Afraid of Bugs – Tales from the Homestead of Casa Chihuahua

This is what happens when you neglect your bread maker for over a year….it gives you a brain shaped loaf just to be spiteful

I thought it was spooky enough to share today!

Mexican Wrestling can fix anything!

I know that i’m not sharing anything here that other first time home owners haven’t gone through – but holy cow – it’s been an intense week. The emotional range over the weekend had some pretty steep peaks and valleys but i think we’re just about to come out the other side.

Maybe it was the healthy dose of burlesque and wrestling last night at the oh so gorgeous Mayan that helped pull everything back into the realm of the living (or the undead as it was a Halloween show) – but whatever it was, we’re more sane now.

Lucha VaVoom last night was AMAZING. The Luchadores were excellent and my favorites were The Crazy Chickens, Chupacabra, and LA Parka (who has the greatest theme song and dance routine). Chupa and Park did the last match with 2 others and near the end of the match they pretty much ended up in my lap. We were sitting 4-5 rows back from the stage which separated the ring side from our area but the wrestling smack-down rolled onto the stage and then was followed by 4 stage dives/tosses right into our area. Metal chairs flew everywhere and before i knew it everyone else was on their feet and i was still sitting there amongst wrestlers and mayhem. (delayed reaction times clearly caused by the house experience?) No one in the crowd got hurt, but several of the wrestlers got hurt and were even helped out of the ring.

I highly highly recommend Lucha VaVoom – and for the SF peeps, they’re going to be up in that area in a few days – Go See Them!

Oh,yah -i was going to write something today about the house – hmmm, maybe tomorrow…still in a wrestling after glow. (see how well it works!)

Let the Inspections Begin

We sign today and then the 10 day countdown starts.  On Saturday we’ll do our General Inspection and Chimney inspection.  I’m also trying to find a tree guy to come out and look at the big dead tree off the back deck.  Our agent thinks we’ll come up with a clean bill of health – and if we have to remove the dead part of the tree ourselves, at least we’ll have firewood for the winter!

If all goes as planned we should be in the house by the first week of December.

Yep, we heard it this afternoon….

we’re about to go into Escrow!

After a restless night full of bad anxiety dreams….we decided to tweak our plan a bit today – and retooled our last counter offer.  The date for response in now moved up to tomorrow at 5pm.  Please send out good house karma into the universe for us and maybe soon  J and I will manage to get some decent sleep…

Either the the worst choice…or the best choice!

We got a counter from the owner this afternoon- and she’s come down a bit more – but not enough. After some serious consideration, we’ve decided to sit tight and not budge. It might cost us the house but thats okay.

We went back to the house this afternoon (they had another open house) and did a detailed walk through, taking note of some of the quirkier things and noting where we could potentially do work first. We also got to see exactly where the septic tank is, as this was a major issue if we want to put in a veggie garden.

She has 5 days to think on the offer – but judging by her responses thus far she will probably get back to us with a firm yes or no very quickly. That said, however, she might wait a day or two to see if anyone from todays open house puts in an offer.

Round Two

The owner countered yesterday afternoon (that was REALLY fast).  She came down quite a bit, but not to our number.  We sent our counter back last night after many hours of deliberation.  We should know by 5pm tonight if we are in or not….

gulp….

**added sunday at 6:30pm**I haven’t posted anything too specific about the house it’s self -  it’s a bit of superstition, as i’m afraid to say too much incase it falls through – but i just had to mention that there is tons of room for a veggie garden AND chickens in the back yard! and even room for our own honey bee colony!

Hizouse Hizunting

Okay – this blog has had a few more weeks of silence – but it’s by no means been quiet around here.

We’ve been house hunting for many months now – getting familiar with the market and neighborhoods here on the east side.  About a month ago, we connected with an agent (who we adore) and he helped us get a bit more serious with our search.  But things really started to happen last weekend.

We usually take saturday to scan all upcoming open houses for the next day – chart our plan of attack – but this past weekend we had pretty much seen everything on the market in the areas we were looking.  Jesse suggested we look at some places in Mount Washington but i really wasn’t that interested in going.  What we had previously seen in this area was unimpressive and i figured the whole area was like that.   BOY WAS I WRONG.

I ended up going with J to look at a few places on Sunday and it surprised us both so very much.  It’s an incredible part of the city with tons of open space, amazing architecture and views to die for.  We fell in love with one of the houses, and long story short, we went back on Tuesday to see it again and wrote up our very first offer wednesday night.  We heard back from them today with their counter and they’re not budging – so we’re basically walking away….but thats actually good news…because we wrote another offer this morning for a different house that we discovered thursday night while driving around the area at night to get a vibe on how it was after dark.  More on the 2nd house in another post – but here’s a photo of the sunset from that house…as a teaser (this was last night, after seeing the house for the first time)

On another crazy note – i think our current house/street is on to us.  We have talked about how much we love our block and love our current rental.  We’ll i guess the walls have ears, because wednesday night, after signing the first offer documents we woke up to a massive crash.  One of the Eucalyptus trees sent a limb crashing down onto our decks.  The biggest piece landed in the yard, after bouncing off the decks, and managed to hit almost every single one of my succulents in the process.  Considering this is the entire extent of my “garden” it was a sad discovery to see the damage.  Either the house is telling us to “get out” or its throwing a temper tantrum in an effort to get us to stay?

Here’s a after the branch fell

And a after clean-up…complete with the succulent triage ward…hoping the patients survive.

We will hear back on the new house offer around 6pm tomorrow and i’ll post more then.

Yep, that would be my car…

The little gray Prius was delivered to our house last October 8th.

Over the past year she has

• been filled up 27 times
• cost me just under $900 in gas
• racked up 8633 miles
• only been filled with Chevron premium
• and averaged 41 MPG

Granted I have a rather short daily commute (under 15-20 minutes each way) by LA standards and also spend a week out of each month not driving but i’ve also taken her to SF 3x in this year, which added to the miles.

The only major work needed was a replacement windshield within the first 2 months, thanks to a rock on the I-5.

Slow Food – Connect with what you eat

Click here to jump to view the draft of the Food Declaration

Posted using ShareThis