On Housing and Fractured Days

[willowisp]

I had planned to get a ton done today, including returning one of my new skirts (I discovered it had some small fault-line rips. While I could sew it, I figured I'd try to get an undamaged one first); check out all of the elliptical sales places which I turned up via the yellow pages yesterday; and visit the Centex and KB HQs as well as some of the developments. I would've done it, too, if it hadn't been for those rotten kids... Erm, wrong evil plot.

Monica will be taking care of Gail and Heidi while I'm in Seattle, and she needed directions to the apartment and so on. Unfortunately she could only make it at four, which fragmented my day to the point where I only visited one community, discovered the place I thought was Centex HQ (Because of, oh, the signs outside saying Centex) was being rented to some lawyers, and discovered that the KB HQ is for after you've picked out a house and want to select the perks.

I did do well at the one development I visited. At first the woman there underwhelmed me, but by the time I left I really liked her. Among other things when I told her about the whole Equity / Equity and KB in NM / Equity and Centex in OR and WA deal, she went to Equity's site, wrote down the information, and promised to check with her superiors as to why Centex doesn't have a deal with Equity in NM. Since 3% of a house boils down to a lot of money, the fact that she is pursuing it rather than giving a vaguely interested "Oh, neat" really endeared her to me. She also put some numbers like Andy's salary and our car payments into a formula and determined that we'd really have to soup up a house in that particular development for it to be beyond our means.

The house I was looking at in the Symphony development was the Handel, which is not quite as open as I think Andy would like, but is still not claustrophobic by any means. When I mentioned how Andy likes open areas, Susan told me about a one-shot house they're doing called the Beethoven. She noted that it wasn't even on the Centex webpage since they had just added it, and only one would be built. When I was looking over the floor plans for the community I checked out today I fell for one simply called #550. I noticed that it had the exact same square footage as the Beethoven. Today Lesa explained why: the Symphony houses were too wide to fit on one of the lots, so Susan and co at Symphony decided to use the plans for #550 and just renamed it to fit in the development's theme.

Lesa believes #550 will be the main house in the development. They began building an inventory one to use as a model and it has already been bought. She expects a second one to be ready for bare-bones walk-throughs in a few weeks. This will be especially good so Andy and I can see if we might want the only Beethoven in Symphony. I will probably write more on houses once we seriously start looking; this will be as much for my benefit when I need to remember the stuff which I will inevitably forget.

Tomorrow I fly out to Seattle and get to be reunited with callicrates and see le_merle and Lars and Yee Man again and meet 9thmoon and maybe sylke, who grew up near where Andy and I lived for the past six years but now works in the same city where I spent the first twenty-two yearts or so of my life. There is one thing I've noticed about getting out and doing stuff -- I have a lot of cleaning to do before I leave tomorrow.

Comments

[9thmoon.livejournal.com]

I am really looking forward to meeting you!
That #550 is a really neat house. It's very close to the revised floorplan I drew up for if I ever get to add a 2nd story to my house. I love the loft space upstairs, especially.

[tyee.livejournal.com]

Those houses are both cool, but I noticed that neither of them have a ground-floor bedroom. While normally this isn't a problem, if either of you is ever injured or ill in a way that limits your mobility, it may be a problem that you can't sleep upstairs. You might think 'no problem, there's always the couch, or we could put the mattress on the floor' but when you are ill or injured, that isn't always an option. It was a big problem for us when husband's mom first came home from the hospital; we ended up renting a hospital bed for her for a month and she hated being in the living room with no privacy.

[willowisp.livejournal.com]

Good point, especially since Grandpa spent the last few months of his life (at least before he became too weak to walk to the kitchen) sleeping in a bed in the kitchen. During his last few days Mary slept in the bed while he stayed in his chair.

I had purposely been ignoring floor plans with the master bedroom downstairs because Andy indicated he would rather it be upstairs. The other day, however, we stumbled across a nigh on perfect floor plan which just happens to have the master downstairs.

[tyee.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean necessarily that the master bedroom had to be downstairs (since having it upstairs can be a nice break from the public areas). Rather I meant that an ideal floorplan in my mind would have a bedroom (not necessarily the master, but with a door that closes for privacy and a bed) and a bathroom with a shower or tub downstairs just to have as an option.

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

(smile) Safe travels, Cat. Wish you both were still near DC, so that I could visit you on my way there this weekend, but hoping you both have fun in Seattle! :-)