Cheetah Photos!

Yeah that's me in the enclosure with the cheetah. As part of Gaels Birthday present we went on a Zoom tour at the Auckland Zoo. You get to go behind the scenes and get very close to the animals. The cheetahs at Auckland zoo were chosen to be ambassadors for the species and were hand reared. (if you've been watching the zoo TV show you'll know all about it) About 1/2 the cost of the Zoom tour goes directly to conserving these beautiful cats in the wild, and the other 1/2 goes to the zoo. Its all nerves when you first step inside their habitat, but it was a hot day and the cats were pretty relaxed. I think by the end of all our session all our therapeutic petting had put them to sleep!

Its unconditional!

We can move in on the 14th of December. I really thought I'd feel way more excited, but mostly I just feel tired! All the stress of getting everything organised has probably taken its toll, but now all we have to do is wait 3 weeks, pack and move in!!! Yay!

Boing boing, take twice daily

BoingBoing is a blog which is updated frequently. It highlights areas of quirky design interest on the web, gross injustices of the web word, and real life injustice such as being arrested at the airport for having a rubber band ball. Visit twice daily for best results.

Its a best of the web blog. Very neato.

Hey that reminds me!

It was Sondras Birthday on Tuesday! Happy belated birthday Aunty S!

House Thing going well

Just got all our reports in! LIM, Valuation and Building inspection. Its all good people.
Except the piles for the deck. Seems the owners did a DIY fixit on the old ones. urgh. Not so pretty. Anyway a friend of mine happens to have a husband who is a structural engineer. Overkill maybe, but he's going to take a look at it on Sunday for us. Other problems include a 46 year old roof and a few bits of wood that need replacing. Just typical stuff for a house of that age. Structurally its fine and it passed the moisture test.

Anyway here is a pun to lighten the mood.

Oi you lot!

I've had just about anough of this anonymous comment posting. Show yerselves! or at least sign your entries ;-) Hey who can guess who this is?

And it goes on and on

All your bases are belong to us!

Oh the memes of teh internet. This is being boinged lots.

First check out this.

Then you can read the explanation here.


l33t hAx0R .... or something.


More cats here (just for you Jamie)

Conditional Offer Accepted

Wooooooooooo the lawyers have our money. as my favourite saying about lawyers and money goes............
"AAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHH!
As we all know the weather has been crap in Auckland for the last few weeks....er months and when we first looked at this place its blowing a gale and persisting down. Despite the grey day I knew this was the house as soon as I walked in. The photos on trademe really dont do it justice. It gets heaps of light and is warm. It has wooden floors upstairs and carpet downstairs. the split level thing is really appealing, especially with Z's boys entering the teenage years!
I've been to see it twice, it doesn't need fixing up, but there is room to develop things ;-)
Its a house that fits our personality, we've been to look at some many boring little boxes! So nobody panic, we love it, its cheap, it has threee huge bedrooms and a study.
We go unconditional in seven days depending on building inspection, LIM and a valuation by QV.
Oh and finance. Its so crazy though, we had approval for a loan $40,000 more than this place, but the repayments were ridiculous and it would take forever to start paying off any decent amount of principal! So with this loan we are borrowing $349,000. We are going with fixed interest for the first year, that way the repayment amount is fixed and it gives us time to adjust to mortgage repayments that are about twice what we pay in rent now. Then if we find we can budget well (and interest rates dont get too high) we will move to a revolviong credit mortgage. That way we can pay it off a lot faster.
Oh and our mortgage broker has been FANTASTIC!!!!! She has gone above and beyond, been able to answer more of our questions than our dumb arse lawyer and always makes time to talk us through our newbie questions. She has taken calls from us at all hours and has always been cheerful and helpful and convinced a bank to lend us a ridiculous amount of money.
Raywyn Watson of Mortgage Express 09 4261210
She covers orewa and North Shore areas. Highly recommended!

Whew, all this legal law stuff is exhausting!

Here is the house.

Its a private sale, so I thought things would be easier, but frankly its still a nightmare. Lots of lawyering done today. Anyway our offer is in, its the asking price so that should be no worries, the only worry is the settlement date. We want to do everything by the book and get LIM reports etc, but the vendor is really rushing us! Argh!

Stress is my friend

So tomorrow I "helping" with the NorthShore Laboratory Conference. I will be the geek sitting up the front working the projector and laptop. I am so cool. But Instead of focusing on that all I can think of is the House. Capitilised because I love it. So we have made an offer on a place and now its just waiting, LIM reports, building inspections and finalising the mortgage.
I never expecting buying a house to be this tedious. I just want to walk up to a place and say "Yes, I'll take it!" and then have my people talk to their people while I go to the beach and drink mojitos all day.

ok new plan

New plan, yep, buy something cheap. That is the new plan.

Oh well, I am off to Taupo for the weekend for a conference so I can't look at houses. But I am sending my hubby out to investigate a few.
Apparently this is "A first home combination thats impossible to resist". Which could be good, depends on how much traffic noise it gets. It seems pretty close to constellation drive. And the sewage settlement ponds.. ARGH! smelly? who can say.

And this is a solid character 1960s Bungalow.

Both homes are nice, cheap and cheerful looking. So I am sending Zed to the open homes.

Or perhaps a Family home on a full site? Its bit further away than we would like. But seems solid. I'm not sure what the area is like though

OH so many factors to consider. Anyway Im off to Taupo, lectures and boozy dinners with sales reps. Fun Fun Fun.

Im not sure I trust that real estate agent.

When they say the vendors are looking for a price between blah(low figure) and blah(high figure) what they really mean is that they are looking for the high figure. Talk about wasting our time with negotiations. If some one says I want between 10 and 20 dollars for this book, you might offer 15 or 18 to seal the deal. But you have no hope when actually they wanted $20 all along. I found the real estate agent to be very misleading (oh big suprise!).

Look forward to my next exciting installment where I complain some more!!!!!

Well we went as high as we could go

And they still wanted 5 grand more. We cant really go any higher. So we are not sure what to do now. I totally feel like they are just playing us to see if they can get more money, but we have already come up substantially on our initial offer. We are already pushing our repayment capabilities to the max.
Wow this house buying business is frustrating. I just wish they had said from the start what they want rather than wasting our time with all this negotiating crap.
Well it looks like we miss out on this place. We just have to say no. So its back to looking at open homes for us. Oh the humanity!!

In the meantime....

I am reading the internet, yes all of it, page by page. I think I may dedicate my life to this great pursuit.

Our ailing communities
I like this article. Its nice to see a doctor being concerned about town planning. Something that has ever existed in Auckland. So I am very interesting to learn more about this so called "planning of towns".

Looking good

Well its looking good, we have met somewhere in the middle, we have come up they have come down and its a price we are happy with. (And still plenty under our limit!! yay!!) The offer has only been put to one half of the landlords as the other half is at work, but we should get a call round 6ish to confirm everything.
I am so confident I even have a bottle of bubbly waiting in the fridge!

Negotiations

So we are about 40,000 apart on what we think this house is worth versus what the landlords think its worth. Crazy considering we have lived here for 2 years and have a complete knowledge of this houses faults and so on. So the negotiations continue and I develop an ulcer. Argh!