a home of one's own

so after signing on a 1000 dotted lines, i am apparently a homeowner now. i don't particularly feel any different though.

did the final walk-through yesterday evening. most of the repairs/replacements are done. the bathroom window pane and two of the sprinklers need to be replaced/fixed. the seller has given me his word on having that done within the week. and i do not wish to play hard ball. if Allah wills it, it will happen.
have to get a cashier's check made out to the title company for the remainder of the 5 down. will leave for the bank shortly.
this evening at 5:00pm, i will sign "my life away" as my mortgage broker's assistant puts it. they are a solid bunch of people and working with them for the most part has been a pleasant experience.
in all of this, i did not particularly feel the absence of an agent. only as a witness to all transactions perhaps but paperwork, unlike what most of us think, is not overwhelming at all because most of it is handled by the lender/ mortgage broker's office.
so far in this whole process i was responsible for arranging the inspection and getting hazard insurance on the house. after some comparison shopping, i switched to allstate. hopefully, i'm in "good hands".
i also realised when i was switching my auto over to allstate that i had been paying more for my auto from geico than i'll be paying for home+auto with allstate. my bad for not shopping around and being lazy.
on a sidenote, i think there is no way i can avoid the escrow account for my taxes. ah well... so much for hoping i could beat the system. many have come before me. and failed no doubt.

on tuesday, aug 23, the appraisal came back and was sent to underwriting. it was valued exactly at cost. apparently, with the way the market is right now, appraisers are taking the easy way out and don't intend to stand in the way of willing buyers and sellers. we need to have the paper work done by today to close tomorrow.
also on a sidenote, rates were locked at 5.6% and 8.1% fixed.
will update as more news comes in.

last week i scheduled the home inspection. the home inspector's wife works with my friend at the state trasportation dept. vive le small world networking! why? because the guy let me tag along. and not only did he let me tag along - he also gave me a crash course on home owner 101. we made our way meticulously through all the important points in the house. the water heater, the furnace, the electrical panel, the sprinkler system, the AC unit. and not just as part of the inspection, but rather, he showed me what kind of fuses i should keep handy for the ac just in case one blows. how to shut off the water main. how to switch the air filters in the furnace. how to switch off power to different sections of the home if necessary. needles to say, i did not know any of this. i have been renting for the last 6 years and any time something went wrong - including something as trivial as a light bulb replacement - i had maintenance people come over and fix it for me. o the joys of apartment living. but now i'll be the primary resource for home maintenance, so might as well be prepared. and when i piss and moan abt how my life is in shambles, i need to remember these little kindnesses from strangers.
downside of hiring the guy who moon lights as a home inspector (which i found out when i was actually paying him) was that he didn't test for mold or pests (two major problem areas). it was too late now. he needed to be paid, and i had hired him without asking what he covered. i could hire somebody else for a full inspection but that would mean $300 more. money was tight as it is. i asked him if he had seen any signs at all. he did assure me that from his visual inspection, he did not see anything that should cause concern but he could not guarantee.
i was taking a huge risk here perhaps by regular standards. but we are in the high desert here and i pray that it'll be alright.

well, nobody knows what it is really. it's like kramer and his foggy understanding of tax 'write-off's. if you ask a home owner on what an escrow account is (like jerry called kramer on the write-off issue) - i bet 8 out of 10 people won't know what to say.
my friend recently sold his house - the day before i made an offer on the one i am trying to buy, incidentally - and he had to pay arrears on his taxes for the 7 months of 2005 at the time of closing. it appears that your escrow account tax payment is behind by one year. now - my question is - how does that happen? you have been paying on time - if anything you are made to pay taxes two months in advance at the time you close on a house. so how did you get to be behind on your taxes?? this is where the escrow account comes in. apparently they hold the money in this account before it can make its way out to the various agencies that need to be paid, such as your mortgage, insurance and taxes. why do we exactly need this intermediary? why can't we make the payments like we do in all other instances? it's not just a question of saving agency costs but also eliminating the co-ordination and management problems that the mortgage accounts are rife with.

i teach my students in class how the fastest growing sector in the U.S. economy is services. and yet every time i pick up the phone book to avail myself of these 'services' i come away feeling frustrated and depressed - by the sheer lack of this very thing - service!
i will need to remodel the master bath in my (potential) new home. this desicion has already led to long conversations on the phone with people in the 'know', i.e., the bathroom remodeling business. so far, i haven't found anyone who will do the job and do it right, with full accountability. handymen will not be responsible for material, nor will they give you prior estimates or a list of materials they will need (you are supposed to know this naturally). contractors will not guarantee their estimates and deadlines. plumbing equipment stores such as lowes and home depot won't deliver the heavy and awkward fixtures, or lumber yards won't deliver the 2 by 4s. plumbers won't help pre-measure the space for exact fitting of fixtures. how does one co-ordinate this many-headed medusa of a remodel ordeal? no wonder you hear all the horror stories everytime someone you know has dared to remodel. for all that talk about service, you are completely on your own in this. you are the driver, the plumbing/construction/electrical wizard, the heavy lifter, the design person yourself. am i missing sth here? where is the SERVICE?

...

correction: lowe's does deliver - for a charge. Home Depot rents trucks that you can use to transport your purchases. Lowe's does not rent tile cutters. Home Depot does.

the other day I heard myself say these words to my friends: with the money i get teaching next summer i am going to try and pay off my second mortgage as much as i can and then refinance the remainder into my first, depending on how the house appreciates.
as my friends smiled at me with a mixture of love and some degree of sadness in their eyes, i couldn't believe my own ears. when did i grow up so much?

during the month of july 2005....

the local area FSBO listings i found (on their website) were all sold by the time i'd call which would at times be the same day. and almost all of them sold for higher than asking price. during that terrible week, two of my friends bid on a HUD home appraised at $128,000. They bid for $132,000 just to be on the safe side cuz they loved the house. it sold for $145,000. a house that surely had potential but would need abt $10,000 to get it up to a liveable state...
the valley was on fire. and it was all thanks to california. they were coming in droves from santa monica and other northern CA cities. buying investment property. see, vegas was exhausted. phoenix almost - what with the uncertainty of lotteries that made real estate just as dicey as gambling. but here was placid old potato country... here they'd make a killing.
every residential road sprouted 'for rent' signs, like tulips in the springtime. near the uni, a dingy, dilapidated duplex that a couple of my friends are renting sold for $199,000. this same house was purchased for $149,000 in October 2004. and objectively speaking, this house is worth neither $149G nor $199G, rather, it needs to be demolished and rebuilt. but objectivity is not driving this market, it's speculation - it's the addictive euphoria that makes people put quarters into slot machines, but only for higher stakes.
meanwhile...every call i made was answered with the same words... sorry, it's sold. one person sold her house the day they were putting up the 'for sale' sign on their front yard. she said: 4 cars stopped while we were in the yard, the 2nd one made an offer. she was kind enough to add: it's sad really.
these homes were mediocre at best. and they were selling for higher than what i could afford. two years ago, my budget could have gotten me a more-than-decent house. now i was looking at places that were in the middle of corn fields and cattle farms, and still beyond my means if i thought abt it long enough. i was getting more convinced that i could not remain near the city center like i had hoped. here homes were already over the $130/sft range. if i found anything at all (which i began to question with increasing frustration), i'd have to settle for a 20-25 minute commute in a city where people did not know how to drive.
Towards the end of July, i went into a state of depresion. when friends wanted to talk about "the situation", i felt irritated. you can't help me, why can't you leave me alone? i did not want to talk to anyone, i did not want to "discuss" my options, or hold out hope for a goal that seemed to recede farther and farther as i tried to realize it. and what bothered me most was how hard it would be to back away after having come this far. two months earlier, i had no concrete plan to buy and it did not matter to me whether i rented or owned. but now it seemed like a massive failure to have to walk away. and yet i could not rule out that possibility. one thing was sure though - whatever happened, i would deal with it on my own. i wouldn't whine or complain or seek meaningless, empty words of solace and comfort. but humans are a social animal, so one can't always act as one feels. the phone rang incessantly, the questions were numerous and prying, the unsolicited advice was at times trite and patronizing. i knew that their hearts were in the right place, but they just didn't realize that none of their various minstrations helped.
all i remember is feeling powerless and small.

sidebar: happy birthday to me.

so the next step was to find an agent. i decided looking at MLS listings online was not getting me anywhere. for-sale-by-owners (FSBO) were hard to come by and took a lot of time, not to mention - gas. and when crude is $60/barrel - you don't want to be driving aimlessly, looking for little red-white signs in unfamiliar neighborhoods.
and this is where (and when) my true learning began. of how different the culture is here in the northwestern part of the country. how openly intolerant and prejudiced the masses are once you step outside of the familiar, cerebral, 'blue' neighborhoods in a fiercely (proudly) red state.
i felt that i had to be close to the city center in order to be safe in a house by myself. i could not move too far out into suburbia - among the christian-god-fearing white masses with the portraits of a blue eyed, white skinned Jesus hung on every wall.
my last name is a matter of pride for me. but it leaves nothing to the imagination as to my religion. before moving here, in my 6 years of living Stateside, i have had only one person ask me abt my religion while i was in - apparently "hole in the ground" - motown, wv (my Remax agent's ice-breaker during our first meeting). but now, i was completely unprepared to dodge my way in and out of conversations about my religion and my beliefs. about my being a 'practicing' muslim. about the frequency of my mosque attendance. about the war in iraq, about the justice and fairness of 'shock-and-awe'. in all this, very little data was exchanged on what kind of house would best suit me.
perhaps nobody in NYC (or Chicago or Miami or LA) would believe what comments were directed at me unless i taped these conversations and replayed them. even as i sat through their seemingly casual remarks and observations, i could not believe my ears. are they just ignorant? uneducated? prejudiced? bigotted? rude? have they never been taught how to conduct a civil exchange with a relative stranger?
after all that, you wonder, what madness makes me want to stay here?...because, soon enough, the immigrant population here will outweigh the locals. then this will be a lovely place to live. with its natural blessings of good weather and great outdoors.
i hope.

for the last one year, i have been driving around this north western city in the valley with a couple of my friends, aimlessly, looking at houses. going to open houses when none of us really were seriously thinking about buying or selling property. we went to the 'parade of homes' in April. as i looked at the houses, i made mental notes on the paints and decors. on the fixtures and appliances. on landscapes and patios, on the newer trends in design. almost subconsciously, i formed my own opinions on what worked and what didn't. what i could and could not live without.
couple that with the hours i spent glued in front of the telly watching hgtv religiously - learning how to paint, tile and organize/reorganize imaginary spaces. the trip to phoenix in late june added fuel to the fire as we saw the Bdesis in AZ going almost berserk over real estate (33 Bdesis there have gotten real estate licenses in the last few years). the air in phoenix was thick with a barely repressed excitement perhaps not too different from what the prospectors felt a 100 years ago as they made their way out of CA towards Warren or Baker city. History was repeating itself (everything is cyclical?) only this time it wasn't nuggets of gold that men salivated over but imagined multiplying of greenbacks inside their head as new appriasals of neighboring property came out. the calculator had become a best friend and confidante.
in early july, i started to look at MLS listings with care. even picked up a copy of the for-sale-by-owner catalogue that came out on the 1st. in there was a 1600 sft home in columbia village. i went out to see it for a lark. 3 bd, 2 bath and office, rv parking, shop, 2 car garage, cul de sac corner plot, european tile, slate and hardwood floors, wood mantel, corner fireplace, split bedroom plan, bay windows, french windows out to patio from 3 separtae rooms, a fire pit and all-brick BBQ pit in backyard. little used home of single male who was a builder by trade. I had found my home. with a price tag of $176,000 - however - i had to let it go. i was duly crushed.
this minor failure made me do something solid towards my somewhat blurry goal of buying a house. it affirmed the need. i got prequalified for a loan. this way i knew what price range to look at and what to avoid.
i comparison shopped to find a good rate and went with the broker who quoted the lowest - a 5.5% on the 1st 80, a 6.25% - int. only - on the 2nd 15. i was told that an 80-15-5 loan would get rid of the dreaded PMI. it was a big moment when i realised that i did have enough savings for a 5% down on what i qualified for. these are the kind of pleasant surprises that make your day.
on a side note, mortgage rates were around 5.25% for the nation at this time. some of the discrepancy in this rate and the one the lender quotes can be due to individual credit history. plus, state rates are different from the national average.
two other companies quoted 5.7% and 5.8 % on the 1st and 8.75% and 9% on the 2nd respectively. woo hoo - i thought to myself. little did i know i had rejoiced too soon...
the trick with prequalification is that you can't lock a rate until you have an address for a property. so it's anybody's game till you do find one you like. by that time, those who lured you with low rates can quote the same rate as others and you got nowhere to go and whine. things change, rates rise...and all you can do is: suck it up.
the bottom line is - this is a business like any other (and if anything, worse than any other) and nobody's got your back.

i have never known the feeling of homeownership. we have lived in rental units all my life. my father was never able to plan well enough to afford to buy a house. he made grandiose plans of multimillion dollar projects instead. a little thing like a house to call one's own did not register in his visions of future success.
...
i remember when we were in the eighth grade my best friend at the time had just moved into their first home in a posh neighborhood. she had come to class the next day and said: being in your own house is a feeling i could not express in words. i have never forgotten her comment. there were other kids in class who lived in family-owned houses but she was the one among us who had made that move at an age when it did impact you differently b/c you were conscious of it.
Allah is kind...so i was convinced that, one day i would know that feeling even if my father never did.

on august 5, 2005, a bunch of friends and i were driving in the locality of the city where i longed to find a house to buy. the prospects had been looking quite bleak because of the current housing bubble coupled with the high demand for housing in this neighborhood due to its proximity to downtown and all its amenities, including the school. it was around 7:30 pm on Friday evening that we zoomed past an fsbo sign. my friend saw it first and decided that we should drive back and take a second look. my friend at the wheel did as instructed. it was a little blue house in a small subdivion of about 10-12 houses around a narrow, private one-way road. the house was freshly painted and from the outside looked to be in good shape. after the nightmare houses that we'd been looking at this seemed to be in mint condition to my eyes. which it wasn't really. i called the number on the sign and left a message. probably sounding more desparate than i should have. then i trembled with anticipation all the way back home. i made continuous circles around the phone willing it to ring. after about 2 hours of this, i called again. this time someone picked up and we talked about some details. 1130 sft, 3 bed, 2 bath, 2/3 lot size, full sprinklers, new furnace, new paint inside and out, new carpeting. potential! i made an appointment for the next morning. and hoped and prayed it would work out.
the next day lis came with me for support. we met the owner and got a tour. relatively newer house with a disaster master bathroom. but sizewise perfect for my needs. so, the +s:
+ location was superb - i could walk to work if i wanted
+ size
+ condition
+ small yard

the -s:
- some road noise due to proximity to a through road
- small yard (for resale)
- master bathroom

but given the state of the market and the constraints on choice and availability, i decided to make a full price offer on the spot with the condition that the seller closes. they called back later the same day and my heart started to race (it still hasn't stopped) with an acceptance.
i am at times elated (how could wait till the day we close? how does it feel to own a house? what color would i paint the kitchen? how will i decroate the study? may be i could install hardwood floors?), and at times completly petrified by the magnitude of this decision (am i insane? how could i handle all that this entails on my own? am i being short-changed? will it resell? will it appreciate reasonably? will i be ok when the bubble bursts?)
snuffy was dead against my taking on this "unnecessary" responsbility. i thought for the most part that i was ready. he said: wait. i couldn't see a reason why.

i don't know when exactly i made this decision to buy a house. sometime in the month of may - 2005 when the apartment management raised my rent by abt a 100 dollars. but there had to be more to it than just the money. i think i felt a need to grow into a different phase of life and in the absence of that happening with the company of others, i decided i had waited long enough. what if i were to die some sudden sunshiny day? this would only be one more addition to the long list of things/feelings i do not know. and unlike most of the other items on that list - i could at least try and make this one happen on my own.
so i decided - to try.

this is my third blog at blogspot. the first two are compromised in ways that I cannot post anything related to homebuying on them (for reasons better left unexplained). suffice it to say that i had to start a new one to get away from the demons of my past - a fresh blog untarnished by (certain) prying eyes. not to mention, to signify a new chapter in my life.

btw, i love this template - so much so that i might not even customize. well done, blogger!

...

as far back as i can remember, i have always had a need to dissociate - from things, from people and from places. if i sit back and reflect on it, i guess it's my defense mechanism working over time. i'd rather dissociate and hurt first than be hurt. it might be nature's way for people who have had to deal with rejection since the day life began.
i don't like getting used to things. i imagine scenarios in which conveniences may not be available, and therefore, try to train myself not to become too reliant on anything. i don't even drink cold or iced water for fear that some day i might not get it so readily. i don't like pillows. i don't turn the ac or the heating on for as long as i can hold out. these are pet peeves - as much a part of my character as, say, my obsession with punctuality or sanctity of my given word... or even my weakness for all things dairy.
when i moved here from motown, after a 5 year period of grad student living in a one-room sparsely-furnished studio, i packed up my belongings in 29 boxes. each one about 18X16X12 in size. they were mostly quite light-weight, except for books. i packed them all myself and shipped them via UPS across a continent. next day, i got on a plane with two regular-size suitcases of clothing, and came away.
i try to remind myself frequently that 29 boxes were all i needed then. and possibly, they're all one needs ever. but one must be ever careful of corporate culture temptations at all times. consumption doesn't always have a satiation point -esp. when it comes to self-indulgent ohysical enjoyment/pleasure. but surviving - and quite well at that - is just about the size of 29 boxes.
so this is how i got the blogspot address for my blog. i am going to lay down some roots now. for the first time in life. have an address that indicates some sort of permanancy. but i must not lose my perspective on 'ownership'and on the transiency of all material things.

i want to start my new blog with a poem... the last two lines of which, i think, are divine...

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young,whatever life you wear


it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love


whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time


that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.


I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance