Sunday, August 26, 2007

The Internet is a Strange Place

I just got a truly strange message in my Flickr inbox.

Apparently one of the pictures I took during our trip to Chicago a few months back (the one of the Budweiser billboard painted right on a rooftop in sight of Wrigley Field) is going to be used in an exhibition on "Man and Product" that's being put together by the Department of Architectural and Industrial Design at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy for the middle and high schools of Torino and Piemonte. That is both totally random and completely awesome.

Glad to see someone's taking advantage of the Creative Commons Attribution license I use for my photos ;-)

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Easy Come, Easy Go

So, naturally right after we got all excited about having an accepted offer on the house in Natick everything went directly to hell. The building inspector found all sorts of problems ranging from a roof that was going to need to be replaced years earlier than expected to a patio that had settled in such a way that water and ice pooled directly next to the side of the house. Perhaps worse was a general feeling that much of the house was constructed in a less than high quality manner.

Anyway, so we asked the owners for money off of the purchase price to fix the problems, they didn't want to give. Since the numbers they were balking at were far less than any suitable repairs would have come to and we knew from the initial negotiations that they were rather unrealistic about the value of their house we walked away without bothering to get some contractors to come in and tell us what the real bill would come to. Life is too short to spend it dealing with crazy people anyway.

On the bright side, we now have a truly awesome home inspector who I'd gladly use again for any house we might want to buy in the future. He went over the place with a fine toothed comb and found all sorts of problems that we wouldn't have even thought to look for. Hopefully we'll be able to use him again soon, as we are still looking...

Next time though I'll probably refrain from blogging about it until we've had the inspection ;-)

Monday, August 6, 2007

An Accepted Offer

Yesterday was the first Sunday in quite some time where Joanna and I didn't go out house hunting. The reason, happily, is that last week we made an offer on a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath contemporary style split level in Natick and this weekend we found out that it was accepted by the current owners. We've now started down that fun filled path to home ownership. Next step is the home inspection, which should happen some time this week.