![Reviewed: Your First Home [Book]](http://www.meetmyuglybaby.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/your-first-150x150.jpg)
This year – less ingenue, more ingenuity. Plenty of books to help me out… and I’ll review them as I go. First, fittingly, Your First Home by Gary Keller (2008) Premise: A high school guidance counsellor tone, “Yes you CAN buy your first home!!! Here’s how!” “The $400 you spend inspecting a house you don’t buy may be [...]
OMGOMGOMGOMG. It’s so ugly. We’ve been looking – for months – for an apartment to renovate. We finally saw the potential ugly baby today, the ugly house with no listing photos. It’s so ugly. So ugly I laughed when I saw the bathroom. Actual LOLZ. So frightfully hideous I couldn’t stop smiling. A group of well-heeled Chinese [...]
House hunting takes a very long time. 60 days into our search and I’m realising it would have been better spent walking to Key West. Maybe I could have picked up some Detroit real estate along the way. I hate house hunting. No, really. I had no idea it would take this long to find an ugly [...]
While I’m looking for the ugliest house out there, agents are working against me – trying to sell properties for their beauty and features. Spinning not-so-great things as wunderbar. Endless talk of gorgeous, stunning, and spectacular. No. All wrong. I want anti-stunning. No stunning. It can have good bones, even benefits (light! bright! spacious!) but [...]
Meet the worst realtor yet. I had to, so… so do you. As our weekends of non-stop Vancouver open houses continue, I’m starting to miss the beach. I think realtors are feeling it too. Still, I’m not getting paid to be there. This weekend we met Bro-Man Baseball Dude, destined for memory as Canada’s worst realtor. Really the [...]
Since our apartment-stalking became an earnest, all-consuming hunt, I imagine we’ve read over a hundred potential listings. Ones that – on paper – fit our needs and requirements: It correctly answers my 5 ugly house hunting rules And meets our 3 main requirements. And yet this is the suckiest, most heart-wrenching hunt ever. I hate [...]
We’ve barely started and already apartment hunting kinda sucks. Where’s the eBay “buy now” button? We’re not used to looking and waiting anymore. The search criteria we gave Agent Awesome make it seem that we’ll settle for just any apartment, if the price and ugly factor are right. Not so. Girl’s gotta have standards, even when her [...]
It’s time to get our search on. With a mortgage pre-approval already in place, we had to give Agent Awesome some basic parameters. We only plan to stay in the apartment 1 year; We want it as ugly as he can find it. That’s structurally sound, no nasty surprises, just really ugly. Our criteria will differ slightly from a [...]
To quote Weezer at their finest: If you want it, you can have it. But you’ve got to learn to reach out there and grab it. While others speak of loving their house; we’re in it to win it. Vancouver is, officially, the best place on earth – it’s also amongst the most expensive. For things that [...]
