The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

Because I’m apparently as bad at updating the new blog as the old one, this is probably old news to most people, but I have accepted a job with Rackspace, in their “Segment Support” group.

“Wait!” you might say. “Rackspace doesn’t have a Raleigh office!” Well, you’d be right. The family and I will be relocating to San Antonio, TX. I’ve been in Raleigh since February of 1999, and really like it here, but San Antonio looks nice, and the job looks very promising. I’ll miss the hockey and improv, but San Antonio has a lot to offer as well.

That means that we’ve put the house on the water in Rolesville on the market, so if you know anyone who wants to buy a like-new house just minutes from I-540 and Capital Blvd, please send them my way.

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The big news is that we got a closing date on the new house recently – we’re currently scheduled to close on Friday, August 11. That’s oh, let me check the calendar, AAAAH! Two weeks away! We haven’t packed anything!

Well, we have a little bit of a cushion because, assuming that there are no delays and we do make the August 11 closing date, we’ll be moving the following Wednesday. That should give us time to go do anything we need at the new house, haul some stuff over there that the movers can’t or shouldn’t carry, and finish our packing.

Will the house be ready in two weeks (we do our “walkthrough” two weeks from today)? It’s certainly possible. I went by the house this evening and, for the first time in a while, there were no workers there. The doors were locked, but once again, the windows weren’t, so I managed to get inside.

New since last time? You can check the Flickr photoset, but the big things are:

* The garage door is installed.
* The railings on the steps and loft have been stained.
* Mirrors and lights in the bathrooms.
* Carpet and hardwood floors down in all rooms.
* Doors have been hung.
* Shelves are in the appropriate closets.

However, there’s still a bit to be done:

* The front porch is still in pretty rough shape, though the stuff to finish it seems to be in the garage waiting for someone to do it.
* No plumbing fixtures or toilets.
* The electricity isn’t connected and the electric meter isn’t installed.
* No thermostats for the HVAC.
* The front yard is still a big mound of dirt and construction trash – that has to be graded/removed and the sod put down.
* No stove in the kitchen.
* The cabinets/sink in the half-bath aren’t there (damaged? backordered?)

So there are still some significant details yet to be done. Given the speed they’ve been going, it’s certainly doable, but there’s probably not a lot of room in the schedule for delays. I should probably check with the builders next week to make sure we’re still on schedule.

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No, this isn’t an improv post. After eight of the most painful months of my life, we got an offer on our house last night, and signed the papers today to accept it. Barring any surprises with the home inspection, we’re set to close on August 31st. Which should be right about the time our new house is ready for move-in, if the estimates they gave me are correct (they said that they estimated 6-8 weeks from the time the drywall was in before closing, and the drywall was in last week). We have the right to rent the house back from the new owners after closing for an additional month, if there are delays at our new place. Hopefully we won’t need that.

We haven’t met the people who made the offer – it’s apparently a young couple about to get married (they’ll be newlyweds when they close, which is pretty much exactly the position we were in almost exactly five years ago), the girl’s apparently Irish, and they’re going to Ireland sometime between now and the end of August to get married.

The home inspection is due to be done by July 21st, which should give us a good buffer to make any needed repairs (I’m only aware of a couple of small things right now). Now I just need to try to pin down the builders at the new house on a better estimated closing date over there.

So while there are still myriad ways things could go wrong, this is the best news we’ve gotten in a while.

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I think it’s about time for me to realize that I don’t know anything about how real estate works.

On Wednesday, when it was pouring 7.5″ of rain and everything in Raleigh was flooding, we had two showings of our house (one while the power was off). This weekend, when it’s been gorgeous, sunny, and upper 80s, zero showings.

I’m sure there’s a reason, but it’s eluding me.

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Given that it’s like 40 degrees out and nasty today, Holly and I both left the house this morning without making it presentable figuring, hey, we’ve only had one showing the past two months, they certainly won’t come out today.

Of course, when I get back to my desk from lunch, I find that we have a voicemail from centralized showing saying there was a showing at 2:30pm (about an hour from when I got the voicemail). I knew Holly was running more errands after lunch, so I drove home to do some cleaning before 2:30. Holly was there when I got there, so we ran through our getting-the-house-ready-to-show cleaning routine. I left to return to work around 2:45 or so.

Holly called me around 4 to let me know that the people had no-showed the appointment.

I want to kill.

Kill.

Don’t sell your house if you can help it, because at least with us, I’d say 20% of the people who call to request showings just don’t show up at all. Which means we screw up our schedule for assclowns who can’t even bother cancelling an appointment.

Kill.

Update

Holly raised the point that I hadn’t thought of – that it’s the buyer’s agents that are to blame. They’re the ones who call the Centralized Showing place to schedule the appointment, they’re (in all cases we’ve seen) with the buyers when they come to the house (since only the agent has the combination to the lockbox), so you’d think they’d have enough professional pride to call Centralized Showing and let them know they’re not coming. I know Centralized Showing will call back – we’ve had it happen like twice. But if our house has been scheduled to get shown 40 times since it’s been on the market, I’d say 10-15 have ended up being silent no-shows.

So if you’re a Realtor, don’t make showing appointments and then blow them off. It makes you look like a jackass.

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I went out yesterday and signed a contract on a new house. Or, technically, a .26-acre piece of ground that will eventually have a house on it. After looking around, we decided that Hampton Pointe in Rolesville, NC (near Wake Forest in northern Wake County) offered the best combination of location, house size, lot size, and cost that we’d found. So we picked up one of the last lots they had in Phase 1 of the development, and decided to put a Collinwood home on it.

Now for our next trick, we just have to sell our current house in Fuquay. We’ve technically got a 60-day contingency on the new house, but if ours hasn’t sold by then, we’ll just lift it and go on. Keystone (the builder) seems to take longer to build a house than a lot of builders in the area. That’s bad from the perspective that it’ll be October or November before we can move in, but good in the sense that they’re not throwing up a house in a month like a lot of big builders, plus it gives us a decent cushion to get our house sold. We’ll probably have to move into an apartment for a few months between selling and buying, which is lame, but I guess I can deal with it.

As for the house itself, it should be more than enough room for us, plus since we’re building it fresh, we got to pick out some options that we like, and remove ones that we don’t need. For example, we got a double-sink in the kids bathroom, ceiling fan prewires in all the bedrooms, hardwood floor in the dining room, and a brick front, but didn’t need to take the marble fireplace or ceramic tile kitchen floors. The house also has an office on the first floor for me, and a “sitting room” off the master bedroom that Holly can use for her creative stuff (scrapbooking, painting, writing, etc). Another couple of nice features are the “waterfront property” with a pond at our back yard, a school bus stop one house away, and the fact that (at least for now) we’re zoned into a year-round elementary school for Hayley in a couple years. Plus, it will cut about 45 minutes or so off a trip up to see the Grandparents in Virginia. It kills me on trips back from there to hit Wake Forest and think “God, I’ve still got another hour of driving to go.” Not any more!

So we’re excited about it – I’ll post some pictures when I get out to the property with the camera. And if you know anyone who wants to buy a house in Fuquay, send them to us.

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Not much activity on the blog front lately. That’s because we’ve been busy with the house. After having it on the market since late October and getting no serious bites, we decided to make a change. The feedback on the house has been very positive, except a large number of people complaining about our carpet. Truth be told, it is pretty nasty, but we were under the (naive?) impression that if people liked the house, they’d be willing to accept us replacing the carpet for them at closing after we’d moved out. No such luck.

So we bit the bullet and are replacing the carpeting in advance this week. Our Realtor(tm)(r)(c) is chipping in and hiring people to move our furniture out and paying to store it for a few days. They’re coming tomorrow morning, so we’ll have a completely empty house for the rest of the week (aside from the random crap we’ve thrown in the noncarpeted rooms). We’re going to take the opportunity to also paint the living room and office/3rd bedroom, which haven’t been painted since we moved in. Then the new carpet comes in on Thursday, and our furniture back in on Friday. Busy busy.

We’ve found a new house we like in Rolesville, but it looks like the lack of a sale on this house will probably keep us from being able to move on it. Booooo.

If you know someone looking for a good house in Fuquay, send them to us. Please.

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Holly and I have decided that we’re going to put our house on the market. We’ve felt like we’ve outgrown the house now, and with plans for Child #2 still in progress, another kid would push us past the point of comfort. That means that we’ve been in manic “get the house looking nice enough to show” mode for the past couple of weeks. Aside from de-cluttering and hauling some furniture to storage, we’ve (along with assists from neighborhood handyman Jeff and Holly’s dad):

• Repainted the kitchen
• Replaced outlets and light switches in the kitchen
• Replaced two ceiling fans (Hayley’s room and our room)
• Re-landscaped outside, including weeding, mulching, and redoing the border around the flower beds with bricks
• Replaced the exhaust fan and light in the master bathroom
• Replaced the faucets in the kitchen, master bath, and guest bath
• Fixed the broken hydraulic on the front storm door
• Replaced the torn screen in the side storm door
• Trimmed low-hanging branches from the Bradford Pear

We still have some painting to do, quite a bit more de-cluttering, and replacement of the picture window in the dining room. But hopefully we’ll be ready to go on the market at the end of next week.

If this house doesn’t sell after all this work, I’m going to be pissed.

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We’d noticed some weirdness in our kitchen for a while – something that looked like insect eggs on the wall a few weeks ago, an increase in sneezing for me, and the final piece, our security system freaking out the other day until I cut power to it.

As Holly investigated further, she found that the “eggs” were mold, and the wallpaper on one wall in the kitchen was peeling. Uh oh. We called a plumber and, sure enough, there was a leaky pipe behind that wall. The plumber first thought that our new cabinets had been screwed into a pipe by mistake, but when he went into the wall, he found that the cabinets were fine (of course, I doubt Everett could make a mistake like that if he tried), but it looked like there was a small nail-hole in the pipe nearby. The pipe that, I believe, takes all the plumbing water from upstairs down into the septic tank. Ewwwww.

We can’t remember ever having anything nailed onto that wall, so it’s possible the hole was there when we bought the house in 2001. The pipe’s fixed (a rubber gasket and clamp over the hole), but we have a gaping hole in the wall. We’ll probably have to replace that whole 4×8 piece of sheetrock at the end of the month when Everett comes down to help. That will mean removing the wallpaper, which will probably mean that we need to pull down all the wallpaper in the kitchen and paint. Looks like we just answered the question of “Which room in the house do we re-do next?”

Ah, the joys of home ownership.

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It begins – the heavy equipment is in the erstwhile cow pasture behind our house, and it’s moving earth. The new subdivision is officially underway. I don’t like it, but there’s not much I can do about it.

You can see the planning information for the subdivision, “Stonewall Farms,” or go straight to the (large) plat map (PDF). That’s a lot of houses. That also means that construction behind us will probably be going on for years.

Bah. I wonder if it’s time to move, just so we don’t have to deal with that.

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