2 Bit Hacker

Been thinking a bit lately about buying a house. I know I’ve talked about it before, but I think I’m in a much better place financially than I was the past couple of time. The original plan was to try and find a place to move to when my lease was up on my current apartment, early next year, but I’ve been looking at this Federal Housing Tax Credit and thinking that I should jump on that if I can.

On the plus side, I might be able to get that 10%-up-to-$8k tax credit if I can get things all set before December 1st. On the down side, I’ll have less cash available for a down payment, and I’ll have to pay the lease break fee to get out of my current place.

Hmm…

Personal house

As usual, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. For one reason or another I just don’t seem to feel I have enough going on that the world needs to know about. For some reason I feel like posting a general update at the moment, and so I shall.

My works is going along nicely. The new office space is rather nice, and it’s network is ticking along quite happily to itself. I’m enjoying the System Administrator position, although it does mean the occasional late night when a server decides to act up. Apparently I’ve been assigned to more of a projects roll than a maintenance roll, working on improving things and setting up new tools for internal use. In the near future I’ll be rolling out Cacti to replace our MRTG instances, and probably upgrading Nagios. All in all, rather good.

On the home front, we’re looking for a new one. The new landlords at the current location have decided to increase our rent while at the same time taking away our storage space in the basement (claiming it’s a fire hazard, while also saying they’re planning on pouring concrete down there, apparently.) So, Delia and I looked at a few townhouses, one of which we rather liked in Merrimack. Unfortunately, I don’t think my credit is going to be good enough at this time to swing a loan. The combination of lack of credit history and my inconsistent bills payments from last year (from the whole unemployment/PepBoys time period) don’t look so great to the banks.

So, it looks like we’ll be renting for a while longer. I’d like to get out of where we are though, and are currently leaning toward a complex in Bedford. While more expensive than the current location, it’s also quite a lot nicer, so I think it’ll be worth it. My plan is to rent for another year or two, keeping better documentation on my bill payments, so that when we go for the buying-a-place option again, I’ll have everything all put together to give to the loan people.

I’ve also been giving some thought to taking a stab at the HTPC project again. I’ve got all the hardware I need, it’s just a matter of throwing it together an making it work. With the recent upgrade to Delia’s PC, I even have my original motherboard and CPU back. I think I’m going to go with an external VGA< ->NTSC adapter this time around though, since I wasn’t very pleased with the TV-out support for my chipset under Linux, and I really want to use MythTV. Also not too sure about controlling the new cable box. My old box had a nice RS-232 port on the back which allowed for direct serial control. The new one does not, which means I’ll probably end up having to go with an IR blaster of some sort. We shall see.

Geek Stuff, Personal, Work house, HTPC

Well, I decided that paying off my rent debt was more important than a new laptop, so I’ve done the financially responsible thing and put more tax return toward that. Now I just have to pay off a couple smaller debts and I’ll be debt free once again. Yay!

In other news, the apartment building we’re living in is up for sale. Looks like the asking price is about $350k, and I’m trying to think of a way to get together with our friends on the first floor to buy the building. One person suggested working out a system by which the building is split into individual condo units and purchased separately, but I have no idea whatsoever on how to go about doing such a thing.

Other than that, not a whole lot going on in life. We had a party for Delia’s birthday last night (I’m actually still awake from that, haven’t felt the inclination to sleep yet.) Much fun was had, lots of Karaoke Revolution, a surprising amount of alcohol and more than enough pizza. I’m sure Delia will post more about it at some point.

Not really sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my weekend. I’ve been tossing around the idea of going geocaching, since I haven’t done that in quite a while. I should do some work on the SimPro stuff as well. Maybe I’ll even get a chance to work on one of my own projects for a change.

Personal house, party

Well, I’m not entirely sure I’m going to be able to get a mortgage in order to buy a place, so it looks like we may be renting for another year or so. This would give me time to get some money in the bank again (assuming I can stick to my automatic savings transfers and not touch that account) as well as try to get some of the items on my credit report cleared up.

On the plus side, we found a pretty nice apartment on the west side of Manchester, two floors above where kyotemusings and redenife are living now. It’s a pretty big 3 bedroom place for about what I’m paying for my 1 bedroom currently. We’d be able to take on a roommate, too, which would help with trying to put some money away.

Personal apartment, house

Quick update on the house hunt; the condo in Manchester that we liked has been sold already, so I’m getting more info on the place in Merrimack that needs work. It’s been on the market for over 100 days, so I doubt it’s going anywhere. Also, the other day when Delia was working at Staples, a guy came in to get copies made for the townhouse he’s selling. It’s in Merrimack, it’s 1900 square feet, 3 bedroom. Looks pretty nice, so we’re going to try and take a look at that one in the next few days.

On the financial front, it seems that the mortgage person I was dealing with has disappeared off the face of the earth, so I need to find someone else. I plan on contacting my bank and Delia’s bank. Any other suggestions?

Personal house

With the new year and my lease running out at the end of next month, I’ve started seriously looking for a new place to live. I’m hoping to find a townhouse style condo or a small house in the Manchester/Merrimack area. Over the weekend, Delia and I went on our first set of showings. We ended up seeing 4 locations, 2 of them we weren’t too keen on, one we like, but it needs a lot of work, and another that’s brand new in downtown Manch, but kindof small.

We started off in Merrimack looking at this place. I’ve noticed it in listings for a while, and the size and location seem really nice, but the listing does say “needs cosmetics tlc”, which is a bit of an understatement. This first thing we noticed when coming in the door was that a chunk of wall had been removed. This was pretty typical, as there were numerous small holes in the walls all over the building. Not really sure what was going on there. It is huge though, good sized basement with the beginnings of a bar, first floor has living room, dining room, kitchen. Two good sized bedrooms on the second floor, then a huge loft-type area on the 3rd floor, which I think would make a great computer/gaming room. It’s also in a pretty good location in Merrimack, about halfway between my work and Delia’s office.

Next we went to a garden style condo in Manchester, off of South Willow street (near the mall). It was very nice, very good condition, great floors, but I think it’s a little small for what we want. It’s not really much bigger than the apartment I’m in now, but it does have it’s own laundry room. I think it’s staying on the “maybe” pile. From there we went to another townhouse nearby. This one has some water damage to the upstairs bathroom that caused a part of the ceiling in the dining room to sag. It’s probably not a big deal to fix, but it didn’t help the overall place much. It would need some paint, as a few of the walls were a little too pink for my liking, but it had a “half-finished” basement, which could make a good computer area.

The last place we looked at was the brand new townhouse in Manchester, a couple blocks away from the Verizon Wireless Arena. It’s got an unfinished basement, a first floor with a small dining room, small kitchen, and a decent sized living room, and a second floor with 2 bedrooms and a bathroom with washer/dryer hookups. I really liked it, and I think it would be great if we finished off the basement to make a comp/game room. Until that happens though, we’d probably use the second bedroom as an office, which means we couldn’t get a roommate for a bit. I think we’re going to request some more info on this one.

So, that how things are going so far in the new year. I need to get on the phone with the money people again to get that ball rolling as well. Hopefully we’ll be in good shape to move into a place of our (my) own in the near future. Then we can start having people over again, yay!

Personal house