Northern Virginia – Trevor Owens

May 28, 2008

Hectic times make for great memories

April flowers have brought May showers to our neck of the woods. A balmy April somehow turned into rainy May days.
Zelda wore the weather well…

….but our two guests this month, Marie and Dave, had to be willing to put up with some muddiness. That worked out pretty well in both cases. Marie joined us for a pretty fantastic Mother’s Day breakfast (if I may say so my self!) and some small-town site seeing:

We did get to see some fantastic “wildlife”!

Zelda graduated from her puppy obedience class:

…and we got a little bit closer to finalizing our wedding plans:

October 7, 2007

Aunt Kath Drops In

Last weekend my god mother dropped in here are some of the photographic highlights.

We caught a performance art thing at the Kennedy Center.

And passed a few notable buildings on the way to dinner.

Then we went back to our house to call it a night.

The next day we stopped off at the farmers market to pick up some lunch.

And then we stopped by my office to show my god mother where I work.

and then we visited the Occoquan craft fair. (It was very cute)

All in all it was a great weekend!

May 29, 2007

up_stairs_photos

As promised, here are pictures of the upstairs.

Master Bedroom: 11×17 (you can sort of see into the master bath on the first picture.)

Here is the second bedroom 11×13

Third bedroom 9×9

And here is the other full bath on the second floor.

Oh I thought I would throw in some other photos of the ‘hood. You can see the pool that is just down the road and some of the other roadside trees and such.

May 23, 2007

We Got the House!!

Pictures to follow!!

3 levels
3 bedrooms
2.5 bathroms
1428 sq feet (about 2000 if you include the walk-out basement)

You can see it here, it is the one with the chimny and the solar panals.

May 21, 2007

Another bid…

So we have put in another bid, on this charming fellow.

I will say that I already am more optomistic, I think this is our most solid offer yet, and its our first offer on a home that is not a forclosure. (There is something comforting about knowing the previous resident left happily, that the home brought them good luck, and that they did not place some kind of curse on the future residents… but thats just me)

Marjee and I are looking forward to our vacation next week, and there is a good chance we will hear somethign about the house before then. That would be fantastic. This will be our first vacation in a while, while we travel a lot it is always with alterior motives, conferences to atend etc… but this time it is a trip out to my fathers, with nothing schedualed. It will be fun to see the pasific northwest agian, we should be able to make time to vist our good friend John in Seatle and enjoy an actual vacation. Thats pretty neat. So cross your fingers, third time just might be the charm!

May 16, 2007

…more offers to come

….so we lost the lovely lake house 🙁

Trevor and I went through the most hilarious red tape making offers on this guy. The books we studied about first-time home buyers all warned us, or rather reminded us that there is no “one perfect house” and to persevere in our home buying experience. Probably because they are mostly written by real estate agents. The tricky thing about this warning, of course, is that in order to be serious enough to put an offer on a house, you have to picture yourself living there for more years than you have lived anywhere (outside of the house you grew up in). In fact, you have to picture starting a family in that house. So you find a house, you like it, you see your future there, you bid on it, and its lost. And you have to pick things up and move on.
…and it can be an emotional process, even when you don’t want it to be.
…but in the case of our last offer, they put us through so much red tape and stalled so badly, I think I’m just overjoyed to know something. And now that we know, we are ready to move on.

On this same day, I had an interview with a new graduate program I have been considering. This is a huge, intimidating commitment, but the interview went very well and the faculty of the program were just great people. I’m still waiting to hear more details about my acceptance, but in the mean time, it is a little piece of exciting news.

May 6, 2007

Offer #2

…so Trevor and I did not get the last house we posted about. No biggie. It was a neat place, but after about 2 hours of disappointment our Realtor has about 5 more foreclosures to show us. We looked at three and got really, really excited about 2 of them. In fact, we think these two beat the first one we bid on, hands down. We went ahead and put another bid on a house today. You can see a picture of the front yard here. No joke! The house is on a private lake. We should not be able to afford this, but again, because it is a foreclosure and needs a little bit of love (not too much) we’re able to make an offer.

April 28, 2007

Making an offer

Trevor and I made an offer on this here house yesterday. It was a pretty exciting experience and we are so happy with our realtor. He did a great job of explaining every single thing we were signing (and we had a lot to sign) and he even stopped by the house to look it over once more before he met with us.
The market has been crazy and there have been a lot of doomsayers posting all sorts of stuff on the interblag, so we had some nervous flutters here and there, but the other day I noticed that our good friend John commented on our blog and is looking for a house in an equally crazy market (Seattle). As Trevor said, John is super smart, so if he’s going into the market right now, it can’t be too bad of an idea.