Garrett-Lacey.com » House

A good case of the shingles….

admin — Tue, 06 May 2008 03:27:55 +0000

My apologies for the bad word play. It’s just that I’m thrilled to have finally worked out the details with my insurance company so that we can replace our whole roof with the claim we filed for the tree that fell on our house. Not only will this take care of the ugly repair situation we were facing but will also provide a brand new roof (with 25-year warranty) to the person lucky enough to buy our house.

When you consider that the top three questions when buying a house are:

1) How long has it been on the market?
2) How old is the roof?
3) How old is the HVAC system?

I think we’re doing pretty good now. What are your thoughts? Would having a brand new roof help sway your decision on a house if it was already on your list of potential options?

Message or Murphy?

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:20:29 +0000

Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. We woke up this past Saturday thinking it was going to be just another Saturday spent keeping the house clean in case someone wanted to come see the house. Around 10 a.m. our neighbor Katie came by and informed us that we had a tree sitting on our house. That’s right….a tree.

As it turns out our other neighbor’s tree had uprooted due to the recent rains and fell onto our house while taking another smaller tree with it for the ride. As frustrating as this was considering the fact that our house is on the market, we are fortunate in that it creeped onto our house instead of falling and slamming into causing more damage. At least we think it creeped onto the house as we never heard it hit the house.

Now the neighbor whose tree it was hasn’t been living in their house for over 8 months now so we had to track them down via the Internet to let them know. Luckily they quickly appeared and had a company up within a few hours to have the tree removed. Now we have to wait for the insurance company to show up and let us know what they will cover and how much of the roof needs to get replaced. What a mess!

So the question we are left pondering after all of this is was this a message from God to move to the new house, or is it’s Murphy’s way of telling us to stay put. What do you think?

( Check out some more tree disaster photos here.)

Is this progress?

admin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:11:52 +0000

Two exciting things happened this Saturday morning: 1) We were still asleep in bed at 9 a.m. (only one child was in our bed with us), and 2) We got a call at 9 a.m. to show our house around noon.

Since we were well rested (for once) we quickly jumped into action and scrambled to get the house clean for the noon showing. As we have been keeping the house in good order since putting it on the market it only took 2 hours to get everything cleaned, dusted, and dressed (the kids of course). We then ran over to Grandma and Grandpa’s for 2 hours while the house was being shown. As of right now we haven’t received any feedback but the realtor that showed the house is one from the neighborhood so our hopes are high.

We also received the above stats earlier this week from our realtor. Based on this data it looks like March is going to see more than double the number of people looking at our property on Realtor.com. We are very hopeful that with the warmer weather will come more interest, more showings and ultimately a sale.

Finally a nibble…

admin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:38:34 +0000

Tonight Kate left for choir and about 10 minutes later drove back up our driveway. I went outside to see what was wrong and found her standing in the driveway talking to a woman I had never seen before. To make a long story short, it turns out that Kate had forgotten something for choir and when she randomly returned home she ran into a real estate agent in front of our house. As it turns out the agent (who had called on Sunday only to be turned away since everyone was sick) had called the service that schedules showings on Monday morning and scheduled to see our house on Tuesday evening. Only problem was that they forgot to call us.

We were not going to miss out on an opportunity to have someone check out the house so we did a 5-minute clean sweep and got things ready. (Kudos to Kate for already having the house in great condition.) She left for choir and I ran next door to our neighbors with the kids to wait while they toured the house.

So how did it end? Do you really, really want to know?

According to the agent they both liked the house – but the wife liked it more than the husband. And she added that it would go onto their consideration list. I suppose that is good news but I really would have preferred an offer. But at least it’s a start and as the weather gets warmer I hope we get more showings and more interest.

Stay tuned as I will post updates regarding the house they happen.