Keep your gas tanks filled... It's hurricane season

So at the moment all the electronic highway signs are flashing the same message - "Keep your gas tanks filled... It's hurricane season".

This means that I currently don't have any idea how busy the roads are because their usual function has been usurped - they usually show how long it will take to get from that point to the next major junction or location. It's nice to know it's 10 minutes to my destination when I get to the i45 because then I know traffic is light and I don't have to think about alternate ways to get home... but now I don't know... because it's hurricane season.

If you don't live here, you might think it's a good idea to warn people of this so that they are informed (and have a full gas tank). However, if you did live here, you would know all about the hurricane season because there's nothing but hurrican Gustav on the local TV channels at the moment.

This is Gustav:

If you look at Texas on that map, we're somewhere to the North West of Galveston Bay, which is the large bay to the South East of TX. In fact we're not far from the crossing of 30N/95W which is just inside the largest circle.

Wow, you might think - no wonder they're warning everyone... but look at that scale - the storm isn't going to get much larger but they have almost no idea this far out where it actually will make landfall. So the prediction is for it to make landfall somewhere between Corpus Christi, TX and the Florida panhandle - a stretch of coast 600 miles long.

And that landfall is at least 4 days away!

But we hear New Orleans has evacuation plans in motion (tomorrow is the anniversary of Katrina) and we were shown evacuation zones on our local news this morning.

But that's ok - we're going to be out of town for the weekend. We have the late flight back so we land at 12.30am on Tuesday morning... at least one model has Gustav visiting here at 1am on Tuesday!...

Woohoo - we filled our gas tank, it is hurricane season. And only 3 and a bit months left to go.

A couple of pics at last!

So we finally have the camera AND the cord AND the battery charger AND a PC in the same place so we took a couple of pics...



Here is the outside as of this afternoon. Em spent 2 hours cutting lawns this morning which explains why it looks so neat and tidy outside! And it was a fabulous afternoon as well so you can see the lovely blue sky - it's not always like this :-)


And here's a view of the back of the house - you can see our tiny covered porch on the right hand side and all the grass - this is where the pool will be (obviously):

Finally, I couldn't resist a pic of the garage - you can just about see the rails, shelving and cabinets Em and I worked hard on all week to get installed - we're starting to get on top of the unpacking in there now!

The Pool Saga... Part II

So our pool guy went to the Woodlands folks and checked about our easement issue - he came over on Saturday and said sometimes they get it wrong and, even when they get it right, sometimes the utility company will sell the easement back if they don't need it...

When he called me today he confirmed we do have the 14 foot easement and he did not mention buying it out so I guess we're out of luck there.

So scratch the pool plan I posted before - we're now waiting on a new design... it should be here tomorrow. The really annoying thing is that we'll have to make the pool longer and narrower... which means more cost (or less pool) - the big driving factor in the pool cost is perimeter length... the cheapest pool (for the area you get to swim in) is a perfect circle. As soon as you start to move away from a circle, it gets more expensive for any given surface area.

So now we wait to see what the builder can come up with design wise - we have quite a few limitations so it's a bit stressful wondering what he can do!

But there are worse things to have to worry about than what shape the pool in the backyard is going to be!

And we're in...

We are officially residents of Creekside Park!

The move went reasonably well - we stayed at the house Thursday night on an air mattress as the movers were due between 8 and 10. We both took the day off.

I was out on one of my errands (more on that later) when they arrived so when I came back things were in full swing.

The system they had was great - all our stuff was in huge sealed crates, each of which had been loaded earlier by forklift with the opening lined up with one of the doors on the truck (this was a huge semi trailer with doors all along the sides). They would open up a crate and move everything from that crate into the garage. Then we'd check the boxes (or whatever) off the inventory list that was created when they loaded our gear in CA. Then we'd move inside and they'd put the boxes in the appropriate room.

We must not have been popular with them when we elected to have the entire lounge from CA put into the upstairs gameroom here. That's all the CDs and books, the sleeper couch and the massively heavy CRT TV that took 3 of us to carry it into our single storey house in Oakland!

While they did their thing, Macys turned up and dropped off the new bed, bedside cabinets, bench, couch and loveseat... they did a pretty shoddy job leaving us to finish off the installation of the hardware etc.

And the new TV arrived. I can't for the life of me remember the first guys name so I'll call him Bob. His helper was Jerome. They arrived and the conversation went something like:

Bob: Hey, my name is Bob - congratulations on the new house. We have your new TV.
Us: Thanks
Jerome: Hi, my name is Jerome. God bless you both, God bless you.
Us: Erm, thanks
Bob/Jerome install TV, everything works
Bob: Have a great day
Jerome: God bless you both, bless you. Have a blessed day. God bless.
Us: Bye

That is not an exageration - he really did bless us six times.

After all that, we still had no phone and no cable - they were due though. Comcast gave us a three hour window 2 through 5. AT&T gave us a window 8am through 8pm (nice!). The comcast guys called, lost. I have them directions. They called again, lost. We were having communication issues because me no hablo Espanol... so in the end I got in the car, drove around until I found them! Once they got to the house, everything went in ok and they left.

The phone company? They didn't even show up. And, conveniently, at 8pm they're closed so you can't even find out what happened!

In the end he turned up at 3pm on Saturday and installed it - all working fine now. Both the AT&T engineer and I were cursing Chesmar homes as they built the house in such a way that the installation involved the engineer being in the attic over the garage on a ladder trying to fish through a cable to me in the upstairs attic leaning over into the insulation holding onto a roof joist with one hand and grabbing for the cable with the other. Nice job Chesmar.

I won't mention the unpacking except to say that it is an almighty pain in the rear - I HATE unpacking more than I hated packing, my previous 'most hated' activity.

No photos yet - still haven't unpacked the cable for the camera.

Closing

We officially own the house now!

We closed on Friday - the process to that point had been fairly smooth so something had to go wrong didn't it? Well when we got to signing off on our land survey, the closer pulled out a differently marked plot than the one we'd signed when we made the offer. The main difference was the utility easement on the back - it was now 14 feet instead of 10.

That means we are not allowed to dig foundations (or pools) in the back 14 feet of our yard. Given that our signed off pool design sits 12 feet from the fence that is a problem. We were angry - this is material information that we did not get in a timely manner.

After much hand-wringing and phoning around we decided we could accept the change but we negotiated for half our 'lot premium' back from the builder (the lot premium is paid on lots that are larger than normal and so on). He made a lot of noise about how we still have a large lot and it's still the best one in the street but we got them to concede there was some loss of utility and so 50/50 is what we arrived at.

I wish it hadn't happened like that but in hindsight it is not the worst thing in the world. The pool builder is coming over at the weekend to discuss. I am sure it will be fine.

Closing soon...

So we're closing tomorrow... We got the HUD statement today... we need to take in a check tomorrow for the highest amount I have ever had to write...

It also means I now see all the fees I have been charged. For one mortgage, there are half a dozen sets of courier fees.. and several fees I frankly don't yet understand... and the bank charged us an underwriting fee so they could assess our risk so they could reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest payments from us for the next 30 years...

And we wonder why the housing market is so crap - we have great credit and can easily afford the house and yet we got hit with hundreds in fees and had to leap several hurdles to get a nice, safe, 30 year fixed mortgage.

But by this time tomorrow, we will have the keys so who cares!

Did I mention that on Friday we have:
- 117 boxes of stuff plus furniture arriving from California
- a new TV from Amazon
- a new bed, two bedside cabinets, a bench, a sofa and loveseat from Macys
- cable man installing HD cable, internet and DVR
- phone man installing phones

So it's going to be a crazy few days but the next post might well be from "The Marrow Resort and Spa" :-)

The pool

So we have a pool design and a contract.

I don't have an electronic copy of the very latest design but this is pretty close:

The highlights:

- 33 foot 6 inches total length

- 4 foot to 6 foot depth

- raised spa with stacked stone spillover into pool

- raised beam across the back of the pool

- sun shelf on the back of the pool with bubblers

We are also capping the patio in flagstone and adding 425 sq ft of pea stone deck. That should give us plenty of outdoor space including an extended patio off the existing covered patio and a nice area at the end of the pool for sunbathing.

The design changed a little since the drawing - the bench in the deep end is a bit bigger now and there is an extra step in the shallow end (with that step going either side of the existing steps to avoid encroaching on the swimming lane). Also the bench in the spa goes all round with a step in the left side to help with entry and exit.

We love it!

The Pool Saga

So we decided that a swimming pool was part of the deal when we moved to Texas. It is an extravagent purchase but with the climate here it's very nice to have. So once we got the offer accepted we started looking for a pool builder.

We looked at the pool thing as a pretty simple exercise - we have a total house budget that we know we are comfortable with. So we buy a house at less than that and then sign up for a pool for the difference and we're happy. Not so fast.

Since the recent credit crunch, lenders have got a lot more picky about all aspects of lending. So now there are rules and limits. There seem to be two elements to the rules:

1. Many lenders have limits on the proportion of the loan that can be used to fund the pool (regardless of appraisal value - even if the pool + house are easily less than the appraised value, they still won't lend more than their percentage rules).
2. All lenders now worry about cost overruns that will mean the pool doesn't get built (a fair concern considering they do take the added value of the pool into account when they appraise). To mitigate that risk, they require the borrower to put more money into escrow.

So... some lenders only want 1.2x the pool contract in escrow (so we have to chip in 20% of the contract value for cost overruns) but will only lend up to 10% of the house value. Others will lend up to 25% of the house value but they want a full 50% of contract value held in escrow. When you consider pools cost tens of thousands, we're talking about significant funds being tied up for months. Others are somewhere in between.

Hence we ended up with a strict budget in order to satisfy our lender.

We called around to 5 or 6 builders and sent them our plot survey or met with them. They all went away and put together designs based on our 'must haves' and 'nice to haves':

Must have:
- Ability to swim decent 'lengths'
- Spa
- Some kind of water feature to provide white noise (as the house backs onto a local road)
- Decent amount of decking

Nice to have:
- Pebble interior (rather than plaster)
- LED lights

We waited and waited and finally designs starting coming in... not good.

We couldn't afford our nice to haves and we couldn't even get some of our must haves, most notably the sizes in our price range were smaller than we hoped for.

Most builders were a bit cagey about the prices - rather than working with us to understand what was driving the costs, they just wanted to decide for themselves how to meet the price limit... this was frustrating as they'd forget about one 'must have' in order to satisfy another ("sure you can have a 35 foot pool but you can't have a raised spa").

Finally we found a builder who actually sat down and explained the pricing. He showed how increasing the pool length impacted pricing (more tile, more digging, more concrete, more plumbing) and how other things had less impact.

We worked with him to push the design in the right direction... we ended up with all our 'must haves' and costed options to add our 'nice to haves' before build out is complete.

We were happy... We signed the contract...

The pool builder resigned from the company... arg!

Cue panic.

We met the owner of the company today - we like him, he is honoring the contract (including the discount we negotiated...) We are happy again.

I'll post details later...

Inspection and First Walkthrough

Last week we did the home inspection - it was a full morning which is mind boggling when you consider the house is brand spanking new.

It was also the first day that we were at the house when it was raining properly... what a difference!

The inspection went well... there were a few things that came up to fix but nothing that was overly worrying. The inspector explained a few things about new houses and living in Texas (who knew that you have to water your foundation during dry spells?!). The day after we got a comprehensive report and fired that off to the builder for their review.

Today we met with the housing supervisor to walk through the house. This was actually a really helpful experience. Eric (our supervisor) walked all through the yard, the attic and every room in the house. In each place he explained everything about how the systems and components work, what maintenance was required and so on.

We reviewed the contents of the inspection report and Eric agreed to fix all the major and minor points on the report with a couple of exceptions. I checked with our inspector and the exceptions are fine so we're happy with that.

We also got to put blue tape on anything that needed fixing, from paint drips to chips in the baseboards and so on. I think we could look around all day, every day and still be finding things after a whole week! We spent 90 minutes marking things up so the builders have plenty of work for the week to come.

One good thing today - the appliances are installed now (except the fridge) - they look great...

Next stop - final walkthrough and closing next week!

Finally... a place to call home

Now the blog so far has been a little bit revisionist... you see, before we even left California, we saw a house on the internet that we thought looked great. It was, in fact, the first house we saw on the day we arrived. We liked it. It became the house against which the other homes would be measured... and all of them fell short in some way.

This is a rather terrible picture of it:

This house is perfect for us...

It's big (2700 square feet) but not too big. The house sits on a pie-slice shaped lot on a cul-de-sac. This means the front yard is small and the back yard is big (perfect for a pool!).

Inside, it has well proportioned rooms including a proper dining room with a door into the kitchen to make life easy. It has some nice upgrades including maple cabinets, all Whirlpool stainless appliances (except for washer and dryer), nice tile work in the kitchen and breakfast area...

On top of all that, the house is half a mile from the aquatic park, the formal park with the amphitheatre and George Mitchell park, the largest park in Woodlands.

To cut a long story short, after looking at other houses for comparison, we knew this one was for us. We put it an offer and got it accepted within the hour. WOO-HOO!

More pics when we move in....

Wilde Creek

After Tunica Pass we headed to the next neighborhood over where the houses are a little bit more expensive and the lots a touch larger... there are several builders operating there at the moment and three had inventory coming available when we needed it - Plantation, Village Builders and Lennar.



We looked at this one from Village Builders:

Now when we looked at it, none of the landscaping had been done, there was no granite on the counters and everything was a bit of a mess... but we did like parts of it... We liked the tiled living area as it is so cool and soothing when coming in from the heat. We also liked the formal study at the front of the house.

There were also things we didn't like... like the dining room being an open area off the foyer (rather than a proper room) which also had no door to the kitchen. Also, the secondary bedrooms upstairs were a bit small.

On a different day, Em went to look at the area again and she went to see this one from Plantation homes:

Before she even went through the door she knew it wasn't for us... the fence all down one side is wrought iron, open to the street. The entire backyard is on display! So that was a non-starter.

We think we have a winner...

Tunica Pass

One neighborhood we looked at was Tunica Pass in Creekside Park. After living in CA with it's small lots and smaller homes (at least for mere mortals who weren't luck enough to buy decent sized homes before the rocket was lit under house prices there!) the homes here were impressive.

With that said, Tunica Pass is one of the more affordable neighborhoods in Creekside with homes starting in the 190s. This means the homes tend to be a little smaller than average on smaller lots as well. Of course for us they were still large!

The model we visited was quite large - around 2700 square feet (sorry for the awful photo - camera phone):


This was quite a nice house but our realtor really wasn't too positive about buying in this neighborhood... we'd basically be buying the most expensive home in a cheaper neighborhood which is not good for resale. For a tiny amount more we could be in a nicer neighborhood and be in a nicer home on the low end of that nicer neighborhood.

So we kept looking...

House Hunting

So, upon arrival in Houston we settled into the corporate apartment for, oh, 7 hours and then we went house hunting.

We were fairly sure from our last visit that The Woodlands was by far the best area for us. It is built in an old forest with a lot of original trees left behind after construction. This appeals to us as it seems to take the edge off the sheer flatness that is southern Texas.

So we got in the rental car and drove up to the Woodlands. At the moment they're building in a few different neighborhoods but the main activity is in the new village of Creekside Park. This community is targetted to those who enjoy the outdoors a bit - there is a decent sized park (read flood water protection drainage!) and lots of biking paths there.

We looked at several homes that were available... more on those later.

Moving on...

Well, after a surprisingly short time (that felt like a lifetime), we finally got the Sold sign up in the garden. We didn't get as much as we'd hoped for the house but we got enough to fund the move to Texas and that's what we needed.

We hope the new owners enjoy the house as much as we did!