Welcome to our home page

We are not done yet, but welcome to our new home :-). Mivon and I have spent a lot of time and effort in the last couple of months to get to the point where we have a nice house.

When we decided to move to North Carolina, we started planning for what it is that we wanted. I did not know how much stress it can put on your relationship to find a new home but I certainly learned all that the hard way.

We started by doing a lot of web research on what was available in the Raleigh area. We also did the engineering thing and made a list of everything we had to have and what we would like to have. It is funny but that list helped more than just about anything else we could have come up with.

My parents thought it would take us very long to find a new home because we had more than one condition that we had to match.

The list of things we "had" to have:

High speed connectivity
At most 1 hour from my "work" location
A real fireplace (can actually burn wood)
Approximately 2000 sq ft in size
A garage
Trees (making it seem private)
A feel of a real subdivision so Mivon would feel more comfortable
A good kitchen (large enough to be enjoyable with good storage)

Now to get started looking we spent the weekend of July 4th going to a friends wedding in Baltimore, MD then driving for hours that night down to Raleigh, NC to look at houses the next day. The real estate agent tried to force us to sign and "exclusive" buyers agreement. That little trick made us just about have to go looking at houses on our own. I was ready to do that and it must have gotten across because we did not sign and we did get to look at houses.

We looked at a lot of houses, probably about 10 that first day. Many of them had some of the requirements but not all. We looked at a log home that was pretty but when you looked closely it was a nightmare of undone maintenance and problems that would have to have been dealt with.

We looked at a house that had looked very nice in the web pages we originally searched. That house was pretty and the yard was great but had again to many problems.

I had never spent time trying to buy something this major with another person. That was a large learning curve for me to get over. I found myself taking a lot of time to get an understanding of what my wife actually did and did not like about any one of the houses. It is important to spend the time to get the real reason why some house is good or some house is bad. If you do not do that you will regret it!

So we looked around for more real estate agents that we could work with. I happen to work with someone who could recommend a really good agent that we could use as a buyers agent. She did not feel the need to lock us into paperwork until we were ready to buy through her. She also concentrated on us and dealt with our somewhat eccentric way of looking at homes. Lorrie Daniel of York Simpson and Underwood did a very good job for us.

Lorrie was even able to deal with the fiasco that happened when we tried to buy the first home we selected out of all that we had looked at. It covered the details of the required list with a little bit of flexibility on a couple of points. It turns out, probably for the best, that we did not get that house. Long story about a real estate agent using our offer to run up the home price over the listed full price which will be told later.

What did we find? A beautiful house which was the first one we looked at after the blown up original attempt to purchase. It happened that we could schedule a look at it and I looked at it first before my wife was able to. It felt right while I was walking through it. That apparently is the best sign when you are hunting for a house. If you feel like you are home, then you probably are.

I will let the pictures talk for it now. We really like it!

To all our friends, you are welcome by any time. Please drop in :-)

Viewed from the street.