Deck

Well, I guess I must have taking-care-of-Calix down to feeling pretty manageable, because recently the project management and design parts of my brain have been getting itchy. After casting about a bit for a project, I decided to tackle a dream of ours to build a deck.

If you’ve ever been to our house, you know that we have a pretty ginormous back yard, and we don’t make very good use of it. Meanwhile, the path it takes to go from the house to the back yard is a bit circuitous and ends up requiring just enough activation energy that we rarely do it, even after buying some cheap lawn furniture. My dream has been to build a deck that has an entrance right off of the kitchen.

We’re really lucky that Colin’s brother Owen is a knows-how-to-do-everything and does-it-well kind of guy, and he happened to be available to take on the construction job. He was alsokind enough to spend time looking at the house and talking with me about the goals and some of the potential caveats for the deck.

I spent a lot of time on the deck design, using one of my favorite software programs – OmniGraffle. The first step was to take a bunch of measurements of the outside of the house. A very useful feature of OmniGraffle for this projet was the ability to set a scale for each canvas. So, I could say that my scale was 1 inch = 5 feet, and then I could enter all of my measurements exactly as they were, and they were scaled appropriately for my 8.5 x 11 inch canvas.

Another helpful OmniGraffle feature was the idea of having master canvasses. I built one master canvas to model the area as viewed from above:

The house is on the top left, in black lines. Brown represents fences and other dividers, like railroad ties. In the upper center are steps coming down to the back yard. Covered steps go into the basement. Another set of steps at the bottom of the picture goes to the next tiered section of the back yard. These steps are flanked with trees and a boulder garden area.

The second master canvas models the view when standing in the back yard, looking at the back of the house.

Here you can see the placement of the critical windows. The windows with the best views are the kitchen window on the top left, and the basement office window on the bottom left. Unfortunately, the basement window will probably be partially obscured by the deck, although we took a number of measures to keep the blockage minimal. The upper kitchen window will be replaced with a glass door.

(It would have been really nice to do this modeling using some true 3D design software. But after some investigations, I determined those packages to have too steep of a learning curve for my purposes. I’m very familiar with OmniGraffle from software project management, so I stuck with that.)

Once I had the master canvases modeling the existing house structure, I could design various decks on top of the masters. Since I ended up trying out about 20 different deck designs in the end, it was very useful to be able to tweak the master canvas and have it apply to each appropriate design.

Owen was great and spent a bunch of time going over my designs with me. In the end, we both came to one that seemed just right, and this is the one that is being built as I type!

Below is the view from above:

The kitchen window is replaced with a door, and you walk out from the kitchen onto a small platform with room for a chair. There is a plexiglass cover, so that you can sit on the platform sipping your coffee and watching the rain fall.

The first set of steps leads up to the main deck area. Turns out we had to elevate the deck to make it high enough to walk under. The main area has a built-in bench and enough space for a picnic table.

A single step from the main area leads up to a side extension could have a grill or just be used to throw water balloons onto people coming late to the party.

Steps go down to the back yard. The placement of the steps was one of Owen’s critical contributions to the design. He realized that you need to have a smooth flow between the steps coming to the back yard from the side of the house, the steps going down to the back yard, and the steps going up to the deck. I think the current placement works great.

The side view is below:

You can get a better idea of the levels here, and you can also just barely see Colin’s addition to the plan – a chin-up bar :).

The fencing is horizontal steel cables (Owen’s suggestion), which is going to be really nice because it is basically see-through from the deck to the back yard. On the neighbor-facing sides, there will be privacy fence.

I’m super excited about the plan, and it seems to be coming together well outside so far (well, just the footings are in the ground, but still)!

 

…and by the way…

Colin’s house sold! The money’s in the bank, and the house no longer belongs to Colin. In fact, it would be illegal for us go over there uninvited! So, yeah, we really managed to sell the house, in a terrible down market. Big relief. And on to the next things :)

 

Flooding sucks

 

Almost over

Next house update, we got the inspection report and then the list of requests from the buyer about what to fix. We agreed to fix a subset of their requests, and they agreed to our counter! Then the appraisal came in on target. So, it is appearing that that is almost that.

Colin’s dad is staying with us this weekend, helping Owen and Nicole on their house, and now he’s also helping us on Colin’s house. So Colin + Dad are now over fixing some wall cladding on the roof, replacing some breakers to match the wire requirements, putting up some electrical boxes, and labeling the breaker box.

So, although I always remind myself of David’s wise policy of not drinking champagne until actual closing, we will likely be done with this whole process by the end of the month.

 

Up-to-the-minute house update

We got preliminary word on the inspection, with one expected result, one confusing result, and one just plain weird result.

• Expected: furnace not working. Colin’s got an electric furnace that seems to have a flaky breaker. When we went over to check the house on Saturday, the furnace was off. We went downstairs and tried flipping the breaker about 30 times, as repeatedly flipping the breaker had seemed to fix things in the past. But this time no go. So we knew they’d find that.
• Confusing: moisture content of the bathroom floor was 31%, and its’ only supposed to be up to 20%. We have no idea how the moisture content of the floor could get high like that, nor what you would be supposed to do to fix it. Hopefully not something like rip out the floor, replace all the plumbing, and replace with a new floor.
• Just plain weird: stain in the basement that it looks like somebody tried to wipe up. It looks like blood. Do they need to call in a forensics expert. Huh?? Uh, no, that’s paint. Ok, folks, cut back on the CSI-watching now.

So, we’ll have word on any demands they have hopefully today. One thing we know is that they won’t be able to get approval for anything over their bid price for repairs, so if they want something done, they’ll want us to foot the bill.

More later…

 

Selling a house in a down market

Now that we’re nearing the (knock on wood) end of the process of selling Colin’s house, I thought I’d write a little bit about the process of selling it.

Step 1 was clearing the house of stuff, dividing all worldly items into the 3 timeless categories of 1) keep (and move to new house), 2) throw away, and 3) Goodwill. I’ve written a bunch about that. So glad it’s over and we’re both happily living in our brown house on Creston.

Step 2 was deciding whether to sell or rent the house. The main point of getting Colin really moved out was that we could be doing so much better financially (i.e. saving tons more money for retirement) if we weren’t paying 2 significant Seattle mortgages. But does it make more sense to keep the real estate investment and rent out the house to pay the mortgage, or to just sell the house?

We don’t really have any desire to add being landlords to the insanely-long list of activities competing for our time. That made us want to sell. But our gut instincts based on everything we’d ever been taught said that real estate was the god of investments, so that it would probably make more economic sense to rent.

But then, our gut instincts about real estate investments had recently been challenged by our financial advisor. We had both been significantly over-paying on our mortgages for a while, under the rationale that the faster we get our mortgage balance down, the less insane an amount of money we have to pay in interest over the years. But our advisor pointed out the following point: Say you’re paying $500 extra on your mortgage a month. You’re doing this to avoid paying 6% interest on the $500. But if you _invest_ that $500, you’re likely to get _more_ than 6% return on it. So it actually makes more sense to pay the 6% interest and put your $500 in the market! This never would have occurred to us.

Because we didn’t _want_ to be landlords, we wanted to see for sure what made the most economic sense.
So, we did a spreadsheet. First of all, we calculated what kind of return Colin was likely to get on his house if he sold it.

We took into account what costs Colin had over the time that he had been in his house, plus costs involved with selling the house:

• principle paid
• interest paid
• mortgage insurance paid
• property taxes paid
• cost of major improvements
• closing costs
• payment of remaining principle

We also took into account any income Colin got from the house or would get from the selling of the house:

• sale price
• rent from renters

When we first calculated this out, we were shocked to see that the return on Colin’s investment was basically at the break even point or 0%! After 8 years of home ownership in one of the hottest areas of the country for housing, no return!

Then we realized that we hadn’t taken into account perhaps one of the most critical pieces of the equation:

• rent that Colin would have had to pay if he had not owned a house

Completely valid, and sure enough this made all of the difference. After taking that item into account the investment came out to be a very reasonable (approximately) 14% per year. Not bad. The whole thing also emphasized not having to pay rent was what tipped it over, this made us realize exactly what we were doing by paying a mortgage on a house that nobody was living in.

The next equation was the option of renting the house out. Some problem with renting the house out are:

• the amount of rent we can collect won’t even equal the amount of the mortgage, when you take into account that we would have to pay tax on the income
• there would be continued maintenance costs
• when we eventually sold the house, we’d have to pay capital gains on the sale, which would of course be huge

Despite all this, if the house continues to increase in value as it has been, we would end up with about a 10% annual rate of return on the investment. This isn’t too bad. But not good enough that we felt like we had to do it when we didn’t even want to.

So, we decided to sell the house, and we should definitely be able to do better than 10% by investing our money (at least if things don’t continue as they have the last few months). Also, our shared finances will be a lot simpler if Colin buys into my house than if we each owned our own and lived in one but rented the other. Furthermore, no hassle of being landlords! Lastly, we would always have the out that we could rent if the house didn’t sell on the terms we wanted.

We came to the conclusion to sell last summer when we finally finished clearing the stuff out of the house, but because of the housing slump, waited until September to put the house on the market.

Step 3 was to actually sell the house!

September came, the house went on the market. We put it on at a price about $15,000 lower than the price for which we had originally wanted to sell it. The house stayed on the market. Reports from our real-estate agent were that our house was getting many more viewing than any other house she was handling. Since the other houses were basically getting 0 viewings, this seemed pretty hopeful. A couple of people had even been buy to view it more than once.

We had set November as the deadline for selling the house. If it didn’t sell at our desired price, we would rent it until the market improved and then try to sell again. Not the greatest situation, but it could be a lot worse. November came, and no offers.

We had an almost-offer, someone who’s agent was talking to our agent, saying that they wanted to place an offer but were just trying to get their pre-approval together (as you can imagine, this is a lot harder in today’s world). After a week or so of waiting, the offer still hadn’t come, and we told them that we wanted to take the house off the market. They asked us to wait, but a couple of days later found that they could not get the pre-approval.

Instead, they started a negotiation of the possibility to lease-to-own. This is an interesting possibility that is a very strange mix between renting the house and selling it. You set an amount of time for the lease, and the people pay you rent, and they pay additional money on top of that that goes into escrow toward the sale. The sale price is negotiated at the time of the lease-to-own agreement. When the lease period is up, the people renting the house can choose not to buy it (say if the price is now out of sync with the market at that time). The advantage to us is that we wouldn’t have to go through a set of renters, kick them out, re-fix the house up, and then sell. It would mostly be settled. But it was complicated.

Then, last week, when we were in the middle of figuring out our terms of the lease-to-own, a real bid came in! The person bid our asking price, contingent on the inspection, and she wants to move in by the end of the month! The only thing we hadn’t been prepared for was that she wants us to pay the closing costs for both agents. But then we got the other agent to lower her closing costs, because the person buying has apparently been looking around for houses for a long time, and she really loves this one, and they both really want it to close. So, things are looking good!

The inspection is Sunday. Tonight we’re going to go over and run some water in the pipes and do a couple of other things, then just hope the inspection goes well.

There you have it! A pretty interesting experience overall, but we’ll both be glad when it’s in the past.

 

Painted!

Well, the house finally got painted (mostly; since they basically painted in the rain, they’re going to come back in the spring to do touch-ups).

We had a moment of a panic when the painters put the color swatches on the house, because the ‘Deep Spice’ looked ‘Orange’, and not deep or spicy at all! The “Kitty Kitty” looked black, which really made us fear that that combo would look like a carved pumpkin. Then the “Western Pursuit” and “Whisper of White” looked “Brown” and “White”. None of it looked fascinating and creative, like we’d wanted to go :(.

But we were in this rush, because it was raining, and cold, and the painters had scheduled too many jobs, and they already knew that they had to use cold weather paint. We had to pick. So we picked the brown colors, preferring them to the “Jack O Lantern House” theme.

Then we had a 2nd moment of panic when we realized that we couldn’t keep our exact door/step color. The color was a dark maroon, and we had gone through all of our Gimp (basically free Photoshop for Linux) exercises using the door/step color and the roof color as givens. We told the painter to match it as best he could, but when we came home one day, our door and steps were pink. I’m talking a very serious, 80’s, teenager, bright pink. Ack!!! Luckily, we got in touch with them, and they hadn’t bought all the paint yet, so we were able to switch it to a color called “Red Red” (which we had to do in a rush one morning before work in 5 minutes).

When the painting was finally done, we were a little bit disappointed. We had spent so many hours with the Gimp, doing very complicated masking and shading, trying hundreds of colors. We had narrowed it down to some of favorites, and gone through rounds of voting with our friends. We thought that we were doing it right, and that if anybody could pick good colors for their house, we could! But then all of these things seemed to indicate that we hadn’t really done it right, and at first blush, we thought the house looked a bit boring. Actually, it looked a little bit like a candy bar. The brown looked like melted mild chocolate. We kept saying “Well, it’s certainly not bad, but it’s not amazing! After all of our work, it should have been amazing!”

And then when they put the “Red Red” on, well… it looked a lot more interesting, but there really wasn’t anything about it that wasn’t red, as you might expect.

But now that the colors have been on a while, we think the brown has deepened, and the red, red “Red Red” really does go well with the brown, and it has grown on us. I’d say that we are pretty happy with it now. So, here are pictures of our newly painted house. Thanks to everybody’s help with the picking!

 

New house color candidate

Based on feedback, we tried the dark orange color with a lighter trim (Candidate E – Deep Spice / Sun Glory). Here’s the last house candidate. Anybody like it better than the others? Hate it more?

 

Help us pick the color of our house

We’re getting our house painted soon. It’s very expensive, and not something we plan to repeat. So, we want to get it right! We don’t like the current colors, and we’ve spent hours with the Gimp image editing program and with Rodda paint swaths to come up with a set of candidate color combos.

If you want to help out, please rank our 4 candidates from 1 to 4, with 1 being the best. Thanks!

Candidate A – Original colors

Candidate B – Sage Tinged / Dark Berry

Candidate C – Western Pursuit / Whisper of White

Candidate D – Deep Spice / Kitty Kitty

 

Getting house ready – not endless!

Well, Colin’s house (the Badship), is basically ready to sell, as of a couple of weeks ago. We were starting to believe that it would never happen, but indeed it did. Here are some pictures of the finished product. Note the:

• New inside paint
• New carpet
• New vinyl
• New roof
• New gutters
• Landscaped front
• Painted porch and deck
• Pressure washed outside
• Cleaned up everything
• Cleared out everything
• A million little details that took 90% of the time

For more pictures, see my photo gallery.

So, it’s all done. Disappointingly, when we got together with our real estate agent, we learned that the market is so slow that it doesn’t make any sense to put it on now. Houses are sitting for months. Since there is more of a surge of buyers in September, we are going to wait to put it on the market then, so that it doesn’t look “stale” when the buyers come around.

So, the ordeal isn’t done yet, but at least it’s not taking up all of our spare time anymore. If we’d known how much work getting that house together was going to be, I don’t know if we ever would’ve got up the gumption to start, so I’m kind of glad we didn’t know.