originally posted march 19, 2005

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The Home Search Stalls

So after seeing dozens of homes in several different areas, I whittled my list down to six prospective condos. As of this past Sunday, all but two of them have been sold. Now I'm at a crossroads in my home search, and renting is still a very real alternative.

I started my home search in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, a residential area very close to parks and universities. That also means that the neighborhood is saturated with both low-cost rentals for students and higher-priced homes for families. Every place I saw on my first outing had some sort of crippling flaw, like an obviously uneven floor or a huge hump in the basement to memorialize past water leakage.

So from there it was on to Highland Park, another quiet residential neighborhood. I found some really affordable places that were in terrible shape and some affordable places that were in exceptional shape. However, the two properties that I most liked were actually too good. I would be paying for someone else's work, and one of them was far too open to accommodate a family; it was practically a "loft-style house." This led me to the conclusion that my house is not bought just for myself; I also need to think about the people who might want to buy it years later.

Since then I've seen dozens of houses and condos. Condos really appeal to me because there is much less maintenance: all I have to do is paint walls and vacuum the carpets (or rip the carpets out, whichever I deserve). The problem is that many condos impose a monthly maintenance fee of $400 or more a month. That includes gas and electricity, but monthly utilities are almost always less than $200 a month. In effect, I'd be paying thousands of dollars every year for repairs I wouldn't even need myself.

So I made a short list of condos that were on the market for between $70,000 and $110,000, most of which had moderate maintenance fees. Then I learned that all of the modestly-priced condos had suddenly left the market, and that the only ones left were the most outlandishly expensive. I pay over $1,000 for rent and utilities now; the cheapest of the two remaining condos on my list would have run me $1,250 for just one bedroom!

So I feel like I'm back to square one in the house hunt. Homes continue to trickle into the marketplace, and both I and my agent are on the lookout for houses where I would feel comfortable and where I could increase the value relatively easily. I'm coming to terms with the fact that I might buy a house that isn't perfect. I also might just save my down payment and move into a $700/month apartment in Shadyside. Either way, I don't want to buy a home out of frustration just to spite myself. I also feel like my agent is pulling away from me. It's taken me two months and lots of her time to come to terms with what I want. I don't think I've been a very good customer.

Follow-up: All These Damned Coins

So as of tonight, I'm down to just 50 dollar coins of my original 125. This is an experiment that started with an $8 lunch and has been chronicled in a series of brief log entries. Most of the time, cashiers accept payment with a nonplussed look. At Pamela's, a local breakfast-and-lunch diner in the Strip District, two of the waitresses' faces really brightened up when they saw such an odd means of payment. Nobody has rejected my coins just yet. I've found that dollar coins make nice tipping coins, but paying for anything over $10 is just as silly with coins as it would be with $1 bills exclusively.

Carrying up to 25 coins at a time also makes me appreciate how the $1 bill still exists. A wallet with 25 bills in it might be hard to close, but a jacket with 25 big coins in the pocket is heavy. The paper rolls which I use to cart around these coins come apart in my pocket. I've tried carrying them in my front pocket with the rest of my change, but that just led to irritation when I heard all the coins fall out of my pocket while I was driving. About the only satisfying aspect of paying with coins, other than making a waitress's morning: the clunking sound of metal against the bare plastic surface of the "miscellaneous coins" slot in the cash register.

Maybe I should try this in a few months with $2 bills instead. At the very least, it would be quite a challenge to ask someone to pay me using only twos. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Back to March 2005, or to the year 2005.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.