blog. Work should be fun tomorrow. Errr today. Whatever you want to call it. I thought that I'd get things started with a post about the beginning to our house hunt.

Wendy and I got married on March 7th of this year and it was absolutely the best day of our lives! It was just a perfect day, with perfect weather, a perfectly planned wedding and one absolutely gorgeous bride who was foolish enough to actually go through with marrying an immature, fart joke loving, grocery store singing, spreadsheet making nerd like myself. The day could not have gone any better and the honeymoon the week after was he perfect extension to that. No, seriously, check out the pictures here.



A few weeks after the wedding, reality had begun to set in and Wendy and I decided that our beloved little puggle, Riley, needed a home of her own and that we should really start looking into buying our first home.

The timing of it all was working in our favor. Thanks to the ever-so-generous American government, Wendy and I as first time home buyers were entitled to $8,000 of your hard-earned cash. But only if we pick a house, get it under contract, find a lender and actually close on the house before December 1st. With 8 months left, we thought we'd have EONS of time to take care of all of that. Also, as you may have heard, house prices had taken a little bit of a dip recently and buying a house that we'd actually want to live in was slowly becoming an option for us. For a while there I didn't think buying a house was even going to be an option for another 5-10 years.

So we started out our search like most everyone else would and stumbled upon a few great websites, which turned out to be really helpful down the road. Sites like www.trulia.com, www.zillow.com and www.realtor.com were what we started out using to take a look at houses that we liked. Trulia and Zillow are a bit more helpful than Realtor.com since they will actually give you the address of the house you're looking at. But the best website, by far, that we found was actually linked from the Orlando Realtors Association website.

www.myfloridahomesmls.com




Bookmark it now. It is awesome. It is as close to real MLS that any normal person will have. It gives detailed maps with aerials, large photos, detailed descriptions of the house including room sizes AND it will actually show you houses in the neighborhood that have sold recently and what price they sold for. "Sale Comps" for those who know the lingo. They aren't always the most comparable of houses, but it at least gives you a good idea. Maybe this is just cool for me since I'm a real estate appraiser, I dunno, call me a nerd if you want.

Basically we scoured the internet for the first month, doing some research and determining what neighborhoods we wanted to live in and knew we could afford, what neighborhoods we wanted to live in and wished we could afford and deciding for sure neighborhoods that we did NOT want to live in, for any price. For us, we narrowed it down to Winter Park, Maitland and possibly downtownish near where we were living at the time. Our next step was to take a few looks at some Open Houses in those neighborhoods and maybe speak to a few Realtors in the process.

Im finally feeling sleepy! Woohoo! Time for me to call it a night. Check in next time for a few interesting Open House stories and possibly a chime in from the wife. Adios!

Allan

Welcome In

OK everyone, well as I am writing this first blog post it is currently 2:26 am, on a Sunday night in November. Occasionally I have a really hard time falling asleep, due to who knows what (couldn't possibly be the two Diet Dr. Pepper's, DDPs for those of you in the know, that I drank earlier today...) and so to pass the time I decided that it would be a great idea to keep a sort-of journal of our entire journey into homeownership and all of the ups, downs and 50-year old wiring, near death experiences that come with it. Stay tuned for that story, ha!

I guess most of the reason why I'm having such trouble falling asleep tonight is that we have been working all weekend around the house and trying to fix this place up before we have our first ever Housewarming Party. It's actually going to be a Housewarming/Gator Football party, and according to my sources (mostly wikipedia) this makes the party approximately 75% more manly and by no means would I expect anyone to make fun of me for being excited and unable to sleep over a namby-pamby housewarming party. There will also be beer.

We're actually hoping to have two housewarming parties. This first one is going to be a family only shin-dig and later on we'll have a big "friends party" assuming we find some friends between now and then... For this weekend, my mom, dad and brother are making the trip down from Jacksonville and they will be bringing my Grandma and Grampie along with them. My parents have already spent some time at the house when they came and helped us move in but after a couple dozen trips to Home Depot and Lowe's, thins have changed quite a bit around here. I'm excited for my grand parents to see the place too! Even though Wendy's family all live here in town they are sure to be surprised by some of the changes we've made just recently. This will be the first time that Wendy's Grandma (Nono) will get to see our house and I am fully expecting a nice long "It's SOOOO Nice!" within 2 minutes of stepping in the front door. Just picture that in a thick old Italian lady voice and you'll appreciate so much more. Her other Grandma, Mimi, hasn't seen the place since moving day and so she will be pleasantly surprised that we aren't sitting in lawn chairs in the living room and using moving boxes as makeshift dining room tables. All in all, it should be a good time. I did mention that there will be beer, so a good time is pretty much a given.

Anyways, I just wanted to give a good kickoff to the blog and let you know some of the things we will hopefully be discussing in the posts to come. House hunting, short sale drama, mortgage spreadsheets, tadpole pond turned to swimming pool magic tricks, paint sample infatuations and PLENTY of other home renovation goodness. Stay tuned, there's plenty more to come!!

Allan