Big news coming soon. Watch this space. Huh? No, not that big.

¶ 553 Posted at 01.23 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I'm buying a house (well, the bank is). Jessica is moving in with me. Also, I got new glasses. So who's free on June 7th to help us more?

¶ 554 Posted at 10.29 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

Apropos: Record 75 Million Americans Now Pretending They Own Their Own Homes.

¶ 555 Posted at 12.31 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I need to acquire a rather colossal amount of money over the next couple of years. The house I can handle without a problem, but when I look at investment strategies, home improvements, and just general life stuff, it's a metric assload of money. My free-spending days of profligacy are behind me, that's for sure. And that's all assuming I manage to hold down my job :-).

¶ 556 Posted at 11.12 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

The house is mine (my bank's). Papers signed and sealed. The title company had their collective head up their ass, so it took over four hours. But it's done now. Everything's squared away. Now I get to watch my pitiful bank balance.

¶ 563 Posted at 04.44 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I'm going to be mostly unreachable for a couple days while we move. FYI. No net access till work on Monday.

¶ 565 Posted at 08.11 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | house )

I made the mistake of leaving my car windows open last night. I'd been planning on moving stuff out of my apartment, but then I remembered I'm lazy. Now, my house has the advantage of having lots of trees. Nice shade. It's very cooling. But. With trees come birds. And with birds come bird poop. Did I mention I left my car windows open? Let's just leave it at that then.

In other news, I am sticking it to the local cable monopoly. They wanted me to order digital cable (+$7 over standard) in order to get HBO. Of course, I also have to pay $7/mo. for that digital cable convertor box. So all of a sudden, HBO would cost me $25/mo. Gee, no thanks. Turns out that DirecTV has the same lineup as Time Warner for a few bucks less than their standard. HBO costs the same. On top of it, Tivo service through DirecTV costs $5/mo., versus the $13/mo. it would cost on its own. Plus, I can still get Road Runner without getting Time Warner cable television (precious, precious Internet). All in all, it will cost about $30 less per month than it would have through Time Warner. Not to mention that I'll likely get my first two months of DirecTV for free, and the first 6 months of Road Runner for $15 off. Those first two months will pay off the cost of a new DirecTV Tivo in savings, and then some. Saving money makes me feel good. More money for precious, precious house.

¶ 566 Posted at 10.24 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

This is the result of what I got to do (part of) this weekend. I played with this doo-hickey and spent two hours pruning branches near the roof. It was good fun, if you're into that sort of thing. Surprisingly, I am. Who knew?

¶ 583 Posted at 01.18 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

What did you do this weekend? This is what I did (picture below is mine):

Is pretty. It will go nicely with the intended look for the master bedroom, which is cool blue walls, a golden pecan floor, and brushed metal accents on fixtures.

¶ 590 Posted at 11.34 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

Just as I was falling asleep, I heard three loud bangs. I don't know what they were. Shortly thereafter I heard some vague noises from somewhere in the house, and my threat level went to yellow. I thought it was the ice maker in the refrigerator, but I couldn't be sure. So I spent about 2 minutes just listening. Finally I got up and started creeping around the house. I looked outside. Nothing. The dogs were still corraled in the other side of the house. Everything was A-OK.

This wasn't the first time this has happened. Nor will it be the last. At times like this, I slip into paranoia. I start thinking of wiring my house with infrared cameras. I look forward to cheap synthetic diamonds so that I can have unbreakable windows. And maybe, just maybe, the Second Amendment and I have a future together. Of course, then I fall asleep and wake up in somewhat less of a panic. Tonight it's a little different because I have a cough that just won't quit. So the little hamster wheel in my head keeps turning.

Living in a house is a lot different than living in an apartment. Every time I get to thinking about home security (usually at about this time on a night like this), I marvel at how vulnerable we are. Basically the only thing that keeps people from invading our homes is that they don't want to. Windows are easily broken. Too few homes have useful security systems. We keep regular schedules, with many neighborhoods being basically empty for large parts of the day. What is remarkable is not how easy it is to break into homes, but rather, how rarely it happens. When your house is broken into, the most jarring thing isn't the loss or the invasion itself, but rather the sudden realization of how easy it is. That takes a long time to go away. I'm not sure it ever does. Jessica's house was robbed a year and a half ago, but I still think about it, especially at times like this. We are generally safe in our homes because others want us to be. There's a lesson there that we would do well to remember. Make laws that most people want to obey.

¶ 603 Posted at 01.15 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I swear, if you prohibited interior designers (well, the ones on TV at least) from using the words "simply," "easily," "beautiful," and "elegant," they wouldn't be able to form a sentence. Maybe get a buzzer and have a game of "Interior Design Taboo."

¶ 609 Posted at 12.22 PM ⇒ No Comments ( tv | house )

My house was constructed in the 1970s. As was apparently the style at the time (going by the many similar houses I saw when I was in the market), there is no door between the master bathroom and the master bedroom.

There is a skylight over the shower in the master bathroom. It is made out of some kind of plastic, presumably to be both light and durable.

My house has several large trees around it, including some with branches that overhang the roof.

Winter in Austin is generally cold and wet. It's as though we have been transplanted to Seattle, except it only lasts a month or two. The rain doesn't so much fall as condense onto solid objects. And instead of just raining for an hour or two, the rain (mist) lasts for days at a time.

These may seem like a series of disconnected facts. Let me be very clear: they are not. In fact, they all come together in a way that will soon drive me batshit crazy. The rain comes slowly and continuously. It runs down the branches of the trees and drips onto my roof. The mist is fine, but the trees collate and stack them into big, fat drops. Some of these drops land on the skylight. The window is plastic and reverberates with each impact. The sound is not unlike the sound of popcorn popping. The noise carries through the bathroom and into the bedroom, where I am fruitlessly trying to sleep. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. I try earplugs. I no longer take note of the clear danger posed by sleeping with earplugs on. That doesn't matter anyway, as they make it impossible for me to lie on my side, and thus sleep. Tap. Tap. Tap. At 4am, I decided we would sleep in the guest room. The bed is too small. It is a double, as opposed to the queen that we are used to. It is up against the wall to maximize free space in the small room. It is uncomfortable and unfamiliar, just like camping. I do not like it, Sam I am.

¶ 657 Posted at 12.25 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

We were greeted with this sight this morning:

Needless to say, we were a little startled. Here are some more pictures. I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the City of Austin's response time. I called them up at 8:15am, they were here at 9, and done by 10. I was afraid I'd have to handle it and pay for it, but since it was blocking the street, the City took responsibility. I'm concerned about the tree, though; one of my neighbors claims that they are fast-growing, short-lived trees with a lifespan of around 30-40 years. My house is just about 30 years old. I looked at the break, and it appears there is an infection or at least some kind of rot at work. It's a bummer; the trees are really nice on my street.

Update: the house is fine. The branch fell away from the house.

¶ 763 Posted at 09.59 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I think I moved to the 'burbs a little too early. But hope may be on the way for the next house, with Traditional Neighborhood Development. People are starting to think that Levittown is not the model to follow. Sprawl makes you fat. It'd be nice not to have to go everywhere by car. Here's hoping that happens in Austin.

¶ 888 Posted at 05.45 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I am puzzled by the fascination in American politics with home ownership and home ownership as an investment. I admit, for a time I was under its spell, but after running a few numbers, I've decided that there is little benefit to home ownership over renting. People often point to tax benefits to owning a house. Then there are the subsidized mortgage loans offered by the Fair Housing Authority and others. Since those are applied relatively uniformly, all they do is inflate the price. After all, if everyone gets more money, they'll simply pay more. Even worse, the tax benefits are skewed toward the lower end of the market, meaning it is the cheapest houses that are inflated the most. When you think about it, it makes sense that the market would price renting and owning at rough parity; the two being out of step with each other would result in a net movement of people to compensate, correcting the imbalance.

Since most people (including me) buy their homes with loans, they don't actually own the homes outright; they have exchanged a landlord for a banker. I believe that the direct costs of home ownership are played down; I'm about to drop 5 large on new AC/furnace and attic insulation. Then there's $300 to repair my garage door, a few hundred for the bug man, and, of course, property taxes. When you add it all up, it's a substantial amount to pay on an ongoing basis, not to mention that it is your problem instead of someone else's.

People often talk about building up equity in a house, but that should be looked at like any other investment. If you subtract the cost of renting a roughly equivalent dwelling from the cost of "owning" it and invest that difference in a mutual fund, you'll come out about even, give or take. Now, if you live in a place where housing prices are increasing faster than the stock market, you'll come out ahead, but it could just as easily go the other way.

Don't take this to mean I think it's a bad idea to buy a house. I'm just saying that if you're going to buy, you should do it because you want to. There are tangible benefits. It's hard to rent a nice house, so if you want a house rather than a condo or apartment, you will have to buy. Sometimes you can get a really good mortgage rate, but low rates generally coincide with low rents; however, if inflation is high, it can be an advantage to have a locked-in payment. Sometimes, the only option in an area you favor is buying due to the nature of the area. And sometimes you just want hot pink walls. But don't let anyone tell you that home ownership is always a good investment, because it isn't. You can get lucky, but you can't count on it; the factors are usually things out of your hands. There are benefits to buying, but there are benefits to renting. Focus on the non-financial aspects, because the money doesn't matter.

¶ 889 Posted at 12.36 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house | politics )

On the other hand, there are a few financial benefits to owning a house that I didn't consider before. In some states, such as Texas, one's home is exempt from seizure by creditors (unless the creditor is your mortgage company). So if you have to declare bankruptcy, you'll be able to keep your house where you might lose a 401(k) or savings bonds. Another benefit is diversification; if you've invested most of your long-term savings into mutual funds, equity in a house can help spread out your risk. The housing market correlates loosely with the stock market, but there are local and regional influences as well. Also, the value of your home does not generally figure into financial aid calculations for college. I believe that owning (or "owning") a home can also help your credit score more than renting and investing the difference, but that's a guess. Finally, there's the home equity/refinance option, which allows you to take advantage of low interest rates for borrowing large amounts of money. The tax benefits are a wash, but these other benefits make a home a somewhat better investment than it may appear at first glance and a good counterweight to other kinds of investment.

¶ 894 Posted at 03.05 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I've been eagerly following the development of the old Austin airport for a little while now. As I mentioned before, the plan is to redevelop it in the style of a "traditional neighborhood development." In short, that means mixing commercial, retail, and residential areas rather than having large, uniform, and separate areas for each. There are apartments, townhomes, and traditional single-family homes. The last, also known as "yard homes," have small yards with automobile access through an alley to the back, with the house closer to the street. The "corner store" returns, as do nearby parks. The current plan (outlined in an article in the Austin newspaper not available online) may have the first houses being built in about 5 years, roughly when we'll be looking for the next house. The main concerns we have are that the houses may be too small (page down) and that the schools might not be up to snuff. It's pretty exciting, though, since most of Austin is either expensive, suburbia, or both. Austin has a traditional neighborhood development initiative, but there are only a couple projects under way, and the other two are far away. My parents live in Austin, my sister in Houston, Jessica's grandmother in Kerrville, and Jessica's mother is going to retire just north of Austin in a couple of years. All that free babysitting is hard to ignore, so we're going to be here for a while.

¶ 933 Posted at 11.16 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house | austin )

Last night, our sewer line clogged up. We didn't know this at the time, just that both toilets and the shower didn't want to drain. Lots of Liquid Plumr and plunging of the toilets did nothing. I called the City of Austin to ask how I could figure out whether it was the house or the city's wastewater system that was backed up. Instead of telling me what to do, they sent someone out. After some looking around, he figured out it was a clog in the line between the house and the city connection, most likely due to the root system of one of our trees. They sent a crew out to clean it (free!). The crew also explained to me how I could fix it myself, as a plumber would charge up to $2500. I'm going to have to dig up the sewage pipe, cut away the roots, and possibly replace damaged sections of pipe. That's not going to be fun, but a few hours of that is much better than $2500. Plus, they told me that the city would clear such clogs for free 24 hours a day until I got it fixed. To summarize, then:

• The City of Austin is really helpful.
• Plumbers will charge lots of money.
• Know where your crap goes so you know what to do when things go wrong.

On that last one, make sure you know where your sewer cleanout is. That's the access point into the line going out from your house. That's where you check to see if everything's backed up. That's where you put the "flat tape" to poke the clog loose. That's what you want to make sure wasn't cemented into place by the previous owners of your house when they installed a patio (ahem). If you have a screw-type cap, replace it with a "popup cap." The popup cap will, um, pop up when the line is clogged, spilling your sewage outside. That's a good thing, because the alternative is overflowing inside.

¶ 959 Posted at 12.57 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

Holy crap. We are getting lightning and thunder and rain like it's the apocalypse. The dogs are freaking out and so am I every time I hear a house-shaking boom a half second after the flash. The radar map shows a smear of angry yellow and red from Waco to south of San Antonio, and it's all moving in a roughly northerly direction, meaning we're maybe half done.

¶ 965 Posted at 02.00 AM ⇒ No Comments ( whoa | austin | house )

It may come as a surprise to people who don't live in Austin or only have been here in the summer, but we get some serious rain. It comes in waves of varying intensity. And, of course, nobody knows how to drive in it. We get some pretty impressive lightning and thunder along with it. I remember one night a couple of years back when we had a thunder-and-freezing-rain storm. Unfortunately, the area where I live is flat and has a lot of tall trees, making it tough to see all the lightning. That's why I want a tower, just like HGTV's 2004 Dream House. I'm not into their interior decorating, but the Victorian-inspired architecture, interior layout, and, of course, the tower are all awesome. That's become my new house goal. Here's hoping for the big bucks.

¶ 970 Posted at 10.09 AM ⇒ No Comments ( austin | house )

I just dropped a bunch of money on home energy improvements, but that's not enough for me. I see all kinds of waste in the way my house (and other American homes) is designed. I want to reclaim the waste heat from my refrigerator in the winter (happens already) but shove it outside in the summer. I want to cool the refrigerator with outside air in the winter. I want the water coming into the water eater in the summer to go by the air conditioner first. I want to reclaim heat from wastewater in winter and divert heat to wastewater in the summer. We have half a dozen systems in the house acting at cross purposes. We expend energy to heat or cool and then throw away the results of that work. I'm sure fixing all of this would cost more than it's worth, financially speaking, but for me it's almost a matter of principle.

¶ 997 Posted at 11.24 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

Last night, we had a severe thunder-lightning-torrential rain-hail storm. It was short, but while it lasted... The noise was unbelievable. I was pretty worried about the skylights and windows of the house. I am so glad I have a garage. I tried to take some pictures, but only one of them came out well. This is the front yard immediately in front of the patio:

Those pieces of hail were about 1/2" to 1" in diameter. It looks a little better in the 2160x1440 version of the picture, but that's 1.14MB.

¶ 1042 Posted at 09.29 AM ⇒ No Comments ( austin | house )

Monday was a rather unfortunate day for our refrigerator to stop working.

¶ 1053 Posted at 09.28 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

We got a new refrigerator this morning. My sob story at Lowe's got us free delivery and a guarantee of being the first stop this morning. It wasn't cheap, but it only cost (with tax) $40 more than it would have cost to replace the compressor on the old one. It's nice. We got a bottom freezer unit, which puts the things you want most frequently in a more accessible location. I'm impressed with the refrigerator designs out there, although the cost turns me away. For another $200, we could have gotten a bottom-freezer unit where the whole freezer compartment was a slide-out bin. For about $500, we could have gotten french doors on the refrigerator section instead of one big door that swings open really wide. They're pretty cool, but I need to be saving for college.

¶ 1060 Posted at 11.17 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

Replacing the roof is going to hurt. A wide swath of Austin got hit by that Good Friday hailstorm and had severe roof damage. The insurance will pay for part of it, but the amount they pay is basically what it would cost for the intern at Bob's Discount Roof and Bakery to do it, minus the deductible. On top of the birth and delivery fees, the new refrigerator, and all the A/C and heating improvements last October, it's been an expensive year, and the stock market hasn't been kind to us lately. Oh well. We have Uma.

¶ 1080 Posted at 10.33 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

A first house should be considered temporary habitation that helps you refine what you really want in a house. By that criterion, our current house is a success. Lately, I've been looking into concrete floors. They're low-maintenance, clean, cool in the summer, and warm(ish) in the winter. They can be surprisingly attractive as well.

Another feature I have been reading about is the green roof (roofs in general, really). A green roof is what you get when you have a lawn on top of your house. Grass would be a poor choice, but you get the idea. A green roof will get you a distinctive look, a longer-lasting roof, weather resistance (since the plants grow back), better insulation, and reduced water run-off. Putting a green roof on a residence is not something that has attained critical mass yet, but it's gaining steam for commercial buildings. It's an interesting idea for reducing the ecological footprint of a building; rather than destroying the flora that previously were there, you merely elevate them. There's lots of information out there.

On the same subject, a soon-to-be-former co-worker pointed me at the Design > Build > Texas program at UT's School of Architecture. I like that they aim for "affordable."

¶ 1098 Posted at 02.45 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

Fanimation has some really cool fans. The Enigma, Palisade, Palmetto, Torrento, Centaurus, Punkah, and Brewmaster are my favorites.

¶ 1102 Posted at 01.14 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house | cool )

Looking for a cheap way to learn how to do home improvement? Try Habitat for Humanity. You can make mistakes and have them corrected without your roof collapsing, and you're doing good at the same time.

¶ 1103 Posted at 01.59 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

You shouldn't buy a house because it's an investment. I've said it before; I'll say it again, this time with numbers (and a spreadsheet).

Let's say you make $60,000 a year and you're buying a house for $150,000. You put the (previously standard, now seemingly quaint) 20% down. You're a prudent person, so you get the 15-year mortgage, fixed at a superb 4.5% annual interest rate. Your annual mortgage payment works out to be just about $11,000. You accumulate about $7200/year in principal over the 10 year period (less at the beginning, more at the end, of course). Let's say you're in for a good 10 years.

So what is this going to cost you? You should expect to pay about 1%-3% of the value of your home per year in repairs, maintenance, and non-recoverable improvements. In the state of Texas, expect to pay 2.5% in property taxes, and 0.5% to 1% in insurance. When you sell your house, you'll have to pay about 10% in transaction fees, such as brokerage fees, repairs to bring the house up to new codes, appraisals, title insurance, etc. If you amortize that over the 10 years, it's another 1% per year (simplistically). You do get a tax break from the government, but only if you itemize. You'd get the standard $4750 standard deduction if you didn't, so you only really derive benefit from whatever you pay in interest and property taxes beyond the $4850 (since most people don't itemize if they don't own their homes). In this case, you're paying about $5000 in interest and $3750 in property taxes per year, or about $8750 total. Subtract the standard deduction, and you get a tax deduction of $3900. Multiplied by the marginal tax rate of 25% on $60,000, and that's worth $975 per year. Expressed as a percentage of the home's value, that's 0.65% on the positive side. So, adding together your regular maintenance (1%-3%), property taxes (2.5%), home insurance (0.5%-1%), transaction fees (1%), and (last, but definitely not least) your annual mortgage interest (4.5%), and substracting the value of the tax deduction (0.65%), you need your home to appreciate in value by 8.85% to 11.25% per year, just to break even on all the money you've put in after 10 years.

Of course, that's not quite fair, since you're going to be living in this house. Some of the money you save from not buying a house would have gone to rent instead; you have to live somewhere. A normal, healthy cost ratio between buying and renting is 12-18, which is consistent both conceptually and in practice with the price/earnings ratio of stocks. Let's pick 15 as our number. So your house, which has a market value of $150,000, could be rented for $10,000 per year (initially). Let's say that the property appreciates at a reasonable 4% a year, and so does the rent. Your initial annual costs of ownership work out to be $11,175 (mortgage) + $3750 (property taxes) + $1000 (insurance) + $1500 (amortized transaction fees) - $975 (tax reduction) = $16,275. Let's say you're a prudent renter and you put the $30,000 down payment you didn't spend and your annual savings for renting into an S&P 500 index fund. The historical average annual return on the S&P 500 is 7.5%. After 10 years, your accumulated stock equity will be ~$156,000. Your home equity will be $173,300, from which you must subtract the 10% transaction cost of selling, which leaves you with about $155,700, for a loss of about $300. That's better than I'd expected. It turns out that the incremental benefit of the tax deduction makes a substantial difference over time. There's also a weird period in years 5-9 where you'd be ahead; I don't fully understand that (maybe a bug?).

Now, does this mean you should buy a house? No. Does it mean you shouldn't? Again, no. Obviously not. This is just a financial calculation. There are intangible positives to owning a house, after all. Being the emotionless robot I am, I will allow only two of them. One is a degree of control over your dwelling you would not have as a tenant (in most cases). The other is that sometimes you just can't live in some properties without buying them. However, this should definitely tell you that you shouldn't expect to make or lose money on a house. It should not be viewed as being substantially better or worse than renting. Now, to be sure, buying a house only makes sense if you can derive substantial benefit from the tax deduction. If you're married, you have to use a standard deduction of $9700, which puts you squarely in the "loss" column. Ditto if you put less than 20% down, or if renting is cheap in your area. It's very complicated, so how about I stop blathering on about this and just give you the spreadsheet (Excel format)?

¶ 1118 Posted at 02.24 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

Seriously, download the spreadsheet. I have all the formulas and variables. You can enter your initial market value, mortgage duration, interest rate, down payment, marginal tax rate, standard deduction, the ratio of cost between buy and rent, property tax rate, rate of appreciation, insurance cost, maintenance cost, transaction (sale) cost, and expected return on alternate investments. It'll then tell you what your annual costs of renting and buying are, your expected tax credit, what you save per year, what your total home equity is, what your investment total is, and a couple of other things for every year up to the 35th year. It turns out I did the right thing for a single guy, but getting married ruined it ;-).

¶ 1119 Posted at 01.22 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I fixed a bug in the housing cost spreadsheet where it didn't calculate equity right for mortgage terms other than 15 years. I also put in a variable for annual additional payments against principal. It's approximate, though, so the final year cost figures are a little off, but it shouldn't be a huge deal.

¶ 1127 Posted at 06.02 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

How Houses Eat Money in the WSJ a few weeks back was what inspired me to do the housing spreadsheet.

¶ 1131 Posted at 06.42 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

The redevelopment of the former Austin airport continues. Last week, our fine local newspaper had an article about the search for homebuilders. The developer has released the design guidelines for homes in the project. Some of the guidelines include:

Houses must have front porches and rear-facing garages. Each block must contain at least four floor plan models, with no more than two houses having the same elevation. At least four lots must separate similar houses.

It sounds a little nit-picky, but given the suburban sprawl non-style of the last 60 years, that is welcome. The first phase will be for sale starting in mid-2007. Both the newspaper article and the design guidelines require registration, sadly, but I can send them to you if you want. I'm not going to post them here because the former is copyrighted and the latter is a 6MB PDF. I'm slowly reading the 166 pages of the latter document, and I'm getting increasingly excited, even though some genius decided to embed diagrams in it as blurry JPEGs.

¶ 1133 Posted at 10.45 AM ⇒ No Comments ( austin | house )

If you anticipate that you may have a baby in your next house, I suggest you look for a few things:

• The master bedroom and the baby's bedroom should be close together. Ours are on opposite sides of the house, which has some advantages, but is overall a minus. If one or both parents are light sleepers, you might not want them too close.
• There should be a full bathroom pretty close to the baby's room. Ideally, it would be immediately adjacent, perhaps separating the master bedroom from the baby bedroom. This is handy for baths and cleaning up after diapers.
• There should be a second full bathroom elsewhere in the house in case your baby is a light sleeper.
• The baby's room should be away from the living room, kitchen, and other noisy parts of the house.
• The master bedroom should be large enough that you can fit a bassinet comfortably. It's likely that you will want the baby in there at least to start.
• Following the above, make sure your master bathroom has a door between it and the master bedroom. Ours does not, which made things kind of stressful for the first few months when Uma was in with us.
• Make sure that the baby's room is big enough for a crib, a dresser, a rocking chair, a changing table, and a twin bed.
• If you have rambunctious pets, you'll want to be able to close off part of the house so they can't disturb the baby. Dogs scratching themselves at night can be surprisingly loud, especially with metal tags (which I suggest taping together anyway).
• See how comfortable the baby's room is with the door closed and the AC and heat on. Uma's room is small, and we have forced air heat, which makes it alternately hot and stuffy or cold and dry with the door closed, especially since there's no thermostat. As a result, we leave her door open at night. That works well, but it means she's not isolated from noise, and we have to keep the dogs out of that part of the house. Radiators and radiant floor heating are apparently much better for this.
• If you're doing cloth diapers and washing them yourself, you'll want the washing machine to be close to the baby's room so you don't have to lug so much stuff back and forth. Even if you're not washing your own cloth diapers, you're still going to be doing a lot of laundry. It may be worth it to pay extra for energy efficient appliances, including a front-loading washer, assuming you have to buy new ones. It's not worth it if you already have inefficient ones. And, of course, having a laundry room inside the house is better than having to go out to the garage. That's true without a baby, but you're going to be doing a lot of laundry.
• Wood flooring is your friend. Tile is hard and not appropriate for many rooms, while carpet gets dirty easily and is a pain to clean. Your baby will be spending a lot of time on the floor. Laminate flooring should be fine, also.

It may sound like we're a little excessive with keeping things quiet. We're slowly getting more cavalier with making noise, as she is getting better about sleeping through noise and falling back asleep if she wakes up. However, if you have problems with your child's sleep, you will be desperate to avoid anything that might disturb her.

¶ 1187 Posted at 02.15 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house | tips | babies )

We got tubular skylights installed in our living room last week. They bring in a lot of light, but it has a distinctly blue tint. We knew we would want to paint the living after we got the skylights in, but the blueness of the light certainly emphasized its importance. Saturday evening, I stopped by the local Home Depot to look at some paint samples. I went in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals, as the temperatures that day were in the 80s (just so you know why I live in Texas). I grabbed swatches of orangey yellows and headed back out. As I neared my car, I saw a sight that filled me with joy at the power of human ingenuity: Home Depot had covered the dividers in the parking lot with plastic strips advertising their credit card. I don't know what brilliant person thought of that one, but they have my admiration.

¶ 1188 Posted at 05.15 PM ⇒ No Comments ( genius | austin | house )

We attended Mueller Family Day on Saturday. It was a pretty low-rent affair, basically a tent in a field with a bunch of people talking about the Mueller Airport residential redevelopment project. We missed most of the structured talking, due to Uma's nap, but I got two key questions answered.

The first important discovery is that they changed the order in which they plan to build out, due to drainage issues. The area I wanted most, due to proximity to the main features of the development (school, retail, parks), will now be the first area with houses rather than the second. That means next summer, instead of sometime in 2008 or 2009. That was sooner than we expected, and probably sooner than is financially responsible or even possible. Bummer.

On the other hand, I picked that area based only on looking at the map, so it doesn't necessarily mean anything. Besides, if done right, pretty much any part of that development is going to be better than 95% of the rest of Austin.

The other key datum was that the range of house prices is expected to hit $550,000. Ouch. No way we can get anywhere near that for at least a decade. The representative didn't elaborate on the features of such a house. It would certainly be the biggest house with the fanciest upgrades, but I don't know how big, what upgrades, or how much each contributes.

Our current house is about 1700 square feet. Adding another living room, another bedroom, another full bath, and doubling the kitchen gets us somewhere in the 2300 sq. ft. range. That's not huge by American standards. On the other hand, it's a design goal of this development to be denser and to draw people out of their houses. There won't be any McMansions. I know that the smallest houses at Mueller will be around 1100 sq. ft. I neglected to ask what the top end of that range will be. Hopefully, it'll be well above the 2300 sq. ft. that I want. I recognize the fundamental conflict here between what I am conditioned to want, and what I know is intrinsic to making this such an exciting place to live.

There's not much I can do at this point besides wait. It's a little tense for me because this is the first indication that it might not be attainable. That's a big bummer, because I can't really think of anywhere else in Austin that I want to live, and leaving this area is highly unlikely. Still, it's also very, very preliminary and based on incomplete information. It changes nothing about what we must do.

We need to make our house nicer. We need to avoid spending money on things we don't want or need enough. And I need to develop my career, both in terms of my day job and also in whatever else I can wrangle. On the first, we've made some strides with the painting and skylights, and we're going to have to do something with the 1260 lbs. of flooring I bought last month. On the second, we're pretty frugal as it is, but we can be better. One thing is for certain: our retirement and Uma's college education come first. If we must sacrifice those to get there, it's not worth it. On the third, that's all me. More on that later.

¶ 1258 Posted at 02.06 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house | austin )

An austin man was recovering at home today after suffering a vicious branching attack earlier in the day. The man claimed to have been "just standing there, minding my own business" when assaulted. He described the assailant as tall, brown-skinned, and leafy. The only other witness to the attack was a 19-month old girl, allegedly the victim's daughter, who testified "Uh oh." Austin Police stated that there had been similar attempts in the area recently, though this was the only attack known to have succeeded. Arboreal gang activity has been on the rise in recent months as police have been distracted by the epidemic of fern rage. The perpetrator remains unidentified and is still at large.

Ahem. Long story short, I was dumb and tried to pull down a loose tree branch by dangling from it. It worked, but the branch clocked me in the head. Stupid gravity, always trying to get at me. I got 7 staples at the ER (getting a lidocaine injection into the skull is NOT pleasant). I think I'm fine otherwise, though.

¶ 1393 Posted at 08.12 AM ⇒ No Comments ( me | house )

And if yours doesn't, you should get one 1. They're not expensive. And they're indispensible for situations like the one that greeted me this morning. We have a little mini spray thing for cleaning out poopy diapers that attaches inline between the toilet supply and the toilet. Sometime in the middle of the night, its hose decided to spring a leak. When we noticed it this morning, the bathroom was flooded as well as the carpet in the hallway and parts of both the office and Uma's room. My shop vac must have sucked up 10 gallons or more of water. This isn't the first time it's saved us, either; I can remember a morning a few months ago when I was under the kitchen sink with an uncapped hot water supply blasting in my face. If you have a house, get a shop vac.

¶ 1461 Posted at 09.32 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

There's lots of talk about "buyers' markets" and "sellers' markets" in residential housing. We've been in the latter for some time, but we're pretty emphatically moving into the former. A lot of people care a lot more about what kind of market they're in than they should, or at least, they care for the wrong reasons.

Consider. Most residential real estate transactions involve people who are moving within a market. Certainly you'll find people moving between markets, like from California to Texas, people entering the market for the first time, or people exiting completely, but by and large, most of the time, people are staying locally. That means that buyers are also sellers. A buyers' market helps you with the new house, but it hurts you selling your old one. A rising tide lifts all boats. Similarly, a sellers' market hurts you with the one one and helps with the old one. It would appear that it doesn't make much difference what sort of market it is.

That's not quite true, though. It's only irrelevant if you're moving between properties of about the same price. If your old house and your new house are both $200,000 and a bubble market is inflating the price of each by 10%, you neither win nor lose. However, if your new house costs substantially more than your old house, it's going to matter. Suppose the house you're selling would be $150,000 in a normal market, and the one you're buying is $250,000. That means you need to cover a $100,000 difference. If you're in a sellers' market, and each house's price is inflated by 10%, you're going to get $165,000 and pay $275,000; the difference you have to cover is now $110,000 1. On the other hand, if you're in a buyers' market with each house's value depressed by 10%, you'll get $135,000 and pay $225,000, for a difference of $90,000. Even if you paid more than $135,000 for the house you're selling, you're still better off in a buyers' market because you're trading up, and you want the difference between old and new to be as small as possible.

Naturally, the reverse is true. If you're moving into a less expensive house, that's when you want a sellers' market. In that case, the difference between the price of the old house and the price of the new house isn't a cost, but a profit. Even if a bubbly housing market means you're over-paying for the new house, whoever's buying your old house is overpaying even more 2 than you are.

Sellers' markets aren't always good for sellers, and buyers' markets aren't always good for buyers, because usually buyers in a market are sellers in that same market. It may seem that it all cancels out, but it doesn't. If you have any flexibility about when you move next, and you plan on a bigger or fancier house in a nicer area with better schools, wait for a slump. Don't get irrationally attached to making a "profit" 3 on your house; if you're making a loss because of market conditions, think about what a good deal you're getting on your new house.

¶ 1575 Posted at 08.33 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house | money )

There are a number of "engineered stone" countertop manufacturers all selling basically the same thing1. A handful of manufacturers dominate the market, and they're the ones you'll see at the big stores. Oddly, each manufacturer tends to have only a couple dozen colors, which means you're unlikely to find something just right from any given one. There's little difference in the product, and the costs can vary a lot, so it's worth knowing about the smaller players. I was unable to find a single, complete list of manufacturers that sell in the United States, so I had to find them one by one. Here's my list for future reference (yours, mine, whoever):

• Avanza
• CaesarStone
• Cambria (NEW: Cheryl Tiegs!)
• Daltile ONE Quartz Surfaces
• Dupont Zodiaq
• Formica Stone
• Hanstone
• LG Viatera2
• MetroStone: I haven't seen a site for these people, and they seem to have a limited selection, but they do appear to be quartz countertops
• Okite (warning: super-annoying all-Flash site)
• Rocksolid Granit (sic): this isn't quite the same as engineered quartz, but it's similar. An advantage with these particular people is that they install right over your existing countertops, eliminating the cost of removal and avoiding the need to go without countertops for a week 3. It is unclear whether this is the same as the other quartz engineered stones, but it's similar. One article calls it engineered granite, but quartz is a key component of granite.
• Silestone
• Staron Quartz4
• Technistone
• Transolid
• VMC Legacy Quartz

¶ 1605 Posted at 05.16 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house | fyi )

Fantastic. Our sewer pipe burst. Maybe big grand trees aren't such a good thing after all. It's probably the same one as last time, and the one that tried to kill me last year. Choose an expletive. Don't feel like you have to use only one. I've said it more than once, I'll say it again: houses are terrible investments. Don't buy one unless you have to.

¶ 1614 Posted at 10.33 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

I have invented a term for a design pattern I have found frequently in my house: load-bearing trim.

¶ 1622 Posted at 10.47 PM ⇒ No Comments ( words | house )

I've removed and installed 2 dishwashers, so if you want to save the installation cost, I can help you out.

¶ 1634 Posted at 08.24 PM ⇒ No Comments ( fyi | house | me )

I've gotten relatively comfortable with plumbing and electrical work around the house. The one thing that aggravates me just as much as it always has is drywall. It's such an aggravation. I can't believe we haven't come up with anything better yet. The mess, the dust, the weight, the lack of strength, the tedious finishing... I hate drywall.

¶ 1652 Posted at 07.01 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | house )

The first few years in my house made me highly reluctant to buy another used house. The plumbing was rotting, we had aluminum wiring, which can cause all sorts of problems, the previous residents half-assed a lot of repairs, etc. Now that we're getting closer to being done, though, I'm thinking it wasn't so bad. For one thing, we're getting things the way we want them. To some extent we've restrained our inclinations because we know we have to sell this house. The next house we won't need to be so conservative because we'll plan on sticking around for a while, so we can use bold colors and more interesting features. An older, already-renovated house will cost more but won't be updated the way we like. New houses will likely have the same drawback, since builders limit what they offer. Doing it ourselves will mean getting exactly what we want, plus it's one of the few expensive hobbies that will keep me out of real trouble. Not to mention I can get some payback off all the learning this house has forced me through, and amortize my investment in tools. Odds are pretty good we'll look for an older, ugly, and above all cheap1 house in a few years. It's weird to have changed my mind like this in such a short time when I thought I felt so strongly about it.

¶ 1664 Posted at 11.20 AM ⇒ No Comments ( house )

My yellow-crowned night herons are building a nest. It's very exciting.

¶ 1700 Posted at 10.06 AM ⇒ No Comments ( science! | house )