House Hunting : It Begins...

Well today we officially started our house hunting. We saw three houses with our Realtor Mary.

The first one was in Glendale, though the neighborhood was quiet, the area was a bit "lived" in and the house needed quite a bit of work, which would have been fine if the neighborhood was a bit nicer.

House number two was in Burbank and the neighborhood was much better, we actually really liked the place. The outside of the house needed a little work but the houses on both sides were so nice and you could tell their owners really took care of it. Well we went inside and I couldn't believe it. The layout was nice.. but you walk into the kitchen and there was so much water damage that the hardwood floor was bulking and breaking.. Mary warned me not to fall through the floor. We continued to walk through the house and though the set up was nice and the rooms were big there were holes in the ceiling, walls and floors. It was banked owned and they were asking $390,000 for it.. $390 for this place.. it was a total tear down and rebuild.

House number three was in Valley Glen/North Hollywood. This was our first house with actual
people living in it. It's very strange walking around a persons house while they are watching you. The house was nice on the outside and looked great on the inside. The neighborhood was okay to good but the only issue with this house it was a short sale. A short sale is a very complicated process where the bank has to agree upon the offer and price of the house. It can take months and the price can vary from what the realtor started it at... since this house was already at our maximum amount we decided to not even try.

So we didn't find our dream house, but we learned alot about what we want and what we absolutely don't want. I was a little discouraged as the market may be a bit soft now and a buyers market and we are willing to spend $400,000 but it's still not enough to get a decent house in a decent area.

After we did the three houses with Mary we decided to expand our number of cities that we were going to look in. We expanded our listing to include Van Nuys as there are some nice areas in Van Nuys.. we found about eight homes and printed out directions to each one and headed back out to look at the outside and neighborhood of these houses, if we found one that we liked we would let our Realtor know and she could schedule a viewing of the inside. So we drove around for about two hours and viewed many houses... one surprise was an area of Van Nuys called Lake Balboa. Many of the streets were tree lined and in really nice shape. There were a few houses in this area and it seemed the price was more in our range. So we sent three of these listings to our Realtor and hopefully will be able to take a look at the inside of this place next week.

All in all it was a very eye opening experience. Buying a house is suppose to be a fun and rewarding experience but so far it's frustrating, stressful and exhausting... and this is only the beginning. But in the end Harry and I will own our very own house.. and that is exciting.

Up Early

Well I got up at 6am this morning, I couldn't really sleep. I'm really excited to go out house hunting today. The past week I have been looking online for houses as well as having our Realtor send us listings and it's been some what discouraging. We really wanted to live in Burbank above Glen Oaks as we really liked the neighborhood. And even though home prices have come down they are still way over priced in SoCal. We can find plenty of listings in Van Nuys and North Hollywood but most of the areas we find houses in our price range are in a more "lived in" area. Some of the houses are gorgeous but because of the area we won't consider them.

Pasadena seems to have more houses in our price range and the lots of alot larger but the houses our 80 to 100+ years old. I know this being our first house, we will not get our "Dream" house but I would like something half way decent. I just have to keep telling myself that we need to find a great neighborhood and an okay house because we can always fix up the house.. fixing the neighborhood is a bit harder...

Well we are heading out in a few hours.. I'll let you all know how that goes.

House Hunting

Today we got our final line up of the houses we are going to see tomorrow. This will be our first outing with our Realtor. She plans on showing us three houses tomorrow. The three that we are seeing were in our possibility list. Even if we don't like any of them it will be nice to actually see what's out there in our price range and get a better idea of what we can expect. I'll post more once we have gone out with Mary.

Quiet Day At Work

Today was a quiet day at work, the EP went up north and several of the editors worked until the wee hours the previous night so they came in later in the day. I thought this was going to be the calm before the storm but he storm never came.

One highlights of the day was having lunch with my buddies/co-workers Will and Ben. We went out to Islands and had a really nice lunch. It's always great to hang out with co-worker outside of work. Both of these guys are friends who I happen to work with. We consistently joke with each other which is great because you don't always have that kind of connection with co-workers, but with these two it was instantly there.

Later in the day Will got some great news.. he got a call back for a viral web commercial that he had audition for the previous day. He said he felt good about it and did his best. They obviously agreed with him and asked him to come back on Monday.. Congrats and Good Luck Will.

KOTG Microcast #4

For Microcast #4 Jenni and I discuss Amazon officially announcing the release of Season One and Season Two of The Guild on DVD. We also discuss what Extras will be on the Second Season DVD.

Thanks,

Kenny & Jenni

Pre-Order The Guild Season One at Amazon.com

Pre-Order The Guild Season Two at Amazon.com

Paperwork

Today we got the pre-approval paperwork for our home loan.. it's amazing because this is only the paperwork for the pre-approval and there is a ton of it and it's very complicated.. I can't wait to see the actually paperwork when we buy a house...

New Podcast Business Cards

Check out my new Knights of the Guild podcast business card.. it turned out pretty good.. I also made one for Jenni, my co-host.

Choosing a House

After our full day or running around Harry and I went over the email our realtor sent us on potential houses. Out of 31 homes we liked 8 and marked them as a possibilities and had 1 favorite, but rejected the rest for being to small, to expensive, an auction, or just not to our liking... we even had one next to a cemetery which creep me out but Harry found my reaction hilarious. So now we send this back to our Realtor and she sets up appointments to view them next weekend.. we're very excited.

The house pictured to the right is the one we liked the most.. will see it next weekend.

Stealing Gas and Running Errands

Today we had to run some errands. Since we did nothing yesterday we had to get a bunch of things done before I went back to work on Monday. But when I got in my jeep I noticed I had absolutely no gas. The night before I had at least a half a tank as I drove to the store to buy some soda but today there was nothing. Someone must have syphon my gas out of my jeep during the night. It just amazes me that someone would do that.. So was drove directly to the gas station hoping my car would make it... and will filled up once again.

After getting gas we went to CVS for prescription, Bank to deposit money, Target to buy some tools, Vet to pick up some skin pills for Daisy, Barnes and Noble to buy a book on house buying then had lunch at PF Chang's (first time and it was very good), then I had to go to work for a few hours and Harry helped me transfer files, then we went grocery shopping then home were we watched more TV and I did a little bit more editing of The Ready Room podcast..

All in all a very packed day.