Don't Let it Get Me

[solarbird]

Gah. Maybe one minute after posting this, our agent calls and says that he just found out an offer had been made yesterday, and was accepted. Bleah. Still, this is the kind of thing we'd like to find.

A possible new house; pictures here, for the moment. It's currently a fourplex - two studios, one one-bedroom apartment, and one two- bedroom apartment. It was built as a duplex; we'd turn it into a triplex, I think. It's at 3842 Interlake Ave; that's a corner lot, Interlake and 39th. Mapquest shows it here, but puts the star half block or so too far south of the actual location.

There are two separate porches, one front, one back. They're both quite large. I mention this in case it's confusing. house1-2.jpg is the only picture of the back porch and back yard, insofar as it's a back yard.

Good points about the location:

• Walking distance to useful and good things in Wallingford. (7 blocks.)


• Walking distance to useful and good things in Fremont. (7 blocks.)


• Walking distance to Gasworks Park (7 blocks, again) and Woodland Park (11 blocks), amoungst others.


• Easy access to bus service - the same bus that stops outside our house now stops a block and a half away. (I am loving that part.)


• Easy access to Burke-Gilman trail - similar to what we have now, only with a gentler hill on the way back. (Four blocks.)


• It has a view of Lake Union from the upper floors, but I don't really care about that, honestly.


• Planting strips. Which are, of course, gardenable. I would plant more trees, since that's what I kind of do.

Known BAD things about the location:

• Four blocks north of the transfer station. I couldn't hear noise from it while I was there. I was listening for it. I also smelled nothing bad. But are there times when I could? I don't know.


• Only one block east of Stone Way, which is busy, but since it's sharply uphill, it didn't seem to matter much from a noise standpoint.

It's cheap enough that we'd be able to pay people to do the kind of fixing up we'd want to have done, for once. (Yay!) Also, the houses around it are generally in better condition. But: what're the problems? It needs a lot of work, that's one obvious problem. In particular, if anybody knows anything bad about the location, I'd love to hear it.

Other good things:

• 1905 construction


• Full-sized (and currently unused) basement


• Unused attic space may be convertable, we don't know yet.


• 4788 square feet, according to King County, of which 3192 is currently built out; that's bigger across three units than what we have now in main house, pt. 8, and the Admiralty. Add in more - via, say, the basement or attic - and you're talking size.


• Quiet street - at least, while we were there. LOTS of available street parking.


• Other houses nearby are nicer.


• Planting strips between the sidewalk and street


• Lot and a half.

Other bad things:

• NO parking on the lot right now, but we could probably build room for one or possibly two cars in back without it looking inappropriate. If it's not impossibly expensive, a basement parking spot should also be an option. It would be appropriately period, if done right - it'd probably go in where the street-facing basement door is now. But, again, it might be too expensive.


• Some garden space, but not much. It's mostly in back, which is a good place to have it, but still - not much.


• Neighbourhood has fewer trees than where we live now, which is mostly just going to be true no matter where I can find. :( ) This is not entirely mitigated by the presense of nearby treed parks.


• Exteriour was "simplified" in the 50s, I think. (That stucco isn't original; lap siding was definitely involved at one time.) Also, I hate the colour.


• Did I mention it's basically a house with a ring of grass around it? And that there aren't nearly as many trees as around here? (sadness)

And here, have a quiz:


You are bisexual.


What is your sexual orientation?
brought to you by Quizilla

Comments

Don't give up completely

[amethyst-dancer.livejournal.com]

House negotiations can be tricky, and until the closing, there's always a chance that the deal will fall through. Ask your agent how solid the deal is, and whether or not you can place a back-up offer, or if he can at least let the seller's agent know you're interested in case something happens.

The first day we got to Long Island for house hunting, we looked at five houses, despite it being Sunday. We found one that we liked far above the others, and decided to go through one more day of looking, and if we didn't find anything better, to go ahead and place an offer on it at the end of the day Monday. Monday morning, the first thing our agent told us was, "Remember that house you liked so much? Because the regular secretary is off Sundays, I didn't know that an offer had already been accepted on it."

We were SO disappointed! We looked all day Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, without finding anything we really wanted. Thursday morning our agent told us the deal had fallen through! We had a deal made on that house within ten minutes. And we got it.

I missed the first house I was trying to get in Lexington. I didn't really know what I was doing yet, and thought about it a couple weeks before deciding to make an offer. A few days before, an offer had been accepted. But the almost-identical house next door was available, and I ended up getting it for even less.

The one we have now was really the only one here we wanted, and we went through some negotiating problems getting it, too. We made an offer contingent on selling our other house, because we couldn't get a mortgage until we had a buyer. The way that works, is that if the sellers get another offer without a contingency, they can force you to remove the contingency or give up the house, and you have something like 24 hours to decide. Well, they did get another offer, or at least they said they did, and forced us not only to decide on dropping the contingency, but they said they were going to take the other offer (which was for both of their pieces of property) unless we agreed to take both also. Fortunately, we had already decided we were going to try to make a deal for the other lot, and the price they were asking wasn't unreasonable. So we did it. That's why we have 22 acres of swamp instead of 7.

Of course, it doesn't hurt to keep looking either.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

It does sound like a good enough place and area, though!

Re: Don't give up completely

[solarbird]

It's a commercial transaction; we'll happily revisit it if it falls apart, but I'm not expecting it to. Commercial buyers are a lot less likely to flake.

And your scenario parallels how we ended up with 5038 really strongly. Remind me to bore you with it sometime. ^_^