Take that wallpaper down!!!

We picked up all of the stuff off of the floor and moved out everything that we could. Harper and Fiona kept coming in wanting to know what was going on. Fiona even bounded in at one point looking for her scratching post and ended up on the window sill!

We did find a roll of wallpaper border that was left behind. It did not match the bedroom wallpaper, but we know now that the border in the living room is "strippable" (check out the middle word on the label). We were thrilled that at least some of the wallpaper in this house would come down without too much of a fight.

So, if the pictures of the room didn't give justice to the wallpaper and you are wondering why we dislike it sooooo much, here is a close up.

Say goodbye because you want see it in our house again!! Luckily most of it peeled off pretty easily in nice long sheets.
For the last stubborn bits that seemed to be attached with enough glue for the whole room, we added some Dif Gel by Zinsser (great stuff) and waited about 20 minutes.
With a little elbow grease, it was going, going....
And IT WAS GONE!!!!!
Next: cleaning the walls of all of the glue that was overused. By the way, if you are every crazy enough to put up wallpaper, here are our suggestions so that the next owners are not cursing you.

1. Make sure the wallpaper is strippable.

2. Do not use extra glue around the windows. These are weird enough pieces to pull down without a lot of glue to mess with.

3. The smaller pieces (ya know in between the door frames) do NOT need as much glue as a full regular sheet. The amount of glue should equal the piece of wallpaper. That is unless you are expecting the tornado to only hit the wall with the thin strips on it.

Our first remodel: The bedroom

It has been a very long time since we updated, but we can catch you up in a few words: unpacking, school, work, life, cats. (We will try to catch you up with more details as we go along, promise!) When the school year ended, the itch hit us to start our first remodel and we chose the bedroom. Remember this place:

Well, Lib (the seller) moved her stuff out. The cats moved in and let us come, too. Since about the end of February our bedroom has looked like this:

Why did we choose the bedroom to remodel first? Here are our top reasons: the wallpaper, the birds on the wallpaper, going to bed seeing the wallpaper before the lights go out, and waking up seeing the wallpaper first thing in the morning.

We pulled out a tape measure to measure the walls, doors, and windows in the room. We read online articles and books about removing wallpaper (thank God for HGTV.com). We dreamed and debated what to do with the blank canvas that would be our bedroom. What did we decide? Well, we guess you will just have to come back and read the next entry!! We will try to update every day that we work, at least. Let the project begin!!!

Here are the rest of the before pictures:

Our final decision

Of course in all of this house hunting, we have to find a mortgage. Jason described his experience at the Credit Union as disappointing. She answered his questions but with a lack of interest in anything. The only way that they would offer us a mortgage for first time home buyers or teachers is with an adjustable rate. Have you read the news lately? Do you really think we want to get into that mess?

We were frustrated with the places that said they had first time home buyers plans, but still expected us to put 20% down or else pay mortgage insurance. One of the banks even said that we wouldn't qualify for a special loan like that using both of our incomes. If we used only one of our incomes, then we wouldn't qualify for the amount that we needed. Huh?

We have chosen Bank of America because their deal couldn't be beat. 5% down payment. around 1 point. 6.25% interest rate. No PMI. NO CLOSING COSTS. Yes, you read that correctly. They take care of the closing costs. We called to check because it seemed too good to be true. All we can say is SOLD: Bank of America mortgage.

Friday after Christmas we met with Sandy to discuss over lunch where we go from here (and also to tip her off about the gun house). It was quickly decided that our search was done and that we were going to make an offer on house #2. We tossed around numbers, what needs to be done, who contacts who, and decided to meet Monday to make an offer.

Monday morning (too early for Nancy who was still on break), we drove down to Newton to Sandy's office. She had some of the information already filled in and finished it up while we caught up with what had happened since our last meeting. We finished filling out and signing on the dotted line a little after noon. We figured with it being New Year's Eve, that we wouldn't hear anything until Wednesday. We headed off to the ABC store to get the ingredients for our traditional New Year's daiquiris.

About 4 hours later, Sandy called. Our offer was accepted!!

Ever since then, it seems like a blur. We have been showered with information and decisions to make: lawyers, insurance, dates, inspections, oh my. Here is what we know as of this very moment. (Yes, this is the blog actually being up to date.)

Saturday: Inspection of home with Sandy, inspector and us

January 30: Closing date (We get the keys!!)

February 2: The big move (If you are available, pencil us in...free Krispy Kreme donuts at both sites...bottled water...pizza dinner)

February 3-4: Clean up apartment and hand in keys (to the apartment, not house)

So upon hearing all of this good news, we turned to Harper and Fiona to tell them all about their new place and this is what we got.

Oh well. Might as well let them sleep peacefully now. They have a crazy few weeks ahead of them. We keep promising them that it is for the better. Maybe it is as much to console them as it is to keep us from going crazy.

A walk through of House #2 with the parents

Twas the Friday before Christmas and we got both sets of parents together to see House #2. Join us on a walk through.


This is the living room that you enter through the front door (to the right). There is a nice coat closet and to the left leads you to the kitchen. Note the wallpaper.

This is the kitchen (duh). To the left is the living room that you just saw, behind you are the stairs up to the bedrooms, and to the right are the stairs that lead to the den. The refrigerator and stove are fairly new; the dishwasher is not so fairly new. All appliances would stay.

This is the master bedroom. Note the wallpaper; you may not see it when you come visit. Yes, those are hardwood floors. There are two closets and the owner said the wife gets the bigger one.

This is the upstairs bathroom. It is connected to the master bedroom and the hallway. It is divided into two parts so that one person can be in the shower and the other can be in the other part (not pictured) brushing their teeth.




This is the smaller of the two bedrooms. It has only the one window. Once again, hardwood floors.
This is the other bedroom. It is a little bigger and has two windows. Both of these bedrooms have a closet.
This is the den. There is the one door pictured and there is another door behind you to the left about half way down the stairs from the kitchen (almost like a split entrance except in the back of the house). The floor is linoleum that has seen better days but is still usable. There is a large storage closet behind you to the right.

To the right of the den is a short hall, which leads to this "extra bedroom." The owner said it used to be an office.

This bathroom is also off of that hallway. It is where you find the laundry. The last room off of that hallway is the crawl space, which will be carefully guarded if we move here, lest we lose a cat.

Upon finishing our tour and dragging our mothers away from the sweet owner lady, we all headed out to Bob Evans for dinner and discussion. Here is a summary of the conversation.

Jason's mom: I love it!! How exciting!! I'll mow the lawn!

Jason's dad: Well, you need to change the fuse box to a circuit breaker. I mean, we used to stick a penny in there but you might not have a house. I think you'll be happier with circuits.

Nancy's dad: I didn't see anything that was a deal breaker. I'm not too thrilled about the dryer vent leading into the crawl space with no external outlet.

Nancy's mom: It's nice. I'm happy for you.

Eric: Did you notice how I got these forks to balance on the salt shaker with only two toothpicks?

With that, we left the fork trick for the waiter and bid the parents good bye. Ya' know, all those times as a teen when we didn't want their advice but they were just brimming with how life should be...that would have been really helpful right about now. I guess since we are grown ups now we have to make our own decisions.

Next time: Our final catch up post! Then after that you will get live up to the date information. That is until we find a place and have to pack and set up new utilities. Can't moving just happen by magic or a miracle or something??!!

A Sunday drive to see more listings

Our next adventure begins on a December Sunday afternoon. Sandy, our realtor, had recently given us some more listings to look over. We really like House #2 from our first day out, and the more we kept thinking about it, the more we wanted it. However, to be fair, we only saw three houses that day, and we really felt that it was in our best interest to at least do a drive-by of other houses on the market in Long View and select a few for potential viewing later with Sandy. We added them to a pile as we went, ranking them in comparison to the other houses we went by.

After meticulously planning out a route to avoid doubling back as much as possible, we set out, armed with 13 other listings, a map, some snacks and water, and ready to see what else was out there. We must have forgotten that we were driving in Hickory, where doubling back and turning around are not optional.

We aren’t going to bore you with each detail of each listing. Not all were bad. We saw a cute older, little bungalow, but it was not in the best of locations, and the listing said it had asbestos siding. Imagine the future conversation:

Us: Hello, HAZMAT? Yes, we want vinyl siding.

Despite this, we did keep that listing towards the top of the pile.

The Asbestos House

As we continue to drive, we delve into some of the not so good areas. Remember in an earlier post when we told you that Coach Elder’s wife, Cindy, told us that the closer to the train tracks, the more transient the population in this area was and we should probably avoid those areas? Well, we did not heed her advice. You see, she might have known more than we had expected when we decided to look around the area of the school she works at (near the tracks!).

Nancy was driving, and Jason was looking for the next place on the map. We had gotten turned around as a result of a one way street (what a surprise). It was becoming a bit more discouraging as listing after listing became more and more disappointing. Several blocks behind the school, as Jason is deep into the map, Nancy exclaims, “Oh!!!” as in shock and horror, not excitement and delight. To which, Nancy finishes off the statement by uttering the now famous words: “That kid has a gun.”

That’s right. A gun. And yes, some of the questions you are probably asking yourself are the same ones Jason asked. Was it a BB gun? Maybe it was a toy? Did he look like he was hunting? The answers were all, “No.” So much for a leisurely Sunday stroll. Needless to say, the house that we were looking for was eliminated for that, the gravel drive, and rusty beams in the front.

The Gun House
It got more bizarre. A house, which was listed as 2,096 square feet, had only 0.14 acres. The house size sounded impressive, but how do you get that much house on that little land? Jason will tell you he never saw the house or the land because he was flipping out. After turning down a very tiny, shared driveway with three other small, somewhat rickety looking houses, passing the chain-link fence with the Beware of Dog sign, then, one assumes, the same dog starting to bark, Jason was ready to put this at the bottom of the pile (even below the Gun House) and was frantically asking Nancy to turn around and leave.

"Beware of Dogs, Shared Drive, Never really saw it" House

We made our way to see the last two houses on the list just as night was falling. As we were looking for the last ones off of Highway 70, we noticed a cop car pull someone over. As we got lost looking for the last house several minutes later, we saw what appeared to have been a fender bender at a light, and this time, the Long View Fire Department had responded. And yes, by the time we saw the last house, it was completely dark and we got lost looking for it twice (again, so much for planning out a great route)!

So at the end of the drive, we reviewed the top 3 houses. Amazingly enough, the Asbestos House was still on top. It had good square footage but no stairs for the cats. It had inside renovations but the garage had no doors. It was more of a detached car port with three walls than it was a garage.

The next house on the pile seemed to have an interesting floor plan based on the outside and the description given on the paper in the information box out front. The drive was gravel and the glass doors you see below are the front door. The house to the left (not in the picture) looks like a tornado hit it.

The Interesting Floorplan House

The third house on the pile was probably the closest to ressembling House #2, with a few exceptions. They had similar square footage and multiple levels (meaning stairs). This one is on a corner lot across the street from Food Lion near the intersection of two fairly busy streets. The tight driveway is behind the house off of the main road (yes, one of the busy streets). It also didn't seem to have as many windows.

The Food Lion House

So after going through these listings we noticed one thing that they all had in common: they were farther north than House #2 therefore would not help Nancy's commute time as much. The more we talked, the more pros we came up with for House #2. Each time we mentioned the other houses the more cons we came up with for them.

Next time: We are so serious about House #2 that we get both sets of parents to check it out with us. Is this like bringing your date home to meet your parents….?

Thanksgiving in Wytheville

We took a week off from househunting to spend some time in Wytheville, VA with Grandpa Greiner. When Jason got off of work on Wednesday, we loaded up the car with all of the Thanksgiving fixings and headed out to I-40. Needless to say, we were in for a real trip that evening. We have traveled before to Wytheville on Thanksgiving Eve, and we know that at the intersection of I-77 and I-81 the traffic gets really backed up. Imagine our shock to approach the exit to get onto I-77 in Statesville and there is a cop car parked in the lane and an officer waving us away from our exit! Luckily, Jason is from Statesville, so we took the next exit and he promised to get us onto I-77 in no time at all.

That evening, we saw a little bit of everywhere in Statesville. We turned around here, took a cut through there, but we kept running into traffic wanting to go the same way we were headed. Finally, Nancy called her parents and asked them to check NC DOT’s webpage for news about traffic. Turns out that a few miles north of where we had originally tried to get on I-77, there was an accident that involved a downed power pole. Realizing that our fate was sealed, we sat in the traffic to get to an alternate road that would intersect with I-77 north of the accident. When we finally got on the interstate, it was really eerie because there was only the trickle of cars heading northbound that had made it through the detour.

Anyways, we made it to Wytheville in one piece that evening. The next day Jason started the turkey when we got up. Yes, we cheat and get a turkey breast instead of a full turkey. With three of us there, it works nicely with just enough left overs to cover Grandpa for a week. Jason and I then set out to hang the Christmas lights for the front of Grandpa’s house. Most of the decorations have been Susan’s work through the years; the rest of us just help put it up and take it down. You can almost hear the guy from the twelve pains of Christmas by Bob Rivers complaining about stringing up the lights! Yes, they all went out at one point, though we didn’t have any blinking problems.

When we finished trying to approximate Susan’s ideals of the perfect light set up, Jason worked on the fixings to go with the turkey and Nancy started peeling, coring, and cutting apples for the pie. In the past, we have run into minor issues making Thanksgiving dinner for Grandpa. There was the year that we single-handedly kept Food Lion in business because of everything we forgot to get (and yes, there were multiple trips involved). Then one year, the pie blew out of the top and made a mess in the oven. We have since learned that it is a good idea to put a cookie sheet under the pie pan for that very reason. This year, though, we are proud to say that we had a successful Thanksgiving dinner.

We were able to spend some time talking to Grandpa about our house hunting adventures. By this point, House #3 has fallen off of the list, never to be seen from again. Maybe it is a result of a bigger swarm of gnats in front of it now. Who knows. We are starting to note more problems with House #1. The only plus that we have come up with is if we do have Nancy’s parents living in the mother-in-law suite downstairs that since the washer and dryer are down there, they can do the laundry. It would be a long commute to Atlanta for Nancy’s dad, but it wouldn’t be the first time that he had to commute to work. Anyways, we discussed House #2 over pie with Grandpa and his friend from church, Joan. We sketched them a floor plan, tried to describe the wallpaper, and looked at the pictures we have of the outside. Joan wanted to know all about the living space possibilities; Grandpa wanted to know about what kind of shape the place was in. We answered as many questions as we could and noted all of the others so that we could find the answers.

Air conditioner installed in 2004; heated with oil (full tank recently); how old is the furnace, though? Is gas an option?

Outside of Hickory city limits; in the community of Long View, which purchases utilities from Hickory (all the benefits of living in Hickory without the taxes); hooked up to city water and sewer (no septic tank); what condition are the appliances in? Which ones stay?

Quiet neighborhood with convenient location for work and shopping; not on a main street so traffic is light; house was built in 1968; What condition is the roof in? Is it in a flood plain?

Great space for gardening; trees look to be in good condition (including a few that would be good for a hammock, Jason notes); little under an acre of land; Jason’s mom said she will mow it; How close is the fire department? What is the crime rate?

The number one piece of advice that Grandpa gave us was not to get an adjustable rate mortgage. Too many people have been ruined financially by this option. All in all it looks like a good place if we get good answers to the questions, according to Grandpa and Joan. It was really fun talking to both of them and sharing our excitement. We would still like to check out a few other places, though. As of leaving Wytheville that night, House #2 was heads above the rest.

Next time: We go for a Sunday drive to check out some new listings that our agent sent us. Learn why Coach didn’t take us everywhere in Long View.

Coached on Long View

Yes, we are a little behind in updating but as usual life happens and then Christmas is here. So, we will catch you up in a few installments over the next while.

Househunting Chapter 2

One of the best ways to learn about an area is to talk to someone who lives there. Luckily, Jason's partner in broadcasting Hickory High is a native of the area and has lived in Long View for quite a few years. When Jason mentioned that we were looking at moving to that area, he said, "I live out that way. Give me a call and I'll show you around." After seeing our first set of houses, the next weekend we decided to take him up on his offer.

Now before we continue, let's paint the picture by having Jason share a little bit more about Coach.

David Elder was born and raised in neighboring Alexander County. He went to Lenoir-Rhyne and played football all four years, then got into education. He was a head coach at a few stops in the late 70's and early 80's, mostly in football before coming to Hickory High School as an assistant in the mid 80's and becoming head football coach in 1994. In 1996, Hickory went an undefeated 16-0, winning the state's 3-A championship and dominating opponents that people still talk about to this day (7 shutouts including the playoffs, scoring 30 or more points in every game, winning a first round playoff game 70-16, their third game with over 70 points that season and winning the state championship game 42-0). Oh yeah, he also coached three girls basketball state championships (1995, 1998, 1999) going 31-1 in 1998 and a perfect 32-0 in 1999.

When he was hired at WHKY in the summer of 2006, I asked him if I should call him David, or how he wanted me to address him. He said that he's been called Coach just about his whole life now, that he wonders if some people actually think his first name is Coach. I usually just call him Coach! He is so popular around town that we have to arrive at the broadcast site at least two hours before game time so that Coach has time to talk to EVERYONE there before we go on the air. At an impressive height of over six feet five and a biscuit short of 300 (according to Coach himself), it is no doubt that he will attain legend status very soon.

His wife, Cindy, is a school teacher and has lived in Long View all her life. In fact, where they live right now is some three to four blocks away from where she was raised. Needless to say they know this area!

Anyways, we called up Coach that Saturday afternoon and asked if we could get a tour of the town. After navigating through the northeast section of Hickory including a driver license check point,we identified his house as the one with the big red pick up. We knew it was gonna be good when he told his wife to come because she knew the area better.

Coach and Jason jumped in the front with Cindy and Nancy in the back (nope, not the pick up fortunately). We had to have gone down most every street in Long View. As you will later read, we can say with confidence now that they did not take us down every street. We can also say that if we had been taking notes, we could tell you where just anybody who is anybody in Long View lives. This includes where they used to live, where they live now, where their kids live, why they moved, and what kind of milk they buy. Here are some of the more classic lines from the adventure through Long View with Coach.

Cindy-"The closer you are to the railroad tracks, the more transient the population is."

Cindy-"Um, you were supposed to turn back there."
Coach-"I'm trying to get to the houses over there. It's just up here."
About two miles later, we turned around and went back to the turn we missed. At least we got to see the rec center, walking track, and runway for the busy Hickory airport. We can say that there are some very impressive views out that way. Jason just isn't so thrilled about the part where things fall out of the sky.

Coach-"If you go to West End Barbeque, they have the best breakfast and an all women staff."

Cindy-"Whoa! Watcha doin? You can't turn on red here!"
Coach-"I knew that. I just don't read the signs."

Seriously, though, they were very helpful in showing us where the Food Lion was, the schools, and what parts of Long View to avoid (as you will later read, we obviously didn't listen too well). We did find a few prospects to look into further. We also had a blast hearing all of the stories and learning about what Long View means to them. We got a really good feeling about moving to the area after our afternoon with them.

Next time: Thanksgiving in Wytheville with Grandpa (we didn't burn anything this year!) and thoughts from the patriarch on homebuying and the houses we have already seen.