Category: Home

Two nice things about our new house: One, we have enough space to host a dinner party. Two, we have a neighborhood and we’ve been getting to know our neighbors. And that’s what we did Friday night.

Actually it was our neighbor Juan who wanted to have a get-together, and he finally pinned us down last month to set a date. We invited a couple from a couple of houses down whom we all knew, and the couple between their houses who moved in recently. Everyone brought something, but Juan’s wife Maria cooked most of the entrees: Roll-up lasagna, and chicken tortellini with sausages.

The sign of a good party, I think, is when you lose track of time, and after people started arriving around 7:15, it was 10:00 almost before we knew it. The food was delicious, and we had a great evening all of us chatting. Blackjack hung out with us most of the evening and even showed that he can still jump if sufficiently motivated (like piles of yummy food on top of the counter). Even Roulette came down to say hi later in the evening.

We also got to show off our Christmas lights: We have a new light show on the front of the house, and we have two Christmas trees up: Our main one in the living room, and a smaller one in the family room. All of our guests live across the street from us, so they all get the benefit of the front lights.

A great night.

Back in May Debbi and I bought a house together. But since I already owned a townhouse (which I bought in 2001), that left the question of what to do with the townhouse. My agent suggested I consider renting it, given that the market for homes is still pretty soft, but after considering it I decided that I didn’t want to be a landlord: Even with a management company doing the work of managing the property, it wasn’t something I really wanted to be responsible for. Besides which, the complex is quite small, which means we all shared the load of doing work for the homeowners’ association, something I didn’t really want to continue with – maintaining our new house is plenty of work (even split between the two of us), and I didn’t want to keep having to chip in on the old place.

So, to jump to the end of the story, I sold my townhouse on Tuesday.

As for the middle of the story…

We spent the first two months after we moved unpacking, buying stuff, hosting an open house, and generally enjoying our new house. Then at the end of June my agent prodded me (gently) into moving on the townhouse, since it was just sitting there empty accumulating property tax obligations and HOA dues payments.

I guess I’d expected that preparing the place for sale would be a whirlwind of remodeling activity which would all be a blur but would be done fairly quickly. In fact there was less work to be done than I’d expected (mainly making sure the unit was fundamentally sound, and making it more presentable), but it took quite a bit longer than I’d expected. Here’s what we did:

1. A chimney sweep came in and cleaned the chimney. This was pretty easy, and he even found a part which needed to be replaced. (I’m going to miss having a wood-burning fireplace, as our city prohibits newer homes from having them, as they’re big sources of pollution. The gas fireplace we have is nice, though.)
2. The unit was painted. We got estimates from a couple of places, and then I had to choose the colors. Of course, my feeling was, “pick whatever makes the most sense for selling it”, since I certainly didn’t plan to put my own stamp on a unit that I soon wouldn’t own, but still, it was up to me. We had them come back to touch up a few things, too. So this took quite a bit longer than I’d expected. (The paint looked great once it was done, though!)
3. The carpets also needed replacing, since they were 10 years old or more. We got a couple of estimates, picked a company, picked a grade and color of carpet – and then things got delayed due to a family matter at the company we’d chosen. Not really anyone’s fault, but it was a little more time added in. By this time we were deep into August.
4. We had a landscaper come out to tidy up the back yard and lay down some wood chips, as well as stain the bench back there.
5. A pest inspector examined the unit, and found some cracks in the flooring under the washer/dryer closet, and a crack in the pan of the master shower, which led to concerns about possible water damage underneath.
6. We hired a contractor to fix the water damage, including replacing the master shower. The damage was minimal-to-nonexistent, happily, and the replaced shower stall looked great. However, this actually took us up to the beginning of our vacation in Hawaii in September.
7. While we were in Hawaii, a home inspector checked out the unit. While it’s comforting how thorough home inspectors are (especially considering that there are many parts of homes that can’t be inspected), it’s also worrying in case they find something really serious. Fortunately,they didn’t find any such thing.
8. Along the way I filled out disclosures about the unit, gather information from my records, and get the HOA to provide information about the association to my agent to add to the disclosures. This involved a lot of reading, looking things up, and signing.
9. And finally, it went on the market smack in the middle of our Hawaii trip.

So it wasn’t that anything went wrong, just that all the work and a few delayed added up to more time to get it on the market than I’d expected. I’d originally figured it would be on the market in August, when in fact it went on in mid-September.

Surprisingly, an offer came in on the place the weekend before it hit the market – the day before we flew to Hawaii. We deferred the offer for a while because I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with thinking it through at the time. However, that did mean I spent bits of time during our trip communicating with my agent.

In the end, though, that unexpected offer was the one I accepted. The buyer was apparently very interested in a unit in that particular neighborhood (hard for me to argue with since I liked it quite a bit myself, especially the great freeway access), and kept in contact with my agent while the place was going on the market.

While the market in our city is pretty good – everything sells, and things which take longer to sell tend to be overpriced, and sell once the price drops – it’s still a pretty soft market; prices are nowhere near where they were in 2006. But then, they are a little above where they were when I bought the unit in 2001, so it did go for more than I paid for it. Even with the soft market I’d expected it would go for a little more, but it didn’t turn out that way. Still, I’m okay with the price it went for – I haven’t had any recriminations about it.

So the unit went into escrow in late September, and finally closed on Tuesday. (It is a lot less stressful to be on the selling end of escrow than the buying end, as most of your work has already been done just getting the unit listed.)

It is a little sad to no longer own the unit. Whenever I went back to the place it seemed a little more alien as all the decor changed. I kept thinking of my late cat Jefferson whenever I went there, since it had been his home longer than anywhere else, and it was of course his last home – I’m not going to have any memories of him in the new house.

I made multiple sweeps of the place during escrow to see if there was anything we’d forgotten. We made a trip to the county’s household hazardous waste drop-off to get rid of a bunch of old paint and similar items, almost all of which had been left there by the previous owner and which were now out-of-date, if they were even still any good at all. And I found a couple of piles of stuff in the garage which I hadn’t realized were there which I either threw out or brought over to the new place. I finally went through every closet, drawer and shelf in the house one day and didn’t find anything else, so I think I got it all.

Debbi suggested we leave a card saying “welcome to your new home” for the buyer, so I did that on Monday, and left the keys and the garage door opener as well. Then I let myself out one last time.

It was the perfect house for me for many years, and really it was mainly that Debbi and I had outgrown it that caused us to move. I hope the new owner enjoys living there as much as we did.

But we like our new house an awful lot, and really, I don’t have any regrets about making the move.

This past weekend we had our first house guests at the new house: Debbi’s sister Dianne and bro-in-law Shawn flew out on Saturday. Shawn was out here for business, and Dianne tagged along to see her favorite older sister; they hadn’t been out here to visit since before Debbi and I started dating. Now, this wasn’t a new meeting for me; Debbi’s family and mine live pretty close to each other, so whenever we go back to visit our families, we each see the other’s, although we each spend most of our time with our own families. But I know Dianne and Shawn fairly well by this point. Our friends Lisa and Michel have gone back to visit them with Debbi a couple of times, too. But them coming out to visit us was a novelty, as they’re usually so busy with their kids that they don’t often travel.

They flew in Saturday afternoon, and after giving them a tour of the house, we took them out to Hobee’s for a late lunch since they apparently didn’t eat much on the way out. Then Lisa, Michel and their kids came by for a few hours and we played with Isabella in our yard, trading off running around with her. Shawn was showing her some soccer moves. Otherwise we just hung out for the day, picking up dinner to eat at home, since they were pretty zonked from their flight and the time change, and they turned in around 9:30. I think this is the first time I’ve ever had more than one house guest at a time, so they were able to take advantage of the fact that we have a queen-sized bed in our guest room now, rather than the single-person futon I had at the townhouse (although that futon is still in the living room, and is one of Blackjack’s favorite places to hang out, looking out the front window).

Sunday we drove over to the coast and had Sunday champagne brunch at the Moss Beach Distillery, sitting on their patio for a while afterwards. We didn’t actually go down to dip our feet in the Pacific Ocean, but I did stop off at the coast trail to get a different look at the ocean. Then we drove to the other side of the bay area, and hit a couple of Livermore wineries in the afternoon before coming back home. A lot of driving, but fun! After dinner (at Vive Sol) we went into downtown Mountain View for a little shopping and to show them our downtown.

Monday and Tuesday Shawn worked, but I took Monday off and Debbi, Dianne and I drove around Silicon Valley in the morning and early afternoon. Shawn finished up early that day and we headed up to San Francisco for ice cream at Ghirardelli. We hit a couple other places (like an Apple Store), but it was cold and foggy in the city, so we didn’t stay too long, and got home before dark.

It was back to work for me on Tuesday. Somehow I cleverly scheduled a meeting for 5 pm after forgetting that Tuesday was the baseball All-Star Game, but I got home during the second inning. We got take-out from FJL and watched the game.

Wednesday morning the three of them got up to oh-god-thirty to take Dianne to the airport, and Shawn headed off to work an hour after I finally got up, and he flew to LA later that day (hopefully he avoided carmageddon on his flight out).

It was great to see them, and to break in the guest room at the house. The cats gradually warmed up to them – Roulette even gave Shawn some attention (and she’s getting a little more adjusted to the downstairs as time goes on). Hopefully they can come out again sometime!

Trash day at our new house is Wednesday. Actually it was Wednesday at our old home, too, but that was a townhouse, so we had a large common dumpster (paid for by the HOA) and I’d just take the trash out when it was ready and didn’t care about when trash day was except for the recycling. At the new place we have a couple of trash bins and we’d have to remember to take them out to the curb every Wednesday.

Well, we had a couple of trash bins, anyway.

We unloaded our storage unit a couple weekends ago, and one of my projects was to break down all the boxes for our electronic stuff. (We had boxes in there for items we no longer own!) The boxes themselves go out with the recycling, but the styrofoam packing goes into the trash. We’ve been putting our regular trash into the smaller of our two bins, while we spread the styrofoam out across 2 weeks, putting it in the larger bin. They took the first half last week, and I put out the bin with the second half Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning I looked out to see if the trash had arrived – not yet. So I went off to shower and have breakfast. I looked out again, and…

…the trash still hadn’t come, but the larger bin was gone. Just gone, styrofoam and all.

Who would steal a large trash bin filled with styrofoam?

I walked around the neighborhood a little to see if I could spot it, but no luck. I thought maybe some wacky neighbor had “borrowed” it and it would magically reappear at the end of the day. Nope. I noticed a neighbor across the street had a bin sitting out at the end of the day after everyone else had taken theirs in. Had our bin somehow ended up over there? But this morning they’d taken it back in, and I saw where they kept their bins, and there was only the one garbage bin. So much for that theory.

It was a bummer since getting a new bin costs money. (Hey, an incentive for someone to steal trash bins! But full bins?) But we figured we’d call and get a new one.

And that’s when Debbi solved the mystery: It turns out we weren’t paying for service for that bin, so the trash company took it away. Apparently the picking-up-extra-bins truck comes around separately from the regular trash truck. It’s a little weird (though nice) that they took the trash, too, but it explains the mystery.

Now we’ll have to decide whether we want to get a larger bin (and pay for it), or stick with the smaller bin. I think the smaller bin will do the job for the most part, but we’ll see after a few months whether we want to go to a larger one.

We’ve been in our new home for almost a month now. I’ve chronicled a few of the major changes involved (mowing, for instance, which I did again on Sunday), but there have been lots of smaller adjustments to make, beyond those and beyond buying furniture and unpacking:

• Now that we have a two-car garage, in theory we can both park inside. In fact we’re still staging our stuff in one side of the garage while we figure out where to put it all. So since Debbi’s been parking on the street for five years I told her she could have the garage and I’d park in the driveway. This past weekend we emptied the storage unit into the other side of the garage, so now we’re both parking in the driveway, but that shouldn’t last too long, as we’ll get rid of the lot of the stuff from storage one way or the other.
• We’re still trying to remember which light switches control which lights. We have a lot of light circuits, so there’s a lot to remember.
• We have air conditioning now! And we’re having a heat wave this week! But we haven’t really figured out the thermostat yet, and haven’t gotten into the habit of turning it on. In Wisconsin I’d turn my A/C on for much of the summer, but that’s because it was humid in Wisconsin for much of the summer, and I had a much smaller place to cool, so it wasn’t a big deal. We only really need A/C here for a couple of weeks out of the year, so we’re not used to turning it on.

  I need to figure out how to program the A/C, and then I could leave it at (say) 80 during the day and have it kick in an hour before we get home. (The cats, weirdly, actually seek out the hot parts of the house when we have heat waves.)

• I’m still figuring out my routine when showering and dressing in the morning. Somehow everything (the bed, my dresser, the closet where our robes hang, the bathroom) is just far enough away from each other that I end up walking back and forth a lot. In the old place pretty much everything was right next to each other.
• For the first time in my life, my comic books are not in my bedroom. That’s still kind of weird to me.
• I’m still training myself to remember where things are in the kitchen. I do a bunch of unnecessary walking back and forth to get plates, glasses, silverware, etc. for various meals because I haven’t got the location of everything down intuitively.
• We now have litter boxes both upstairs and downstairs. So I’ve adjusted my habit to scoop the litter in the mornings rather than the evenings, so go up and down the stairs slightly less. But sometimes I forget to scoop, which means an extra trip upstairs when I do remember.

None of this stuff is major, it’s mostly just changing my habits or committing details to memory. It’s just taking some getting used to.

I do sometimes think of the old house a bit wistfully. It was a good house and I lived there for almost 10 years. It’s hard to let it go, even if the new one is much bigger and nicer.

Today I mowed a lawn for the first time in, oh, 20 years or so. I’m pretty sure I stopped mowing my Mom’s lawn when I went off to graduate school, since I had less and less time to go back and visit from that point forward.

I borrowed an electric corded mower from my friend Chad, who has a gardener who does his and Camille’s yard. Since it had been sitting around for a while unused, I cleaned it up this afternoon, bought a 100-foot cord, and tonight took it out for a spin (it having been maybe 2-1/2 weeks since the lawn was last mowed, around the time we closed escrow).

The two big drawbacks:

1. The cord is by far the biggest pain in the ass in the process, having to swoop it around to make sure I didn’t mow over it. Fortunately, I didn’t, and I didn’t get tangled up in it either.
2. The bag is small, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the bags on the mowers my Dad owned growing up. So I had to stop to empty it often.

So I bet I’ll end up buying a new mower with a larger bag. While I grew up using gas-powered mowers, I’m not too enthused about having to buy and store gas for it. So more likely I’ll get an electric battery-powered mower.

I might also need a weed whacker or other edging tool, as part of the yard is edged with large rocks. Fun fun.

All-in-all it took about an hour, but I think with no cord and a larger bag it would be faster and even pretty easy.

Still, how long do you think it’ll be before we break down and just hire a gardener?

This weekend was mostly given over to unpacking. Debbi has been stressed out with all the boxes around the house and was frantically unpacking the kitchen, while I figured it would take several weeks to get most of the stuff put away. Eventually we came to a compromise where I’d prioritize unpacking the books in the living room, but have more time to do the study and library. So yesterday I anchored the tall bookcase to the living room wall, and then I unloaded all my hardcovers into it and the two short bookcases next to it, cutting in half the unemptied boxes in that room. Progress!

Meanwhile, we went to Ikea on Friday night and picked up a couple of bureaus (and they were heavy, so picking them up was no mean feat!). It turns out that Friday night is a great time to go to Ikea, as they were pretty quiet and we got through (and, in particular, got parking) in record time. I put the bookcases together over the next two days, which was rather a pain in the ass: Since all the drawers are themselves unassembled, it took about 2-1/2 hours per bureau to assemble them. But they look pretty nice now that it’s done, and we’ve unpacked most of our clothes. It also feels right to me to have a bureau on the wall across from the bed.

(By the way, our friend Chad pointed out that Californian for “bureau” is “dresser”.)

We also ran some errands on Saturday, in particular buying a couple of counter stools at California Stools Bars & Dinettes. While the price was more than we were prepared for, we had not had much luck finding what we wanted at places like Target and OSH, and admittedly the quality of what we bought at CSBD seemed better. And honestly I couldn’t fault their service on the showroom floor (yay for salesmen paid on salary and not on commission!). We’ve sat in the stools for breakfast the last two days and are very happy with them! (Blackjack also enjoys sitting on them sometimes.)

We’ve been in our new house a little over a week now and we’re really enjoying it. Debbi keeps saying how it feels right. The cats are all used to it, although Roulette still prefers the upstairs to the downstairs. We spent Saturday evening on the couch in the living room (a.k.a. “the room without a television”) reading, enjoying the gas fireplace, and the cats hung out with us.

We’re still moving the last items out of the old place. Almost everything left there is now in the garage, but we still have a few more car loads, not to mention stuff to throw away, stuff to donate, and stuff to take to the dump. It’s “the unromantic part”, Debbi said. But we’re getting there.

We wrapped up the long weekend with a small Memorial Day barbecue – though it hardly felt “small” since we had three couples (Subrata and Susan, Chad & Camille, and Joar and Karin) and their children (4 all together, each one 3 years or younger). Yes, the cats spent almost the whole afternoon hiding in the bedroom. But we got to show off the house to people who hadn’t seen it yet. I was able to use my grill to cook 12 hamburgers and 4 sausages all at once, and the kids enjoyed running all over the yard. We had a nice warm – if a bit windy – day. Also, Chad brought over his electric lawn mower which I’ll borrow for a while – I just need to get a long cord for it! (He hasn’t used it in years since they have a gardener for their place.)

We had a great time, but were definitely tired by the time everyone left.

Actually the whole weekend has been pretty tiring, even though we were very productive and had a good time today! But somehow I don’t think it’ll exactly be a relief to go in to work tomorrow! 😉

Buying a new house and moving sucks up all your available time, which is why I haven’t been writing here lately. Plus, we don’t yet have Internet at the new place. But! On Saturday we made the big move to our nice new home.

We closed on our new house last Tuesday, and we took Thursday off to be at the house for some appointments, including Comcast coming by to set up cable TV, and our washer/dryer being delivered by Home Depot. All the appointments went off without a hitch, and we were able to move some stuff over during the day as well. Susan and Ajay also came by to see the place, and Ajay enjoyed playing in the yard as well as running in circles in all the empty rooms.

We were packing right up until the movers arrived on Saturday, though we did go to bed and got about 6-1/2 hours of sleep the night before. Debbi called around to several moving companies and we went with Trusted Van Lines, based in San Jose. The phone contact was apparently very helpful and was the only place she called to give us a written quote. They also had the best price. Originally they were supposed to show up between 1-3 pm, but they called on Thursday and asked if they could come between 8-10 am, which was fine with us! They actually arrived around 8:40 am with a 3-man crew and a plenty-big truck.

I think we packed around 90 boxes all together, and the movers filled a couple of larger boxes with bedding and pillows. Plus our furniture, which actually was not as tough to move as the fact that about 50 boxes were filled with books, comics and CDs! Heavy!

But these guys were awesome. They were friendly, courteous and careful, and impressively efficient, only taking a few breaks. We had water available for them, and I went out to buy us all lunch from Quiznos. They trucked lots of boxes up the stairs at the new place (where they didn’t use dollies to spare the new carpeting; the old place didn’t need such care as its carpet needs to be replaced before I sell it), and got almost everything routed to the right place (3 boxes ended up in an adjoining room – hardly a tragedy!). Given the heavy stuff they moved for us, we gave them a pretty hefty tip (at least, I think it was hefty, from standards I’ve read about elsewhere), and the final total was actually close to what I paid for my 2001 move. It took about 7 hours end-to-end, which was slightly above estimate, but given all the books I wasn’t too surprised.

We would definitely use them again. In fact, we might use them again to empty our storage locker next month!

As the movers were finishing, Chad and Camille and the twins came by to give us a care package of mai tais, and we invited them in to see the place.

I locked the cats in one of the bathrooms in the old place for the day. Newton spent much of the day meowing, but I hope they were able to get some sleep after we left for the other house. Debbi and I made a run back to the old house to pick up some key items we’d been unable to pack, and then we picked up the cats, put them in their carriers and brought them over.

Newton is a well-travelled kitty, having done 2 previous moves (1 cross-country), and he was out of his carrier within 5 minutes, and trotting around with his tail held high within half an hour. Blackjack and Roulette, however, refused to leave their carrier after a peek outside, so we eventually pulled them out and closed it up. Blackjack started to come around, finding a good hiding spot but venturing out periodically to explore before retreating. Roulette, however, was miserable, looking for somewhere to hide and not finding one she liked. Debbi eventually took her upstairs where she hid under the bed for the rest of the day.

As I’d predicted, she came out overnight and had pretty much conquered the upstairs by the next morning, but she’s still very wary of downstairs and mostly stays upstairs. (I hope she comes down to eat at night.) Blackjack has gotten used to most of the house, has been scratching at various posts, and took off up the stairs at high speed this morning, so I think he’s used to the place. Roulette may take a week or so to fully acclimatize.

For Debbi and myself the house feels like home already (albeit home with a bunch of boxes piled in every room). She’s unpacked much of the kitchen, I’ve set up the computer, TV and stereo, and we’ve made another run to get more stuff from the old house. (We still have another 2-4 car loads in the garage to bring over, but we’re almost there!) But we’ve been there a couple of nights now, cats snoozing on the bed with us, and we watched an episode of Doctor Who while drinking mai tais last night.

We have several projects to get the place just right over the next month or two, but so far so good. I think it’ll be a great place for us.