dear reader, i bought a house, and will be moving from the fourth floor apartment facing this busy intersection in the city to a detatched home surrounded by a lawn on a quieter street not far from a suburban metro station.
i know. and, yes, that also.
it is true, dear reader that, barely coherent mass of contradictory values and impulses that i am, i have not concerned myself with evaluation along the hip-urban / boring-suburban spectrum in some time, focusing instead on scraping by at something a little nearer the subsistence survival threshhold with respect to indicia of modern capitalistic successful adulthood while trying to aspire to certain likely-unattainable ideals.
i did happen to learn by chance, while looking for houses with a former significant other (and her real-estate-agent friend) within the past year, that, to my amazement, i might be able to buy one myself . . . although i still hear that mortage broker's glowing assessment of our individual and several mortgage-worthiness with a tinge of the same sort marketing tones in which a beautician might tell a plain customer that with a little work she would be beautiful. anyway, at that time we found a house and then, more or less immediately, more or less amicably, broke up.
simultaneously, indeed perpetually!, there was tenants association business afoot -- properly characterized, lo these many years, tenants association business describes a consistent low-level rear gard action against various landlord and developer volleys and sorties punctuated from time to time by eruptions of all-out, life-or-death struggle, while striving (and mostly failing) to maintain a clear view of the terrain and "battlespace" and bolster morale among a confused and undisciplined company of poorly-equipped and not-entirely-invested irregulars (in two languages). i was something like a colonel: the colonel of truth, although rank didn't mean much among the files. in negotiations with the enemy i was generally bad cop to another colonel's good cop, under the benign and free hand of the general.
these days there is a sort of armistice, but it is fragile and not particularly well understood by the parties below the executive level. the tenenats are on fairly strong ground and surrounded by a palisade of legally-binding agreements, which do, however, stipulate some inconveniences for all involved parties over the course of ensuing years. specifically, the landlord will both renovate the building (relocating every tenant to a comparable dwelling and subsidizing any rent differential during renovations and then moving each back) and then maintain the building in perpetuity as low income rental housing.
i did not want to move twice and end up no better off for it: same location, rent increasing again and earning me nothing, still an officer of the association, and not particularly fond or trusting of the landlord and its minions (or most other association members).
so i started looking for one-bedroom apartments in the neighborhood and quickly learned that a month's rent (per a lease undertaken in 2012) in an apartment in the city would cost more than the monthly payment on the mortgage note contemplated last fall.
i got a referral to Alan Bruzee and Yvette Chisholm at Long and Foster in Rockville (Alan is the son in law of a friend: the nicest, most effusively-appreciative and enthusiastically-engaged little old lady in the world!), and, engaged to go see some listings the next weekend, sent them the following:
My list is kind of long, but mostly out of ignorance. I have been using the RedFin mobile app to search listings for detached houses south of gaithersburg (and White Oak) under $300K (but, $250K would be preferable), and tending toward four digits in the square footage (though I find that number often-misleading and therefore confusing). While there are a lot of listings, a preponderance of them note "pending." Among those remaining are a broad array including estate sales, short sales, public auction, and various references to third-parties, banks, tear-downs, and as-is's and other daunting terms: I'd prefer not to immediately have to replace the fusebox and the roof.
In general I've focused in Rockville along the train tracks, where several houses along Lewis St., and in the neighborhood beyond, seem modestly plausible, and across the swath from Viers Mill over toward Hyattsville. I like the idea of a couple listings in Takoma Park, or near it; there's what looks like a lovely little house on Sligo Avenue; and one or two extravagant outliers down in Fort Washington which appeal for plausible proximity to the river.
But I don't have a great sense yet of what my money might get me. In comparing listings, I find some turn-ons, as it were, and turn-offs and several consistent considerations, foremost among which is the commute. For a car, driving into the city is the certain to be dreadful from any entry point, so I have a strong preference for living within a reasonable walking distance of a metro station or high-throughput bus route.
Turn-ons: AC, W/D, dishwasher, potentially-comfortable sunroom/patio zone, parking, an environment amenable to supporting a satisfactory illusion of privacy (also, although I can hardly cook, some of those kitchens look magnificent!);i then appended my top ten listings from the despised redfin app, by listing number and street address.
Turn-offs: HOAs, restrictive covenants, neighbors homes looming through windows, used carpet everywhere.
that weekend Alan walked me though an immense amount of paperwork before taking me to see four houses not among those listings i had provided . . . and, after some deliberation, i made an offer the next day on the second of those four.
which offer was accepted and thereupon began a month of scurrying to gather, scan, print, sign, scan and transmit paperwork, and consulting with inspectors, and scanning and transmitting more paperwork, culminating today over at village settlements where a settlement attorney with the thoroughly entertaining and amazing bedside manner of a vaudvillian comic, walked the parties through signing yet another immense amount of paperwork, so that i hardly even noticed handing over the cashier's check for almost all of my money - the largest single payment i have ever made, the handover of which i would expect to make a great impression but, instead, is lost in the wash of signatures and jokes.
after the title attorney indicated the deal had been consummated, the seller said something about a ghost, then stopped short, turned to his real estate agent, and asked, "Is that a statement-against-interest?", to which the agent replied with a grin, "It's too late, the deal's done." Thereupon the seller told an unsatisfying (after that introduction!) anecdote about a supernatural solution to some plumbing problem, that devolved into some practical discussion of certain idiosyncrasies to the property.
i came away with keys to a house still containing all the staging furniture (and an appointment for that furniture to be removed by the stager, and a hastily-executed agreement concerning liability in the event the people removing the staging should be injured during that appointment). i went to that house and sat there for a while before returning to my apartment to get on with the packing.
and then this infamous storm came through.