dido

I haven’t been on this site since the semester started August 29 and I got busy teaching, but this goal has moved very rapidly from fantasy to reality. The first week of school, I drove by a house that a friend of mine had seen for sale and said “that would be perfect for you!” When I drove by, I agreed with her and decided, just for the hell of it, to call the listing agent.

I didn’t buy that house (while a lot of things were nice, it had no closet space and was located in a historic district which, while a lovely neighborhood, made it more expensive to live in). But the experience did motivate me to drive around and target a nearby neighborhood that I liked just as much, where the house prices were cheaper. I started looking at the local Multiple Listing Service site on line for houses in my target neighborhood. The MLS was a great boon, since many of the listings have pictures of the insides as well as outsides of houses.

I also sat down and made a list of all the features of a house that were most important to me. This evolved out of both my MLS browsings and the fact that, for fun, I’ve periodically gone to Open Houses on Sundays for a while now. Once I was really clear on what I wanted, things moved swiftly.

It wasn’t much longer before I spied a house on the MLS that was in my target neighborhood and which appeared to have all of my “most important” criteria. Because I liked the agent who showed me the first house, I called her up and asked her to serve as my Buyer’s Broker, so she showed me the house (Sept 13, two weeks after looking at the first house). There was an Open House at the house a few days later, which gave me the opportunity for a second viewing.

Before making a decision about the house, I also spent a lot of time just hanging around the neighborhood during the dinner hour or on weekends and talking to as many of my future neighbors as I could. I’ve already met about a third of the people who live on the street.

By the time of the Open House, I’d also gotten my finances together (a necessary preliminary to starting any of this) and met with a mortgage broker to figure out how much of a mortgage I’d qualify for (and, out of this, how much I’d actually want to spend—which I knew would be signficantly under the maximum I’d qualify for). With this information in hand and advice from my buyer’s rep and from friends who have gone through this before, I put together an offer with an inspection contingency (Sept 19), and that offer was accepted!

I had the inspection done a week later and the house came through pretty much with flying colors—there’s just about 2-3 hours of minor electrical work to be done once I move in. I met with my insurance agent, who also insisted that I have the house’s flat roof coated in order to qualify for insurance (which is necessary to qualify for the mortgage). It’s now a month since my offer was accepted, and I’ve had the roof coated, paid my homeowner’s insurance, completed all the mortgage application details, hired a mover, and packed (all while working time & a half!). I go by my house on my way home from work about every other day and just sit out on the porch for 15 minutes and chat with the neighbors when I can.

My closing is a week from tomorrow (Oct 28), and my official move date is Nov 1.

When I put up this entry back in August, I had no idea that this goal would come together so soon, but a variety of things in my personal and financial lives just came together very suddenly making this a good time for me to buy a house—and so it’s (virtually) done!

two or so years after buying it!

I found Allen’s writing style a little obtuse but the ideas quite worthwhile. Psychological research shows that change occurs when we break ideas down into their components and attack those, rather than than trying to change at the higher level. Even just thinking about writing as “I’m doing 5 minutes of brain dump” rather than “I’m writing a novel” makes the writing much easier to tackle.

I’m spending the week in the collecting and processing phase-I’m a paper piler and there have been tremendous piles of papers to sort through (3 garbage bags full of what I’ve thrown out so far). I’ve also been looking for optimal “buckets” to keep my ideas in. I think I’ll be using the combination of (a)my PlannerPad calendar, (b)a small carry-with notebook to capture info on the go, which I then toss into my inbox for weekly processing, along with© a computerized outline (which I’ve set up very similar to the way that this person has set his file up-http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/wiki/index.php/HogBayNotebook/JesseGrosjeansNotebook. Except I’m using Action Outline instead, since I’m on a Windows machine.

It was, in fact, reading around on the web and getting ideas of how other people are implementing the program that helped the ideas become more concrete and got me all the way through reading the book.

Finished my first full reading of Getting Things Done. I think it’s going to take a few iterations to really implement the program, but I do feel like I’m making some progress.