Maybe I'll post more this quarter...

But if not, consider it my piratey love of pillaging that keeps me away.

ARRGH!!!

My pirate name is:

Captain Davy Flint

Even though there's no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you're the one in charge. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
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So A Lot Has Happened - Part I

Since my last post, much more has happened.

The short version is: we signed the final docs and handed over a check to the title company, escrow closes on Friday, and we own a house!

God had great plans for us that we could never have imagined. When we let the other home go, we started looking for homes again. In the process, we ended up finding another realtor. We were looking at a lot of foreclosures, and because of the reduced cost and the fact that foreclosures tend to not have as high commission for the realtor, she didn't really want to work on them.

I went online and found another realtor, and told her about the couple of homes we were interested in seeing. She agreed, and took met us at the first one. We looked at it, and it was a great price, only $200,000 for a 1500 square foot 3 bedroom, 2 bath, with a bonus room and a garage, which was why we went. It was another 10 miles farther from work than the last one we were looking at (which was already another 6-7 miles from work). The house had been completely remodeled, and was gorgeous, but it turned out that the house was settling badly. There were cracks in all the walls and ceilings, and the counters in the brand new kitchen were pulling away from the wall. Poor people.

We looked the other, and the realtor told us that she'd put together a list of others we might be interested in. Not unexpected. What was unexpected, was that she told us she new someone I might want to talk to.

Someone who might want to give us $25,000. Hmm... Interesting!

Time to move on!

Well, we're withdrawing our bid on the house! After waiting two weeks, the bank came back and told the seller that it wants $4000 more before he's allowed to sell. I assume that more mortgage payments have passed since it was put on the market. The seller turns around and tells me that.

I'm not interested in paying even more for it, because the house has so much fixing up to do, so its time to move on. There are a couple of other interesting homes in the area, but they are even further from work. I asked my boss about shifting my work hours from what they are now (8:30-5:00) to an earlier time (7:00-3:30). That way, I could avoid rush hour traffic and still live out that far.

Anyway, we've withdrawn the bid, but we're still looking for a home.

I'm going to be an uncle... again!

I just heard that my sister is expecting another child! I figure that's as good a reason as any to find some time to go south and visit them again. She and Stephen are down in Yucca Valley in Southern California, where Stephen is the pastor of a Southern Baptist church.

More details as events warrant.

A place to live...

**** Major Update ****

Ok, so here’s the story:

It all starts 10 years ago when the current owner of my Mobile Home Park bought the park. I actually feel kind of bad for the guy (now that I understand what he’s gone through). The park had extremely depressed rental prices (like less than $200 per month) for the space rent. The man saw an opportunity to make some money, and bought the park, intending to raise the rent to a more reasonable price (i.e. market value of about $375 at that time). When the sale had finished, he issued a notice of intent to raise rent. In the intervening 90-day period, the City of Concord rushed and put together a Rent Control Board, who told him he couldn’t raise rent.

A year ago, just after we had moved in, a 10-year-long lawsuit was settled, and he was allowed to raise rent, plus retroactive increases for the intervening time. The problem (for the owner) was that they didn’t raise it as much as he had wanted, so he started the process again. After about three months, and realizing that there was another major lawsuit ahead, he’s decided to take another tack.

He has applied to the City of Concord to put the land to Alternative Use.

That’s right, he wants to close the park. I assume that he wants to build condos or something. Basically he’s gotten tired of fighting with the City and is looking for some way out.

For a day or two after I found out, I worried, but with a little help from Heather, I got perspective and realized that God knew what he was up to. He’d provided the mobile home at a great price in the first place, and he wouldn’t do that just to take it all away again. But the odds are that the park is closing in about a year.

With that in mind, I became much more interested in the MLS emails that I had been receiving since I bought the mobile home. I opened them each day, and almost a month ago now, I saw a listing that looked too good to be true. There’s a house in Bay Point (which is 5 minutes from where I currently live) on sale for $250,000. It is 1,000 square feet, on a 5,000 square lot, which is an amazing deal around here. So Heather and I went to take a look.

There’s a reason its inexpensive… there’s a lot of work to be done. The home is a “short-sale” which is basically the same thing as a foreclosure, except that the bank is being kind to the family, and doing things the other way around. Rather than taking the house and selling it, the family that owns the house are the ones that listed it on the market, but the bank sets the price, and reserves the right to review every bid. That way the loan gets paid off “by the owner” and the bank doesn’t have to foreclose.

Unlike many foreclosures, this home is actually in decent shape. You can tell that the family was doing their best to keep the house up. It appears that they were actually trying to remodel it and then sell it again. There are new Pergo floors (that are mostly installed). There are new baseboards (that have been cut to fit, but are not installed). The closets have been re-made to allow more space (but aren’t quite done yet.) The interior is newly painted. The bathroom is about halfway through a remodel. There is new tile, but it isn’t grouted, and it needs a new sink, and at least some of the wall needs to be ripped out and re-sheetrocked. And that’s the interior.

On the exterior, the lawn is completely dead, and needs to get re-done. The windows need to be re-caulked (one of them is new and needs to be caulked for the first time). The stucco is cracked in places, and one corner of the house needs to be completely re-done (about 2-3 square feet). And then there are the two cars in the back yard. One of them is basically just a chassis, and has been beaten or demolished somehow. The other might run, it looks like it was being worked on. And then there’s a big machine that someone said is probably a stucco mixer, which is similar to a cement mixer, that was used and never cleaned, so probably doesn’t work, which means I can’t sell it.

So, anyway, we put a bid down on it. And we heard back from the Realtor today that the bid was received and that it would probably come back positive because it was a strong offer. Because of the short-sale process, it could be up to two weeks before we know the offer was accepted, but it sounds like it could be ours.

All that to say, Praise God, because he plans these things out. We’re still praying that this will work out for the best, and I’m still doing some other background work. But we’re on the road to home ownership.

(And at some point, we've got to sell the mobile home.)

Well, Here We Go!

So I'm officially into the thick of it. I'm in two classes this quarter, Accounting and Group Dynamics. Interestingly, it is the Group Dynamics class that eats up most of my study time. We formed groups of six the first day, and I must say that ours is the best! (Kudos to Jeff, Isabel, Amy, Helen, and Andy.)

Amazingly, it seems to take the six of us together longer to write a three page paper than it would take for any one of us to write it alone, but se la vie, that is the group process. Its actually because everyone wants to do well, and so we work hard to make sure the paper is the best, and that the individual parts we write mesh together.

It's also a function of all the papers we have to read to write our three page paper. Don't even get me started on the first paper we had to read. It was titled "Attribution Theory," and it was a bear to read. I don't have the worst vocabulary in the world, and it must have taken me two or three hours to read the fifteen pages that we had to read. *GAH*

Anyhow, it's a lot of work, but is definitely worthwhile.

Welcome

I don't yet know what will come after this. But you gotta start somewhere!