gina and neil's first house

Oh, heck yeah: it's the holidays again

2010-10-02T18:11:00.000-07:00

The past two years I've waited until November to begin obsessing over the holidays. Well, this year I went all Kohl's style and started fixating on Thanksgiving and this year's room to-do by September.

It's not that I've become better at planning. If you didn't already know, I fractured both my legs this summer overtraining and have had a little more obsession capacity than usual.

Worry not: I will compete in the Turkey Trot ProCup on Thanksgiving. It wouldn't be ThanksG without it! My pops and Neil will prove to be much more formidable competition this year. Not to mention I started training from scratch (!) just two weeks ago.

But the important thing: Thanksgiving dinner.

How, oh, how will I torture everyone this year?

Well, third year should be the charm. I think after last year's disaster, I've learned enough to make this year a game changer. In fact, I've already decided this year's menu:

Champagne and butter cookies.

I'm only half kidding.

Actually, I've decided this year I'm "hiring out" to serve up the basics — savory turkey breast with traditional mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, orange-cranberry relish and gravy will come from my local Whole Foods.

It seems so wrong, doesn't it?

Truth is: I'm admitting defeat. Turns out, I don't make the basics as basic as they need to be to suit the whole audience. I waste.... spend so much time prepping these ill-received basics that I run out of time for what I consider the tasty treats. Then I run over on serving time. Things get cold. Tempers get hot. I'm a problem-solver. So, Whole Foods it is.

The plus side is now I have all that time back! What's on extended menu?

Well, champagne and butter cookies.

I'm only half kidding.

We're starting with drinks: champagne mojitos and sangria. While I fully intend to have dinner ready when everyone arrives, I fully anticipate not everyone will arrive at the same time. So, drinks are in order.

So are a couple bready appetizers, which will carry over to the dinner table. And, of course, butter cookies.

Then we're off. Here's the full menu:

drinks
Champagne mojitos
Rose sangria with cranberries and apples

appetizers-turned-table-fare
Porcini tartlets
Prosciutto-fig w/ gorgonzola flatbread

the bird
Traditional savory turkey breast with stuffing and gravy

grains
Lemony Israeli couscous with olives and pine nuts
Pumpkin risotto

plants
Corn pudding
Apple cider sweet potatoes
"Cheesy" potatoes from my mom
Big-ass green salad
Broccoli with ancho butter
Traditional mashed potatoes
Traditional green beans
Traditional cranberry-orange relish

happy endings
Chocolate raspberry swiss roll
Traditional pumpkin pie
Capirotada — gingersnap and candied jalapeno bread pudding with poblano whipped crema (a la momocho) and salsa verde

Jalapeno breading pudding and swiss roll aside, I've made each dish before and know the process and approximate times. Many of these dishes, including the swiss roll, can be prepped the day before, which will help with the day-of race. And I don't mean the foot race!

The difficult part this year, however, is control.

Yes, I know last year I learned very much about losing control — let us never speak again of the turkey hijacking again (although it did teach me that no one cares what flavor of turkey they're eating, so I'm not wasting my time anymore). But this year I'm aiming to not waddle away from the dinner ten pounds heavier than when I sat down.

Hence the champagne and butter cookies menu.

I'm still only half kidding.

Last week I began the long-term process of adjusting my eating habits, changing the way I conceive of being full, improving my exercise routines and trying to lose 15 pounds I don't need. I'd like to lose one pound a week for the next 15 weeks and learn how not to be a pig when I eat in the process (so I can keep it off).

Thanksgiving will be somewhere between weeks nine and ten. I won't be a happy camper if I have to start from scratch!

Considering the "lighter" load this year, I'd like to be more relaxed this year... with my champagne and cookies in hand.

All this said, I stopped by Lowe's today in search of paint. The room of the year: family room.

Right now it's a mishmash of colors, fabrics and one helluva fireplace mantel. It's actually going to be the marquee room at this year's festivities &mash; we're moving the dining room table into the family room for the meal so there's more room, a fireplace and no need to dork up our pretty living room.

We're thinking gray. But gray, as you well know, isn't just a boring color anymore. It's a nuanced mystery of warm, cool and neutral tones that makes you question which way is up. And we've only just begun.

onto the next set of holidays

2009-12-13T12:45:00.000-08:00

While we're done hosting for the season, I'm still spending way too much time thinking about decorating. But it seems appropriate for today: I've festivized our house with twinkle lights, bowls of ornaments and tiny Christmas tree (photos to come).

As I keep my decorating mind ticking, however, I find myself drawn to the family room, whose decor will be left up to Neil and his design genius. I try to pass bright ideas his way, and he politely bats them down. (We have a tendency to do that to each other.)

Neil's a tad conservative in his decorating tastes, so you can imagine his enthusiasm when I recommended this rug for our family room:

Perfect for the space in front of our fireplace! I don't think it will make it to his final round of objects de decor. But you can find it on etsy.

thanksgiving 2009, part two: on the plus side

2009-11-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

But enough of the self-debriefing. Thanksgiving 2.0 was an awesome day. Not only did I make dinner for two families, I ate more food than two families might consume in a week. And it was all delicious.

One of the difficult parts about preparing Thanksgiving is that by the time you hit the table, you’re not at all hungry. This year was no exception.

It started with a smooth-but-chunky crab dip with fresh herbs, which I ate constantly throughout the morning with slices from a fresh baguette. How I ended up sharing any of it is a mystery to me. I wasn’t surprised it was a hit with the party. While I was a little heartbroken… in a good way.

Then I overdosed on some homemade fleur de sel caramels and hazelnut profiteroles (aside: I lost my mascarpone cheese and lost track of the morning, so I whipped up a frangelico-ricotta cream with crushed hazelnuts and paired it with dollops of nutella to fill pastry puffs) with grapes before the crowds arrived.

My fingers dabbled in the pan-remains of heavenly potatoes, shitake stuffing and sweet potatoes with apple cider as I prepared the collection of dishes for dinner. I had a good 2-3 hours of pre-eating before we sat down for the big event!

I had assumed others had indulged just as much, but I think some guests weren’t as into the appetizing scene as I. (Note taken.) The new soup arrangement—served about 45 minutes before the sit-down dinner—however, went over well. And my mom’s chicken dumpling (“magic”) soup was the Thanksgiving rock star I knew it would be.

Then a weird thing happened: when the turkey breasts arrived from my mom’s house (my dad delivered the Alsatian-brined whole bird 1.5 hours earlier), suddenly male turkey aficionados flooded my kitchen. They knew how to cut the turkey, they knew what they were doing, they knew how it should served. I was elbowed out of my kitchen.

Frustrated and oh-so tired, I grabbed a bottle of champagne, filled my glass, emptied my glass, filled it again and took my seat at the head of the table. And waited.

It didn’t dawn on me until… this morning that in all the madness surrounding the turkey carving that I neglected to actually finish the birds!

The tangerine glazed never made it near the bird; I don’t know that the Riesling gravy was paired with the Alsatian turkey; who knows whether the chile-rubbed breast boasted of ancho deliciousness. All the meat was just slapped onto a single platter and delivered. Turkey experts my butt.

But since I don’t drink, the glass of champagne left the beginnings of dinner a little foggy. I delivered another underwhelming pre-dinner prayer (Thanks to everyone for being here and thanks to our respective higher authorities for all the great things we have in life, including love of our friends and family. I’m thankful for all of us that we have relatively miniscule things to worry about in life. My dad asked that I give a much better prayer than I said last year, but I had champagne, so: good food, good meat, good lord: let’s eat!) and plopped only a few bites of food on my plate before chatting up Neil’s grandmother, uncle and parents, who were quietly sitting on my end of the long table.

Minute after minute, however, I had to keep getting up because we had forgotten something (if only I hadn’t ditched the list by 3 p.m.!). Can we have the salt and pepper? Do you have more ice? Where the shrimp?

Every year, Neil’s uncles come equipped with dozens of jumbo cocktail shrimp and sauce. I pulled out the foil-wrapped plates from the refrigerator, and sweet Jessica helped me open the sauce bottles. We were struggling getting the lids open and wondered what we were doing wrong. And as I strongarm-tugged the thing open with abandon, my bottle flew open… and all over Jessica’s shirt and sweater.

Oh, I’m such a jerk.

She beautiful wardrobe-changed into a wasabi-colored cashmere bateau from my closet (and then a backup shirt from her car—she was like a glamorous award-show host) and didn’t even threaten to beat me up for ruining her clothes. As she should have.

Just when I sat down and started telling the fam about Neil’s big race, Landon surprised us with a visit! I was probably a little loopy—from the day, the exhaustion, the excitement, the champagne—for the first 30 minutes he was there, but it was too cool to see him.

Before I knew it, though, the table was being cleared and Neil’s family was packing up to go home (it wasn’t even 8 p.m.!) as my cousin Gabriella and her Mr. Ivan were just coming in.

Gone was the intermission with café cubano and strawberry shooter, chocolate jalapeno gelato and blood orange sorbet. The chocolate tart and fig-blackberry-pear crisp sat in the fridge untouched. My mom’s bread pudding was scooped informally from her pan on the stove. All our elegance and order out the window. Was I really hosting a Thanksgiving with people leaving before dessert?

If the night had ended then, I would have probably been bummed with failure today. But Landon stuck around a long while. Gabriella, Ivan, Jessica, my mom and I toured the house, sipping various coffees and drinks, talking about art and design. My dad played Risk with Neil, his brother Joe and Joe’s chica Corinne. And many of my 10,000 dishes got magically cleaned by two wonderful elves.

By the time the house was cleared, I lasted five minutes before I was in bed. Neil and I woke up at 5 a.m. to walk to Radio Shack for his new Garmin. Then I slept until noon (so unlike me) to recover from Thanksgiving 2009. And we made it until 2 p.m. before we started planning for next year.

thanksgiving 2009, part one: hitches + lists

2009-11-27T10:52:00.000-08:00

One of the most fun things to show people on Thanksgiving is my to-do list.

By the beginning of the week, I always have a day-by-day list of things to complete (from hitting certain stores to cleaning particular rooms) up to Wednesday night, and then a down-to-the-half-hour to-do leading to dinnertime on Thursday. This year was no exception.

Except, of course, that the plan was totally derailed by 2 p.m.

But first: the morning. My alarm sounded at 6 a.m. I was scheduled to bake corn cakes, fill profiteroles and cut potatoes before the Turkey Trot, but when I opened my eyes I could barely move. While I’d had only four hours of sleep, it was the standing for 20 hours that really made me hurt. My knees, my feet, my back throbbed and swelled. Run? Really?

It took me a good hour of five-minutes snoozes (mostly because Neil was ready to kill me) to slump out of bed. I didn’t bake, fill or cut anything. I just got dressed, picked up my pops and hit the Turkey Trot with two of my favorite boys (read about the race).

We made it home on schedule, and I had most of the appetizers on the table by the time Neil’s family showed at 2:30 p.m. Then the time warp happened. Somehow 4 p.m. arrived, and I was just getting around to the prosciutto risotto!

I kept everyone really well fed with the crab dip, profiteroles, spinach-and-tofu dumplings, bruschetta and Jessica’s olive dip, followed by my mom’s chicken dumpling soup. But the whole turkey was delivered shortly before 4 p.m. and most of the sides were ready and waiting.

Sure, from an appetite perspective turkeys going long wasn’t bad. Everyone had been eating a while. But I could feel impatience building. Instead of seeing me, they imagined an old-style cartoonish roasted turkey bouncing around the kitchen. It’s my annual serve-late plan to trick Neil’s family into hanging out, spending quality time.

But this year’s two hours might have been too much.

Little excitement greeted the meal at the table. When the 3-4 talkers weren’t sitting, the room fell silent. No one really ooh’ed or ahh’ed anything.

There’s a huge learning curve to scale when catering to two very different audiences. How can I create a single event for one crowd that likes to mingle and another that eats and goes? What do I serve when things I think are “normal” are outside another’s box? Where’s the happy medium that won’t make me feel like I’m overwhelmed by an underwhelming occasion?

Neil highlighted a good point today: I made shiitake-seeduction bread stuffing; his brother asked where the Stove Top was. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Perhaps year three will be the charm.

it came, we ate, i conquered

2009-11-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

I woke up at six this morning, ran a 5-mile race and prepared an evening of food and wine for a total of 20 people. Somehow, even though I had about three bites of food once dinner hit the table, I'm filled to the brim. And now I must sleep.

thanksgiving eve

2009-11-25T20:52:00.001-08:00

After trying to sleep an extra 30 minutes (it was so perfect: cool, calm morning, raindrops hitting the window), I hopped out of bed around 7:30 a.m. to get Thanksgiving eve under way. I took the day off work, and, let's just say, this was no vacation!

I hit a few stores for last-minute stuff before hitting my dad's house to brine the turkey. Then I rushed home to cook, prep, whip, blend, braise, mix, brown, melt and bake everything in sight. But even after 19 hours, I'm still less than halfway done.

Much of today's time, though, was spent flipping between cooking and house projects. I finished the bathroom and dressed up our room. While I didn't have a chance to think about my disaster room (we'll call that one storage), I did get most of the downstairs looking swell for the big day.

The only downside to the large crowd is that I've had to condense my living room layout beyond recognition (our dining room is big enough for 10-12, but seating 18-20 needs a room and a half!). So, it was a little heartbreaking to shuffle the furniture placements I'd spent so long tweaking. At least we didn't take time to hang stuff on the walls.

Over these 19 hours, I think I've sat a total of two minutes. My knees, feet and back feel abused... and aren't shutting up about it. Getting up early to do pre-race prep will be almost as interesting (it's just about midnight now) as actually running the Turkey Trot.

Racing five miles is pretty far from my conceivable abilities right now. Only time will tell. Besides, it's only a race. If I don't PR, I don't PR. I will still eat. A lot.

What's promising to be delicious so far: 1) The heavenly potatoes, it turns out, are quite heavenly. They haven't been baked yet, but I'm guessing we'll end up with a casserole-sized twice-baked potatoish type dish. It's very cream, smooth and good. 2) Spinach-tofu dumplings w/ jalapeno and sesame oil were light, refreshing and appetizing... perfect for an appetizer. 3) Have I shrieked enough yet about the ancho butter? 4) I'm making up the chocolate macadamia tart as I go along. So far it has a chocolate crust with a fudgey brownie-like filling, topped with homemade buttery caramel and chopped macadamias. I'm thinking about topping it with a light, refreshing mousse, some berries and maybe a little cream.

At least I won't be lacking food energy when I race in the morning. Now, if I could have just loaded on some of that sleep.

an ancho minute

2009-11-24T20:38:00.000-08:00

Pardon the interruption. If you try nothing else to test your cholesterol this fall/winter, make this recipe: roasted broccoli w/ ancho butter.

Sure, it's 3/4 butter, but the smoky ancho peppers blend so smoothly with the robust flavors of toasted pine nuts that you'll want to ignite a log in the fireplace and open holiday presents. It's that good.

But the best is yet to come: I've only made the butter. I haven't yet roasted the broccoli with it. That report will come on Thursday. The family won't mind if I type as I eat, right?

t minus two days

2009-11-24T19:39:00.000-08:00

Whole Foods: check! Heinen's: check! Bathroom touch-up paint: check!

I have everything I need for Turkey Day, except for prosciutto and fresh baguettes. Oh, and a clean house. Both will have to be done on Wednesday.

It was surprising to see how many people already had wild Thanksgiving looks on their faces at the stores today. Granted, there was no elbowing for the good-looking turkey breasts I picked up this evening, but I did feel like I had to push my way through the baking aisle. I can't imagine whose knees I'll have to take out to get the bread tomorrow.

For now, however, I'm softening some ancho peppers in hot water, preparing to brine my turkey breasts and do some make-ahead steps on the ancho-butter broccoli. I'm new to this ancho scene, so these dishes should be interesting.

Please just remind me not to rub my eyes too soon after cutting the peppers: I pulled that mistake the first time I played with habaneros. (Shudder.) One of these days I'll wise up and get some gloves.

For now, where's that brining bag....?

three days to go: menu #1 it is!

2009-11-23T17:33:00.000-08:00

After an almost unanimous feedback vote, menu #1, featuring the Alsatian-brined turkey, champagne mojitos and dulche bread pudding (among many others), has been crowned feast of the year.

Now the real work begins.

I've already begun tidying the house—somehow that always means it gets much more messy before anything gets better— and finishing some decorating touches, including window film, artwork and, of course, bathroom painting.

It's just my luck, though, that our second bathroom's walls don't seem to like paint. After a thorough priming and two coats of paint, the edges are messy from paint seeping through the tape, and some chunks of the walls look drippy and uneven. Sigh.

On the plus side: I've painted the bathroom an appley warm olive hue that I'm going to dress up with bejeweled accessories, like studded picture frames, rhinestone curtain rings and other dainty things. It's a confusing color, that "bamboo leaves" green. Part masculine, part regal, part mid-1970s. But like most other borderline ugly/beautiful things, I totally dig it.

I picked up the bathroom paint on my wild Sunday trip around Northeast Ohio, making grocery trip #1 (of three) to Trader Joe's. Whole Foods and Heinen's to follow. I've been really lucky so far finding most of the things I need for Thursday. But it has only just begun.

Because I'm cooking big time for the feast, I'm intending on not cooking much at all this week. So, I just returned from a five-mile run and will feast my chompers on... High Fiber O's from Trader Joe's.

Talk about gourmet.

countdown continues: 7 days...

2009-11-19T23:09:00.000-08:00

A week ago I never thought whittling down the longlist was possible. But all week in jury duty without Web access and nine menus later, I've landed the following three menu options (in no particular order):

menu one
the drink: Champagne mojitos

the starters: Warm crab dip w/ fresh herbs; Hazelnut profiteroles w/ blue cheese + grapes; and Spinach + tofu dumplings

the soup: Spicy parsnip

the whole turkey: Alsatian-brined turkey w/ riesling gravy

the stuffing: Shiitake mushroom seeduction stuffing

the two breasts: Jalapeno + paprika-rubbed; Tangerine-glazed

the sides:
Heavenly potatoes
Mashed sweet potatoes w/ apple butter
Prosciutto parmesan risotto
Lemony quinoa salad w/ pine nuts + olives
Maple-ginger-roasted vegetables w/ pecans
Roasted broccoli w/ acho butter
Swiss chard gratin w/ toasted bread crumbs
Corn cakes w/ spiced cranberries
Curried peaches + butternut squash w/ ricotta + almonds

intermission: Cafe cubano; Chilled strawberry shooters w/ mint cream + vanilla crisps; and Sweet chestnut + rosemary ice cream

the sweet endings:
Chocolate macadmia tart
Dulche de leche bread pudding w/ juicy baked plums
Fig, blackberry + pear crisp

menu two
the drink: Rose Sangria w/ cranberries + apples

the starters: Porcini tapioca; Baked peaches w/ almond paste; Shrimp + chorizo flatbread; and Curried sweet potato shooters

the soup: Mom's chicken dumpling

the whole turkey: Roasted turkey w/ figs + muscat gravy

the stuffing: Prosciutto-bread stuffing

the two breasts: Maple-glazed turkey breast w/ bourbon-pecan gravy; Hickory-smoked turkey breast w/ apple slaw

the sides:
Mashed potato w/ horseradish cream
Vanilla-bean whipped sweet potatoes
Polenta gratin w/ spinach + wild mushrooms
Butternut squash risotto w/ chestnuts
Grill-roasted vegetables w/ pine nut pesto
Braised kale w/ cranberry brown butter
Champagne-roasted cauliflower w/ gruyere
Cranberry-grapefruit conserve

intermission: Trader Joe's Wintry Blend; Mexican hot chocolate; Blackberry napoleon

the sweet endings:
Rustic pear + hazelnut crostada
Strawberry basil bread pudding
Harvest mousse w/ spiced almond tuiles

menu three
the drink: Blood orange margaritas

the starters: Rosemary flatbread w/ blue cheese, grapes + honey; Coconut-lemongrass chicken spring roll; and Texas smoked salmon tartare

the soup: Chestnut soup w/ grappa cream

the whole turkey: Roasted turkey w/ lemon + chives

the stuffing: Wild mushroom whole wheat stuffing w/ tarragon

the two breasts: Indian-spiced turkey breast w/ cilantro-yogurt sauce; Chile-roasted turkey breast

the sides:
Herbed potato gratin w/ roasted garlic + manchego
Mashed sweet potatoes w/ apple cider
Toasted coconut basmati rice
Pea, mint + feta risotto
Spiced veggies w/ pomegranate seeds
Crisp salmon w/ avocado salad
Creamed spinach + parsnips
Caramelized broccoli w/ garlic
Gingered cranberry sauce w/ spicy pumpkin seeds

intermission: Espresso; Tangy mint + pomegranate refresher; Peach ginger ice cream blondies

the sweet endings:
Fig + raspberry tart w/ chestnut honey
Banana bread + butter pudding
Indian pudding

You'll notice that I didn't decorate any of the menus with fancy dish photos or anything that might campaign for taste buds in an unfair manner. I'll be finalizing the menu choice and its modifications by Saturday morning! Please let me know your thoughts or last-minute recommendations.

Our guest list looks to be settling at 17, so it's time for table measurements and tableware procurement. I'm only a little bummed that Neil's family won't get to see our living room in its natural glory (the table-for-17 will displace some of the current setup), but a huge Thanksgiving is totally worth it.

And when I'm done with eating Thanksgiving, I might be displacing some of it too.

countdown begins: 14 days to go...

2009-11-12T19:58:00.000-08:00

I cannot tell a lie: I’ve been excited about Thanksgiving 2.0 since about March.

And by March, I mean the day after Thanksgiving last year. Maybe even during last year’s dessert.

In case you didn’t think it was possible, it’s even bigger this year: at least 16 on the guest list! It might also be time to start thinking about chairs.

First: the food.

Over the past several months, I’ve collected all the tasty dishes—from starting flatbreads, warming soups and sparkling drinks to turkey types, veggie greens and sweet finishes—in the running for this year’s final menu. (Check out last year’s menu.)

Because I’ve managed to unfold the unabridged list on a full stomach, I can’t promise this list won’t grow. It’s hard to naturally taste what goes with what when your stomach’s just not growling and telling you what’s right.

It really looks like a crazy number of dishes, but there’s plenty of time to carve the perfect menu… and get feedback. So, please feel free to leave feedback in the comments. (Note: I will include some traditional dishes that aren't listed here. Worry not. Neil.)

Here’s the full rundown of ROUND ONE Thanksgiving 2009 possibilities (including about 60 new items I've added since initial post):

first to get the party started...
amuse-bouche
When you're arranging dinner for a larger number of people, you can't expect everyone to arrive at the same time (or even on time). We also want to encourage Neil's fam to hang out a little longer, so having starters ready when they walk in (alongside a card table and football on TV) will be key. Some ideas:

Bella mushroom tartlets
Pear bruschetta w/hazelnut cream
Baby artichokes stuffed w/ crab salad
Shrimp + chorizo flatbreads
Fresh goat cheese + crispy shallot dip
Hazelnut profiteroles w/blue cheese + grapes
Andouille-and-sweet-potato pie w/ tangle apple salad
Palestinian spinach pie
Warm crab dip w/fresh herbs
Texas smoked salmon tartare on blue corn chips
Bakes peaches w/almond paste
Rosemary flatbread w/blue cheese, grapes + honey
Spinach and shrimp salad w/chile dressing
Plum clafouti*
Porcini tapioca*
Leek, baby broccoli, smoked salmon + goat cheese tart*
Fresh fig mini pies w/honey mascarpone cream*
Midgetized BLT w/roasted tomato confit + ginger aioli*
Bacon + onion tartlets*
Curried sweet potato shooters*
Spinach + tofu dumplings*

drinks
Sure, I may not drink myself, but some people on T-day might benefit from a little loosening. In all areas, drinks included, we'll have some standards, in addition to all this dreamy stuff, such as:

Rose Sangria w/cranberries + apples
Blood orange margaritas
Sparkling pomegranate punch
Cranberry caipirinha
Champagne mojitos
Sticky toffee pudding eggnog
Plum green tea martini*
Ginger shiso sour*

then we sit down, gather 'round and indulge...
soup
Last year I worked long and hard on a delicious mushroom soup. But when some people just pushed it aside and dug into the main courses, I felt a little defeated while realizing I'd have to question my soup strategy. If I don't start everyone with a bowl will they bother? We'll see which soup will garner the best tasting attention:

My mama's magic chicken dumpling soup
Pumpkin soup w/ creole lobster
Mushroom soup w/toasted bread
Chestnut soup w/grappa cream
Spicy parsnip soup*
Colombian chicken soup*
Avgolemono chicken soup w/rice*

birds
Let's face it: big turkeys are a big waste. Neil's brother requested more turkey this year—despite the glut of leftovers we had last year—but I know a bigger bird is not the answer. It's bigger breasts (isn't it always?).

For the sake of appearances, I'm getting one whole, decent-sized turkey this year and two big turkey breasts. The whole turkey will be roasted in some "traditional" flavor for the pilgrims, while the breasts will be wild with flavah!

The regular turkey options are:

Alsatian-brined turkey w/riesling gravy
Roasted turkey w/figs + muscat gravy
Roasted turkey w/lemon and chives

And the two big breasts? Maybe we'll have a family turkey breast throwdown to see who can make the best, with tastes like:

Maple-glazed bird w/bourbon-pecan gravy
Indian-spiced turkey with cilantro-yogurt sauce
Slow-smoked turkey breast w/cane syrup-coffee glaze
Tangerine-glazed bird
Pickled jalapeno-paprika-rubbed and roasted breast
Grilled, butterflied turkey w/caraway-acho gravy
Chile-roasted turkey w/sherry mushroom gravy*
Hickory smoked turkey breast w/apple+cabbage slaw*

stuff it, baby
I heart stuffing. In fact, I would pitch the whole dinner for a pan of stuffing. Whether it's fancy, made-from-fresh-but-expertly-staled-bread dressing with chestnuts and fine wine or even Stovetop (that's right), I'm a fan. It's warmth, it's fall, it's comfort, it's Thanksgiving, it's good. One of these will be good too:

Wild mushroom whole wheat stuffing w/tarragon
Proscuitto-bread stuff w/sausage
Shiitake mushroom and fresh herb stuffing
Garlic + olive oil-tossed seeduction bread stuffing
Chorizo corn bread stuffing
Chestnut stuffing w/fennel*

on your side
So many sides, so little time. We're talking , salads, potatoes, greens, grains and beyond. How to choose? Well, once the turkey and stuffing are selected, it might be easier to know what will go. Until then...

Potatoes (not including sweet):

Herbed potato gratin w/roasted garlic + manchego
Mashed potatoes w/horseradish cream
Good, old-fashioned mashed and lumpy with turkey-related gravy
Heavenly potatoes*
Mashed potatoes w/butternut squash*
Lemony salt-roasted fingerling potatoes*
Chantilly potatoes w/parmesan crust*
Baked potatoes w/wild mushroom ragu*
Herbed potatoe souffle*
Sausage-stuffed potato galette*

Sweet potatoes:

Vanilla bean-whipped sweet potatoes
Sweet potato gratin w/chile-spiced pecans
Sweet potatoes w/apple butter
Cranberry-glazed sweet potatoes
Sweet potato spoon bread
Mashed sweet potatoes w/apple cider*

Comfort, grain and rice:

Toasted coconut basmati rice
Butternut squash risotto w/chestnuts
Proscuitto risotto w/parmesan + cannelini beans
Polenta gratin w/spinach + wild mushrooms
Mashed winter squash w/Indian spices
Pea, mint + feta risotto*
Crispy ham + cheese polenta*
Lemony quinoa salad w/pine nuts + olives*
Farro + green bean salad*

Straight up veggies:

Root vegetables pan roasted w/chestnuts + apples
Maple-ginger-roasted venetables w/pecans
Grill-roasted vegetables w/pine nut pesto
Spiced veggies w/pomegranate seeds
Spicy heirloom radish salad*
Carrots, avocado + orange w/cumin*

Green:

Roasted brussel sprouts w/cranberry brown butter
Kale + water chestnut in curried cream
Spinach simmered in yogurt
Ensalada verde w/idiazabal cheese
Green salad w/tangy mustard vinaigrette
Braised kale
Spinach salad w/warm bacon vinaigrette
Creamed spinach + parsnips
Basil, plum + spinach salad
Roasted broccoli w/acho butter
Swiss chard gratin w/toasted bread crumbs
Sauteed beet greens w/sun-dried tomatoes + pancetta*
Brussel sprouts w/cranberries*
Kale w/currants, lemon + olives*

Sides that refuse to declare a party:

Cranberry sauce w/spiced pumpkin seeds (must have!)
Champagne-roasted cauliflower w/gruyere
Avocado relish w/caramelized onions
Crunchy baked fennel
Fragrant cauliflower in tomato sauce
Curried eggplant w/chickpeas + spinach
Fall harvest salad
Hot, buttered cauliflower
Baked, curried peaches w/ricotta + almonds*
Cranberry, clementine + pumpkin seed conserve*
Corn cakes w/spiced cranberries*
Cranberry-grapefruit conserve*
Cranberry-licorice compote*
Crisp salmon w/avocado salad*
Barley salad w/parsley + walnuts*
Beet, fennel and jicama salad w/macadamia nut dressing*

time to explode, recover or sleep...
down-time
Another crazy lesson I learned last year: these people don't eat until they drop. I was really surprised when, following dinner... and a while after it, that no one was gung-ho about dessert. Personally, I'd been counting down to it! This year, I'm planning for the down-time. The in-between. It might also make another slot for getting Neil's family to hang a bit longer. And to help them digest, refresh, chill and stay awake:

Trader Joe's Wintry Blend coffee
Ginger tea
Strawberry-mint frappe
Chai silk or latte
Espresso
Cafe cubano
Chilled strawberry soup shooters w/mint cream + vanilla crisps
Blackberry napoleon*
Peach ginger ice cream blondies*
Sweet chestnut + rosemary ice cream*
Chocolate mint cookies*
Mexican hot chocolate*
Tangy mint + pomegranate refresher*

who am I kidding? this is the main event...
sweets
I would make (and eat) every single one of these if I could. Perhaps, with a little training, I could some day. By this time next year, I will be an Iron[wo]man. Until then, some desserty ideas:

Pies, crostadas, tarts (oh my!):

Rustic pear + hazelnut crostada
Chocolate macadamia nut tart
Deep-dish apple pie w/cheddar crust
Poached pear and brown butter tart
Honeyed fig crostada
Granny Smith apple + brown butter custard tart
Fig+raspberry tart w/chestnut honey
Pumpkin cheesecake tart w/cranberry gelee
Sweet potato tart w/red wine caramel
Chilled grapefruit-caramel meringue pie

Bread pudding:

Pumpkin bread pudding w/caramel rum raisin sauce
Caramel bread pudding
Dulche de leche breading pudding w/juicy baked plums
Krispy Kreme bread pudding w/espresso whipped cream
Banana bread-and-butter pudding
Kemptville blueberry bread pudding
Bread pudding w/dried cranberries, vanilla + mint
Strawberry basil bread pudding*

Cakes and other fancy stuff:

Caramelized pumpkin trifle
Chestnut-chocolate mousse
Candied winter squash parfaits w/chocolate
Apple cake w/toffee crust
Pumpkin pudding w/mile-high meringue
Harvest mousse w/spiced almond tuiles
Indian pudding
Minty lime baked Alaska
Om Ali*
Arabian pancakes with orange-flower syrup*
Meringue + raspberry ice cream cake*
Apricot tea cakes*
Soft-centered chocolate puddings*
Caramel-pecan bars*
Goat cheese cheesecake w/honeyed cranberries*

Mostly fruit:

Confit of peaches w/mint
Minted melon w/vanilla granita + citrus yogurt
Fresh fruit wrapped in vanilla crepes
Plum-marsala sorbet*
Blueberries, bananas + nutella crepes*
Fig, blackberry + pear crisp*
Rhubarb + strawberry compote w/balsamic + ricotta*

I'm not sure whether narrowing down this collection into a balanced meal for 16 that honors tradition for some, excites palettes of others and flows delightfully from course to course will be any easier on an empty stomach. Good thing I've started "early"...

*New additions since 11/12

seeing the light, falling in love

2009-11-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

Don’t we all have an opinion about what changes a house? Some people think it’s the landscaping. Other people say the kitchen. More still say the floors.

OK, for me it is the kitchen. But a photo-finish close second: light fixtures.

While there was nothing wrong with the light fixtures in our house (well, the circa 1970 wicker-blade ceiling fans have not picked me up as a Facebook fan), I didn’t feel like any had the umph I wanted. So, I started to shop.

And at first I was afraid. I was petrified. I thought I couldn’t spend anything less than $1K to get better lights in my life.

Then came Etsy.

Now’s as good a time as any for me to come clean: my name is Gina and I’m an Etsy-addict. I can (and often do) spend hours scouring etsy.com looking for the 10,001 things I need/want as an eternal home decorator. Pillows, throws, artwork, wallpaper, curtains. You name it.

One of my best finds, however, was a crafty little lighting craftswoman who goes by the seller name myfinch. She sells lampshades, table lights, pendants and chandelier, and is totally worth a visit.

After we painted our kitchen, I wanted to find a light fixture that added some dark drama to the whimsy of our Tiffany blue. I found plenty of chandeliers with crystal beads and countless arms, but I needed to balance the drama and gothic charm with my more-simple aesthetic. Enter myfinch.

I can’t imagine how I decided to search etsy for chandeliers, but I looked for terms “black chandelier” and found myfinch’s Midnight Black Chandelier. Beautiful, affordable, clean. It was the perfect accessory for my kitchen. And when I ordered it last April, I wobbled between complete love and uncertainty about how it would look in my kitchen.

I gained a bit of confidence when I found various images on design blogs and décor magazine sites, featuring chandeliers in not-typically-chandeliery spaces, like the kitchen and bathroom. But my vision of my chandeliered kitchen wouldn’t be fully appreciated and realized until today.

Neil’s dad, Allen, visited us from Massilon today. He’s a crafty electrician who was nice enough to drive north, do a day’s worth of work (I also bought a clean, modern, white chandelier from myfinch for the dining room) in exchange for some proscuitto, fresh bread and a Main Street cupcake. Have you seen the commercial about paying people in gum? Well, we’re not too far off. And he’s awesome.

It was swell to see the two guys working together to hang these two light fixtures. And it was one of the first times in my life that an installation went off without a hitch. (Mr. B also installed our transformative, craftsman porch lights after we tried for weeks… to no avail. Photos of those lights to come.)

With that said, here are the beauties:

Black chandelier

White chandelier

I’ve really fallen in love with the way the black chandelier changes the mood of my kitchen. Spending so much time in my kitchen, I thought it was only appropriate (and awesome) to have something so pretty lighting up my life. Plus, I think it matures the color. I’ve waffled about changing the kitchen color—nothing major: just a little dulling or graying of the current shade—and now I feel secure in our blues.

The white chandelier replaces a brassy chandelier that was simple and not at all bad in its shape or lines. In fact, I’m thinking about refinishing the former light for use in another space. Aside from clean lines, the new chandelier brings a dash of white to the dining room, which has mostly dark tones, and ties it neatly with the living room.

What a difference some light fixtures make. I admit that now I’m looking around the house, wondering where I can hanging a chandelier next. But I have to be careful. And sensible. Neil might start hitting his head if we get too decked out… and our house might start looking like a chandelier store. Although there are worse things it could be.

For great lighting solutions, check out the myfinch studio:

what's that faux?

2009-11-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

Inactivity on my blog(s) belies the amount of activity in our house (and on the roads outside it) over the past year. And it’s almost Thanksgiving again!

Alongside the marathon and Ironman training, I’ve been trying to focus on my master’s thesis, but have spent plenty of time working on aspects of the house, like finding furniture, browsing for chandeliers and figuring out how to marry two divergent styles without an unstylish spat.

Good luck with that.

One thing we did agree on, however, was that the long wall of our dining and living rooms needed some intrigue. We talked about tall mirrors and wall art, but nothing maximized the space and took boring to new heights.

And then we found what we were looking faux…

Moulding! First, I priced out real, wooden crown moulding for the walls and ceiling, for which I had budgeted doing the labor myself. That turned out to be a little scary. But as I googled for instructions about installing moulding, I stumbled on a better idea: faux moulding.

The French call it trompe l’oeil, or trick the eye. I call it a neat idea. Not only did it provide us with a doable solution for the long, boring wall, it’s a semi-permanent solution that wouldn’t be devastating if we changed our minds.

Plus, I already knew how to do it.

Starting with a small wall (across from the big one), I measured and marked with chalk a large rectangle, whose sides were each six inches from the edges. Then I used my cell phone to mark the lines a couple inches thick all the way around, and then a soup bowl from the kitchen to round the edges. I taped off the chalked frame, painted with a contrasty off-white and came out with this:

Total time: 40 minutes.

You can imagine how pleased I was with the amount of effort and the great results. Immediately I launched into the big wall. It did not take 40 minutes.

While similar in principle to the small wall, the process for the bigger wall was a bit more complicated. Not only was there much greater surface area, but I had decided to paint double-decker moulding frames… and there were six of them!

Here’s how I did it:

1. Using a tape measure and a 6-inch-wide book, I drew a large rectangle whose sides were six inches from each of the edges.

2. Then I measured its width in inches and spent at least a day dividing by six, adding for space in between, chalking out the sub-rectangles, finding some error in my calculations and starting over again. I think the error lay mostly in my physical measurements and chalking than the math, and I could have… should have used a level.

3. Taking into account the height of my furniture, I picked a height for the upper and lower frames. I used a yardstick to dot each frame’s edges and then connected the dots to break the large rectangle and sub-rectangles into 12 frames—six tall frames on top, six 1/3-size frames on the bottom.

4. I used my cell phone, again, to mark off the thickness of the frames’ sides, dragging the phone down the drawn rectangles, dotted its edges and then using a yardstick to connect the dots.

5. Making use of my soup bowl again, I rounded the edges, marked thickness with my cell phone again, and used the bowl to draw the outer edges. This step wasn’t difficult, but after having to do it at least 48 times (four corners for each frame!). And I still sometimes have dreams about it at night.

6. I started out taping the entire frames, corners included, just like I did on the small wall, but found that my unsteady hand painted better-looking curved corners, on average, than the taped curves.

7. Paint, paint, paint.

8. Let it dry.

9. Removed the tape and touched up.

10. Enjoyment to the maximus.

While I still have some chalk-cleaning and touch up to do, I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed the results. The faux moulding isn’t perfect, but adds plenty of intrigue to a long, boring wall with whimsical lines and just enough contrast.

Check out more photos from the process, including how crazed I looked about half way though the chalk job:

And our colors? Martha Stewart’s Birdhouse in satin Valspar paint walls with Martha Stewart’s Hominy in satin Valspar paint moulding.

In the process, I came up with a number of paint-tape tricks I could have used to make the process much easier. Now I’m eager to paint some patterns and shapes throughout the house. And when I nail down these better processes, I’ll be sure to share.

Check out some BEFORE images on my previous blog post.

How to Host Your First Thanksgiving: Part V

2008-11-28T14:14:00.002-08:00

You could have guessed that preparing your first Thanksgiving (or any Thanksgiving, really) requires plenty of planning. And I’m the queen of planning when a project tickles my fancy.

Once the menu was settled, I plotted out my week (hour by hour by Wednesday night) to ensure I picked up ingredients and managed prep time with style and grace.

Oh, and that I’d squeeze in enough time to sleep and run the Turkey Trot on Thursday morning!

Granted, I didn’t get much sleep, but cutting out of the kitchen for a couple hours to drive downtown to race the 5-miler only kicked energy into the day. My back and legs were pretty sore from Wednesday’s endless standing in place (while my upper body was cooking, whipping, whirling, salting, rolling and kneading away), so the race was a welcomed change.

And I even hit noon (my secondary start time after the race) well ahead of schedule. Until water took revenge on me. Even atop full blast, my pots of water just wouldn’t boil. For an hour. They teetered on the brink of boiling, but took an eternity to get there. So, the potatoes and sweet potatoes, which diced early that morning before the trot, put me behind almost immediately out of the gate.

Not to be deterred, I stuck to my schedule and tried to speed up the things for which I allowed plenty of extra time. Like the flatbread baking and cheese chopping. But what I didn’t account for were my little oopsies, like forgetting to thaw the chorizo or pit the dates.

Sigh.

Nevertheless, I was only five minutes behind hors d’oeuvres when the first wave of Neil’s punctual family arrived (while I fully expected them to be on time, there’s the part of me that’s used to a family who’s a little more fashionably late). Lucky for me, most hadn’t seen our house yet. So while Neil conducted tours, I got busy!

It’s the difficult balance of hosting, though: you want to entertain, but you have the million things to do in the kitchen, as well as in the eating area.

My mom was fantastic enough to really fill in the vital holes in my first-time planning—like seating for 12 and centerpieces, nice dishes and fine silverware—and to execute it without batting a lash. Not surprisingly, too, she came over with the turkey we roasted in her oven all done up well and beautiful while I was still running around in fuzzy yoga pants and an old Georgetown T-shirt.

The plan had anticipated guests at 1 p.m. and dinner at 3 p.m. I thought it would make great bonding time for Neil and his family, but I forgot one important details: they’re card players.

It’s a fundamental difference in our families, too. They play cards; we eat, drink and talk too much. In fact, we talk for hours. We eat some more. And then we just keep talking.

You can imagine the ruffle in my feathers when they started looking at the set table extension (we added our kitchen table to the end of our dining table) for a game. I almost cried. At that point in the afternoon, I had “set table” checked off the list and the thought of putting it back on might have broken this camel’s back.

I’m sure it miffed a few guests, but Neil was able to find a drafting table in the basement that suited their euchre-playing needs. And as we cleaned up the house after dinner, I made a note with Neil that we should find a card table before our next gathering to avert future disasters.

To my delight, we were barreling toward 3 p.m. and I was merely balancing the warmth of food waiting for two turkeys’ temperature gauges to pop. It’s a delicate balance, though, that I imagine will take years to master. Unless, of course, I take the lessons I learned from this year into the purchase of my next generation of cooking appliances.

While my Mr. Fix-it spruced up the oven just in time for the big day, its absence gave me plenty of time to think about buying a new oven and what types of oven-related appliances I might need. And if I continue to host Thanksgiving, I think a double oven (big enough for turkeys, obviously) and a warming drawer would be perfection.

Perhaps then we wouldn’t have to serve so much food lukewarm.

By 4 p.m. the turkeys had popped and my mom and step-father got carving. They were totally in turkey-carving zone, so I felt a little disruptive when I offered to take over or help.

Not that I didn’t have plenty to do. I was using the legions of serving dishes my mom let us borrow for Thanksgiving, and was grateful with each bowl of stuffing and each dish of potatoes and eat boat of gravy that I had such a valuable resource.

Finally, by 4:15 p.m. we were seated (there was a brief moment of scurrying as my mom and dad rushed to block the sunset beaming into one side of the table’s eyes) and ready to begin. None of us had been in this situation before—Thanksgiving at this new generation’s home—and were a little confused about who would lead what. Neil’s sweet, sweet grandmother nudged me and said, “It’s your Thanksgiving, Gina. You get us started.” And I did.

I didn’t really know what to say. Well, I knew what I wanted to say; I didn’t know how to say it without excessive use of such Thanksgivingy words like grateful and appreciative and thankful. But it was all I could say.

We have a great life. Neil and I are really lucky to have great families. It may not have been the perfect piping hot meal I imagined as I planned for weeks and weeks, but I had all the people I love around me, hungry, and waiting to eat.

So, I did tell them we were just grateful for them being there and thankful for all they had done to get us where we are today. And without any closing remarks prepared, I stumbled over my mom’s favorite Thanksgiving prayer: “Good food, good meat. Good lord, let’s eat!”

Happy Thanksgiving.

How to Host Your First Thanksgiving: Part IV

2008-11-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

Neil is Mr. Fix-it.

I think that he may have doubted his abilities to repair things and figure out the homeowner day-to-day when we first moved into this house. But just like anyone else in a situation, he’s really finding his way. And I couldn’t be more grateful.

First there was the leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom. It was at the top of our to-do, but we just didn’t know enough about plumbing to get that thing fixed. So, in the meantime, we collected the drippings in a cup and used it to water plants all summer. No harm, no foul, right?

Well, summer ended, but the dripping did not.

Nino came over to help, and, between the two of them, they managed to take the thing apart and figure out which part was broken. Neil located the name and number of the part, which wasn’t available in any of our local hardware stores (large or small), and buy it online. A few twists, turns and shakes later: no more drips.

Then there was the oven. Some time over the summer, our stove decided that it hated us. It would wake up in the middle of the night and start screaming. The thing would beep-beep-beep so loud with an F1 error message that we didn’t understand. We weren’t sure how to get it to stop or what to do about it. Finally we unplugged the oven and only plugged it back in when we needed the burners.

Which meant no baking, at all, for quite some time.

That big no-no really put a kink in my cooking style. And as Thanksgiving approached, we were getting a little nervous about our inaction. The big deal: the repair of the temperature gauge that was causing the problem was a $150-$300 fix, which weren’t sure we wanted to make. So, we tossed around whether to buy a new stove for a few months until I decided I’d hold out for my Cornu Fe or Viking in a couple years.

One call to the Maytag man later, we had a guy come out to look at the thing to tell us what F1 meant (we already knew, thanks to Google) and what needed to be fixed. It would have cost more than $300 to fix if Neil hadn’t cajoled the repairman to just point out the piece that needed to be replaced and where to buy the part.

Neil headed to V&V in Euclid on a day off to buy a temperature gauge, replaced the part and put our stove back together. It has worked beautifully ever since and extended the time I have to save up for my dream stove.

Who knew I had shacked up with Mr. Fix-it? What’s more is that he did a magical job on our white tiled floors… and he cleans up after I cook. Here’s to Thanksgiving!

How to Host Your First Thanksgiving: Part III

2008-11-26T14:11:00.000-08:00

But before all the decorating decisions were made, I had much bigger things to consider.

The menu.

Last year I made an Indian- and North Africa-inspired meal that combined spices and flavors that to me suggested more celebration than tradition. Thanksgiving, to me, is a celebration all the great things we experience day to day, but I suspected that many of our 12 guests might be looking for more tradition.

The solution, of course, was a compromise. As has been the spirit of my house life with Neil. First it’s the house choice and then the walls paint, furniture design and rug colors. We’re getting pretty darn good at it too! In fact, I think we’ve moved beyond compromise into hybrid ideas. And we all know hybrid technology is all the rage.

I compiled a list of recipes for hors d’oeuvres, sides, turkeys, stuffing and desserts to pass around my cabinet of culinary advisors, chopped and trimmed to arrive at this menu:

Hors d’oeuvres:
Fresh-baked baguette with brie
Fig and proscuitto flatbread
Margherite pizza
Sesame crackers with three cheeses*

First course:
Spicy mushroom bisque

Turkey:
Brined turkey (11 lb)
Paprika-glazed turkey breast (6 lb)

Sides:
Pumpkin seed bread salad
Chorizo-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon
Mashed potatoes with horseradish cream
Apple cider mashed sweet potatoes
Butternut squash and chestnut risotto
Rosemary-butter biscuits
Smoky sherry-doused gravy

Desserts:
Gianduja mousse
Pumpkin-gingersnap tiramisu

We supplemented the meal with a regular mesclun salad, corn and green beans, while our mom’s gave the meal’s end extra sparkle with delicious pumpkin and apple pies from Neil’s mom and a an incredible bread pudding (with croissant base) from my mom’s kitchen.

I think Neil was a little nervous his more traditional family wouldn’t dig the non-traditional menu (it wasn’t too far off), but they really dived into the dishes and didn’t utter an un-mmmed word.

* While I cut up some Colby and swiss, I was really enamored of a light Wisconsin cheddar and cranberry I picked up at Whole Foods. For once, I wasn’t too upset about people not wanting to try new things. More for me!

How to Host Your First Thanksgiving: Part II

2008-11-25T14:05:00.000-08:00

Mockups in hand, we picked up some wall décor, but only one thing made it to our house and on the walls in time for Thursday’s feast. While we bought a round mirror for the living room and a few other pieces to hang, things just weren’t quite right. So, we held off.

Except for one thing: my favorite print.

Have I admitted to my Etsy addiction? Diana pointed me to Etsy a few years ago as an awesome spot for handmade goods. (And when I say ‘awesome’ it’s because I can’t think of more awesome terms for awesome.) It’s been a torrid love affair ever since. In fact, I’ve probably spent several days of my life trolling Etsy and finding about a zillion perfect handmade things for every part of my life.

The latest find was this print by dazeychic, who’s one of my favorite Etsy artists. I check her page often and am always tickled by her work. But when I saw this print, I instantly bought it. And how perfect:
While it didn’t necessarily match the plum accents I wanted to draw into the living room or the warm colors I had tried to pull into the kitchen, I knew my French fry print would find its place in my home. Even if it did take a while.

In fact, I first hung the print in the kitchen, but it just wasn’t quite right. Cute, but not quite right. So, I leaned it against the new bench I bought for the living room (the wall had been scouted for a bookcase, but we went with additional seating for the holidays) and waited for inspiration.

The inspiration popped up on Wednesday night. I was looking at our bare walls as I prepped for Thursday’s big event. It didn’t bother me that my home wouldn’t be perfect for first visits, but I felt like something on the wall would make a big difference. And there was my French fry staring my down.

I grabbed a picture hanger and pounded it in an eyeballed center of the side wall. I hung up my French fry and looked pretty darn cute:

So, I kept it there (the frame on the bench shouldn't actually be there). I’m not sure that it’s the final hanging place for such a happy print, but it garnered much attention. I think I get plenty of odd looks for most of my decorating decisions. But how could you think to look askance at a bird and a French fry? I can’t even begin to guess how one could.

How to Host Your First Thanksgiving: Part I

2008-11-24T13:50:00.000-08:00

It all started last year when I had an inkling we’d have a house by November and put in my bid to cook Thanksgiving for our families.

All hands approved, so Neil and I took to preparing the house. In July.

Top of the order: decorating the house.

After the kitchen-painting fiasco, we were a little gunshy about painting. Instead we spent more time figuring out how to use our rooms and make subtle upgrades like kitchen hardware and furniture purchases.

Oh, and we spent a ton of time doing mockups.

I spent a couple weekends tripping from store to store conducting the butt test on several dozen couches, looking for the perfect seat. We were looking for a neutral-colored piece of furniture that I could comfortably fall into, but that would provide support and not too much cushiness.

So, I made my way to Pottery Barn of all places and plopped myself into a Seabury sofa. Down-filled but sturdy, the couch passed the butt test with flying colors. My back was supported, and I was wonderfully cozy, while I sunk into the couch without getting lost in the cushions.

I put it on the list and continued to scout sofa after sofa. Then Neil and I were in the Pottery Barn neighborhood a few weeks later. Neil gave the Seabury a plop and found it perfect for our living room as well.

We procured a great deal for a very clean white sofa and chair for the living room, which looked great with the pair of brown leather club chairs we bought a few weeks earlier.

Then the real work began. What color should we paint the walls? What coffee table should we pick up? And which side tables? Should we get a bookcase? Did we need more seating?

Enter Photoshop.

I have a habit—whether it’s with work-related new media design, room arrangements or home décor—of mocking up everything in Photoshop. It’s so much easier to move things around and to undo it all on a computer screen (moving the sofa back to its original place isn’t just a click away in real life). Especially the painting.

With big furniture decisions made, we checked out dozens of paint samples from Benjamin Moore, Sherwin Williams, Valspar, Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren. We wanted a rich color that was not only influenced by the darker season, but by our need to temper the brightness of our kitchen.

The living room sported light beige walls, which were a good neutral color, but did nothing for our light-colored furniture or the hyperactive kitchen blue. We toyed with grays and plums, dusty blues and various greens. Several colors tickled our fancy, so I came up with these living room mockups, complete with some pillow side and coffee table selections (as well as some wall clutter and decor clips I picked up off my favorite Web sites just for feel). Some work much better than others...

And it was a tough choice! We returned to the paint store with a grayish blue in mind, but still nothing really caught our attention. I picked up countless dull colors and almost settled on a few that wouldn’t have been quite as satisfying as Neil’s find: Birdhouse by Martha Stewart:

Who knew Martha Stewart had such a knack for mixing greens and blues and grays? The color turned out a touch more green (in most lights) in our living room, but it does the trick.

(While a decorative Neil in the chair wasn't part of the original mockups, I think he works pretty well in these shots. Hee hee. But the light/color is a bit off because the image was taken around sunset.)
Not only does it do the trick in the living room, it does wonders for our hallway as it contrasts and complements our newly stained door. Nino was kind enough to complete arduous task of stripping an old door down its bare pine and staining it anew with a reddish maple color.

The result? My favorite view in the house: a shot through the kitchen that juxtaposes the kitchen’s Tiffany blue against the hallway’s Birdhouse and the accent of maple on the door. Love it!

We bought new hardware for the door. But because it’s an old thing and the original lock didn’t feature a deadbolt, the workload to install the new stuff was too much. While we intend on getting the old hardware nickled and shiny, we’re already pleased with the new look a natural-color door makes on the inside and outside of our home.

And it all happened just in time for the big holiday.

Summer of Home Love, Part II: Welcome This

2008-09-14T16:56:00.001-07:00

How many times have I crabbed about the security door that unwelcomed… dewelcomed… diswelcomed… terrified guests upon approaching our house? Well, let’s just say it wasn’t good. Check out these jail bars:
Yuck! I think the only way it could be worse is if it had a faded “Beware of Dog” sign shoved between the bars.

Sure, I understand the purpose of security doors, but (knock on wood) we’re not exactly in need of a security door’s services. And I hope someone on craigslist can help the security door fulfill its security door destiny. We're just not the right family for this thing.

Changing the door was the first thing I wanted to do when we moved in. Which means it didn’t get done for several months while we dug up the yard and looked at doors, picked out a few styles, went home to think about it, looked at more doors, went home to think about it, and then finally made the commitment.

In fact, we were so committed to it that we picked a retractable screen storm door AND a gorgeous craftsman wooden door (with dental shelf) to boot. We placed our order for the doors, but didn’t have to pay/finalize until an installer came to assess and measure.

Lucky move. While we were full-speed-ahead on the storm door, we came home and had second thoughts about the craftsman door. It remains one of the most beautiful things you’ll see, but we realized the door we have wasn’t bad – it just needed some love.

After years of sloppy paint jobs, slams, chips and bumps, it was a shabby door… without any chic in sight. The windows (and their frames) need some serious love. The paint needed to go.

But after my brother did a masterful job with his front door (a thick wooden door, which had been painted evergreen about 40 years ago and then 1970s yellow for the past 35, that he stripped and stained a gorgeous mahogany), I wanted to follow suit. That boy’s been doing some serious nesting lately and giving me worlds of ideas to steal!

So, we nixed the entry door replacement and Nino picked up the old door, stripped and sanded it to reveal—you guessed it!—a beautiful wooden door with styling grain and a really nice surface.

Next stop: the stain.

Neil and I stared at a wall of stains for at least 20 minutes before determining we had no idea what color we wanted. We had settled on a subtly red-gold hue before making it to Home Depot and finding 60,000 shades of the same color that looked at the same time completely like and not at all like what we had imagined. This one was too red; this one not enough; another was too dark; another too light.

Finally, I found a shade that was lighter and yellower than the shade I wanted and we bought it. “Why?” you ask. Well, I saw the mahogany stain Nino used on his door. From the printed label I could tell the sample was much lighter and browner than his final product. It was the same brand. Perhaps that color strategy would work for me.

Well, the door had its test coat applied late last week and initial results look great! Neil and I were really pleased with the stain so far and hope for the best as the rest of the door gets painted. Outlook is more positive than the initial paint job in the kitchen. Whew!

In the meantime, however, we had our storm door installed and couldn’t be happier. The installer came a few weeks ago, put the thing in without a hitch and left us to enjoy the new welcoming committee for our new home.

Not only does it show a clean face, it has fresh brushed nickel hardware and a very simple look. No jail bars on this baby! It closes and locks tight (how’s that for security?), and slides easily between window and screen, which works wonders in a NEOhio season that requires air conditioning one day, blankets the next!

Once the door was installed, Neil and I stood—arm in arm in the front yard, as usual—gazing at our new front door. It was the first major purchase for the new house, and it was worth every well-priced penny:
I joked many times that replacing the prison door would up the neighborhood property value by $20K. And a week after we installed the new one, zillow.com sent a message that our home’s estimated value had increased $3,500!

Coincidence, I know. Besides, what price can you put on coming home and just feeling happy at the sight of it?

Now, for some new porch lights, doorbell and mail slot...

New (Young) Kids on the Block

2008-09-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

By now, you've probably gotten a sense for how much ownership I take with my house, my kitchen walls, my neighborhood (a place so nice I've lived here twice!). But you may not have gotten a sense for what old curmudgeons Neil and I can be when it comes to one of the biggest factors in finding your happy place: neighbors.

Neil and I lived in two apartments over the past five years -- one in Broadview Heights, one in Stow. They were both clean places with nice layouts and even better rental rates, which made them prime locations for young people. Like us.

Although not enough like us that we didn't want to kick a few butts when it came to blasting video games, late-night parties, bumping stereos and endlessly barking dogs.

We're very chilled people who understand the occasional reason to get loud and obnoxious. But that doesn't mean we have to like it.

And most of the time, we didn't like it!

In fact, whenever one neighbor moved out, we'd spy and worry about who would move in. Would they be better than the previous tenants? Could they possibly be worse? And we often caught ourselves cringing when twenty-somethings pulled up in a U-Haul and into our lives.

A house two doors down sold to a former high school classmate last month. It was a foreclosure in what looked like terrific condition and selling for perhaps half its value (and if Neil and I didn't hate paying one mortgage's interest, we might have made an investment). Good for him, right? But when I told Neil who bought it, we let our agist sides creep out.

He was a quiet guy in high school -- from what I could tell. What could have changed in ten years? How would he act at 28? 29? 30? Who are his friends now? Has he grown into a partier? What does he do for a living? Will he be too noisy from even two houses away? Will he at least vote for Obama?

And we laugh each time we go through this process because it's probably the same process our neighbors have done with us. Oh, no, they must think. Look at these "kids" moving into the neighborhood. "The young couple." That's us. Beware.

While we're very clean and quiet, I wonder what they think of that landscaping job or the semi-crispy lawn, the living room in disarray you can see through the bay window or our relentless chopping of the neighbor's vines that grow all over our property.

The mums that aren't quite blooming as they should. Or the topiary.

The poorly painted entryway (that was done before we bought). The poorly painted window.

The young couple constantly standing in the front yard, arm in arm, marveling that they own a house. This house.

It's not like we think we're a novelty, some anomaly of twenty-somethings who are respectful, quiet, responsible and clean. We just haven't had good experiences, which doesn't mean the new kid on the block doesn't get a chance. Just like we had.

Summer of Home Love, Part I: Landscaping

2008-09-01T15:08:00.000-07:00

Why didn’t anyone tell me maintaining a new-homeowner blog was an almost impossible thing to do? We’ve been rolling all summer with moving-in and moving-up activities. And the first thing we tackled: landscaping.

When we moved in May 2008 our front yard looked like this:
My mom had for years managed a beautiful English garden-style front yard with lush blossoms and mossy baskets. But by virtue of our move-in time, not much was shaking in the front yard but the world’s oldest azalea bush and a very stubborn couple of trees.

So, we dug.

And then we dug some more.

We did some root hacking and rock chopping. We dug. Neil accidentally hacked a garden snake. Robins visited en masse to feast. And then we dug some more.

After day one last June our front yard was completely bare, looking something like this:
Lovely, huh? We had for weeks tried to conceptualize what we wanted to do with the front yard, agreeing that it should be clean, very simple and easy to maintain. For the moment we were nixing the idea of trees – we have a great bay window, which people tend to block with too-big trees, that we wanted to keep clean and clear – and looking for small evergreens to fill the space and not die.

Our solution? Korean boxwoods and a topiary. We hailed consultation at Gale’s Garden Center – an associate named Carl helped us plot two boxwoods and a hydrangea (that wilted and was moved to the back yard in less than a week) in the front yard – and bought just enough bushes and mulch to make our landscaping look sparse and a little bit sad.

We also picked up a spiral topiary, which was a cheeky ode to our young-couple landscaping naivete. I had always dug those trees (probably from my days as a Roller Coaster Tycoon junkie) and wanted one the minute we bought the house. Our tree, whom we named Kingston, wasn’t tall enough for our targeted spot in the yard, so he’ll remain a potted tree until he hits his spurt.

After resetting the bricks we spent all morning digging up, we stepped back to realize one important thing: we suck at landscaping. We thought it would be closer to a piece of cake than a pain in the butt to master “clean and simple.” Au contraire:
A few weeks, a fresh mind and at least 17 hours of photoshopping later, I hit the Heights Garden Center with my mom and Nino. It was the beginning of August and I fell into one helluva sale and one moderately OK landscaping solution.

First, I bought an oversized blue pot at the center for 50 percent off, which I filled with a mum basket from Whole Foods in coordination with my summerlong hanging basket. Side of the door plot? Check!

Then came my landscaping stop-gap: mums. Fall’s upon us, folks, so I thought it only made sense to catch a flower that would look good until everything died off and would add color to our wholly unlush front yard. For some reason I thought four plants would fill the big overhaul (we ended up buying eight more mum plants the next day). At least the ten bags of mulch were a good estimation.

With plants, mulch and a slight idea in mind, we added some curves to the landscape, as well as a bed in front of our front-stoop slab. Neil and I spent about nine hours planting, turning soil, digging, laying brick and mulching… all to accomplish this:
...and a little bit of this (check out that beautiful blue pot!):
(Note: these photos were taken a few weeks after our work was done. I think we slept for about three weeks to recover.)

It must have been Euclid Garden Tour day, or something like it, because groups of people appeared to be touring our neighborhood and visiting houses that weren’t on the market. A few groups walked by our yard, giving us the thumbs up on our young-people-learning-landscaping type of job. And when we were still digging hours and hours later, they applauded our effort and supported us until the end.

I heart a friendly, supportive neighborhood!

Weeks later, the mum blossoms have withered and been removed. I’m waiting for the next wave of blossoms so I can be lush again. It’s a clean, simple look. Over the winter, we’re going to regroup and rethink our landscaping approach.

I’d love to incorporate more functional landscaping – like dwarf fruit trees and blueberry bushes (both ideas stolen from my brother), pepper plants and basil bunches – in the front yard to look good and taste even better. For now the mums, boxwoods, pots, baskets and mulch will do. It’s clean and simple. And it’s home.

Wedding Planners, Baby Planners… Moving Planners?

2008-06-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago Salon.com reported on a boom in professional baby planners—people who plan everything from the baby’s room and the shower colors to diaper types and the hospital bag—for what I assumed is a segment of the socioeconomic population to which I do not belong. So, I had trouble wrapping my brain around the concept (although I forwarded the article to my baby-loving friend JG who should start designing his letterhead).

Granted, I’ve had neither a baby nor a wedding, but I assume I’d plan both on my own. Maybe I’m just a control freak.

But, you know, I think I’d be happy to hand over the reigns for moving.

Neil and I have both moved aplenty in our lives—in fact, Neil has moved something like 5-6 times since college to my three—so we weren’t shocked by any moving pains. The packing. The carrying. The lugging. We were also prepared for finding new places to shop and losing one utility while another overcharged.

And then there’s the inevitable changes in services and, most importantly, the cable pain.

Thanks to the local monopoly, we moved from Time-Warner to Time-Warner cable, which we assumed would be an easy time. Not only would Channel Three (WKYC/NBC) be on channel three (it was on channel two in Stow; channel three was TBN, The Bible Network, which provided quality programming like Bibleman, featuring Willie Ames from Charles in Charge), we thought the service and, more importantly, the digital interface would stay the same.

Yet again, we thought wrong. (Haven’t we been doing that a lot lately?)

Good news is Channel Three is on channel three, and Five is five, Eight is eight. But the pipedream of a smooth transition from apartment to house was just that. Not only did we lose the upgraded interface (that matters to a user-experience designer and a computer geek), but TW dorked up the accounts, overcharged us by something like triple and managed to preprogram our cable box to flip on a local polka station when we turn on the TV.

Don’t get me wrong, I am Croatian and, therefore, love polka, but Neil… the rhythm just doesn’t get him.

What Neil does get, however, is people. Right now he’s in hour two of Time Warner negotiations and, I believe, his fourth or fifth person. They’re chumming it up now about the movie “300,” but 30 minutes ago they were butting heads over what charges went to what bills. While Neil saved $150 by calling, we’ll see if by call’s end he’s outdone his hourly wage.

Rumor has it, though, that the current cable interface is a legacy graphic from the last cable company, and while we kind of dig the accuracy of the current DVR rewind/fast-forward functions, we should get upgraded to the Stow TW interface soon.

We don’t really watch enough TV for it to matter much, but there’s something about being able to type and search a program name to have it served up nice and hot on my DVR.

Only real tragedy: we lost all the All-Star Workouts, Namaste Yoga, Friends, How I Met Your Mother and Extras episodes I had recorded and sworn to watch. But who has time for TV when you have a house to… own?

I guess it’s all part of the joys of homeownership to jump through these fiery hoops. Would I prefer someone else to get out the trampoline? Maybe. I wouldn’t kick a moving planner off the moving truck. At the end of the day, though, I just stop, drop and roll, look around and smile. Because the house is mine.

Plus, I have Neil to fight the good fight with the cable guys. And the gas people too. I just hope he doesn’t charge me some unreasonable rate…

Civil Disobedience for the New Homeowner

2008-06-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

Some perks of my first-home blog: a) giving some future homeowner a what-to-do/what-not-to-do narrative; b) telling people what a swell place Euclid is to live; and c) posterity.

GNFH keeps me in touch with faraway friends and family who can check on the Neil-and-Gina drama as it unfolds in all its gory detail. And Neil doesn’t have to listen to me retell each gory detail three times a day.

Blogging also makes for good therapy, as illustrated in my last post.

One drawback to the blog: mom reading and accordingly getting mad at the previous post. You knew it was going to happen. What’s a new-homeowning daughter to do?

Should you find yourself faced with a similarly gory situation, follow these rules to make it out alive.

Five Simple Rules for the Hosting New Homeowner

Make your guests feel welcomed. Cook them dinner, walk their dogs, offer to carpool to work. Nothing beats a gracious host.
Accept full responsibility from the get-go. If it’s your family, claiming immediate responsibility with your co-owner or spouse not only assures things will go wrong, but that you’re point person for the certain fall out.
Don’t let the extra stuff bother you. Truth is something like 99 percent of Americans live in houses too big for them. You really don’t need all that space anyway.
Be more utilitarian. Use your packed boxes to fashion walls, tables and forts. In other words, "make lemonade."
Smile. You’re only going to survive this reality series if you act like it’s perfectly normal.

Five Simple Rules for the Happy House Guest

Make your hosts feel welcomed. Appear happy to see them, clean up after your dogs, say hello when your hosts come home from work. Nothing beats a grateful guest.
Respect their schedules. It’s simple: if someone is sleeping, don’t slam doors and don’t use the blender.
Encourage fellow guests to be courteous too. Enough said.
Offer a helping hand. If you see your hosts struggling to stack couches in a crowded room or fashion walls and forts out of boxes, see if they need help accommodating the clutter. It’s rude to just watch and sigh.
Smile. Nobody likes a bad attitude. Especially not your hosts.

OK, perhaps it’s a little more troublemaking there. Anyone who knows me, though, knows I love my mother, my family, and that I think we should all do good by our families. Thick or thin.

But if venting about surviving the live-in makes me some kind of sleaze from the Dark Side, then call me Darth Maul.

And, while you’re at it, call me human.

A Word to the Wise: Don't Try This at Home

2008-06-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen the movie Madhouse with John Laroquette and Kirstie Alley? If not, please come over.

Oh no, we’re not watching it; we’re living it.

Three weeks into the move, I have finally found my lost black bag (it mysteriously ended up in the basement), but can’t seem to lose the former residents of our house or their dogs. And while I’d like to say we’re ready to scream, I’ll admit we already have.

Most of my mom and step-father things were moved from our living and dining rooms this weekend while Neil and I dug up the front yard (the scoop on landscaping goes up tomorrow!). They spent the past couple nights at their new house, and Neil and I thought we were home free. Neil and I thought wrong.

The evening dog-sitting stint on Monday wasn’t so bad—although the last thing Neil wanted to be surprised by on a late-day-at-work night was the two wily dogs—and the two dog-free/people-free mornings have been glorious. Our neighborhood and our house are so quiet!

In fact, it’s been so peaceful that I decided to work from home on Tuesday. I pulled up my café table to the bay window, set up my computers and started designing. When I get into a peaceful, uninterrupted groove at home, I feel unstoppable and my productivity is through the roof.

Then came the dogs.

I didn’t actually know that when we were at work our house became a hot-spot café for the fam. It seemed like everyone was here (except for my out-of-town mom who ran at the right time), chatting, eating, having a good time. Not a problem in the grand scheme; not cool while I’m here looking for peace, peace and more peace.

So, I still managed to get my work done (but I had to work about three hours over because of the distractions) while I was left with the dogs, who barked, barked and proved, again, that they aren’t yet housebroken.

Yes, today I did cry.

It’s times like these, though, that I’m grateful for my blog. Whether it’s been the kitchen, the kitchen, the family or the landscaping, I’ve reminded myself that all these hiccups make for good writing! I’m still trying to sell Neil on that coping mechanism.

Sure, know-it-alls will say “I could have told you all this,” but there’s something to being good to your family. Even if it makes to want to hurt them and disrupts your happy relationship something fierce.

And I’ll admit I thought all day about packing up, disappearing and moving to New York, as originally planned, but I really like my work, adore my house and absolutely love my neighborhood. This morning I went for a 6 a.m. run around Euclid and couldn’t have been happier. Isn’t it always the external factors that ruin a good day?

All we really want right now is an empty house into which we can unpack our things (we’re still living amongst boxes) and feel like human beings again. This weekend, I’d like to finish the landscaping and clean the floors, unpack my things and move into my new kitchen, set up my “office” and get a beautiful new front door…

…With a beautiful new lock to which only we will have the key.

The Good, Honest Contractor

2008-06-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

A few years ago Neil and I told a car-fixin’ friend the key to his career success: open a shop called The Good, Honest Mechanic in which he’d do good, honest work at reasonable prices and on agreeable timeframes.

Aiming high, are we? Not really. With unreliable mechanic stereotypes abound, most people I know would kill for a trusty mechanic.

Finding one, though, is really just a crap shoot of alpha order and word-of-mouth.

Same goes for contractors. But worse. Whenever I talk to people about contractors—the guys who do general work on your property, from roofing and flooring to kitchen installs and carpentry—nary a good word do I hear. It seems like everyone has had a bad experience and knows someone who’s had a bad one and knows someone who knows someone who’s had a REALLY bad one.

My mom was so close to breaking down that barrier. She has just signed for the new house when she located a contractor named TJ in the local listings. He was prompt and punctual; he returned her calls and did great work. She couldn’t speak more highly of him if he were her golden boy son (turns out that seat’s already taken).

Then came the bill.

First the charge for the roof more than doubled without warning. What were the extra $1300+ charges? Gutter-cleaning and… nice views of the lake? And more recently the housework bill arrived more than doubled. Again, without warning.

As some background, I’ve been a designer for about ten years. I’ve done Web design, print and interactive work. While I normally charge project fees with some provisions for project changes and any serious time overages, I would never change the fees without first warning the client. before the charges were incurred. It’s not honest. It’s just not nice. It’s just good sense.

So, while my mom and step-father overpaid for the roofing, they weren’t going to overpay the second time for work that wasn’t even finished yet. The larger projects, including plumbing, cabinet installation and bathroom work, were left undone while the contractor brought in guys to do things like paint (which my mom can easily do after move-in) and apparently smoke hundreds of cigarettes in the house.

And another one bites the dust.

Amidst the dispute over the bill, TJ and his over-painting buds took their equipment and left the house. Yet again, without warning. Long live the good name of TJ the Contractor!

Last December I wrote about experience with Contractor Chuck, the shady character who was more Mafioso than cut-and-run and who worked on my mom’s rental properties and flips when I was a kid, and the perpetuation of contractor “stereotypes” on shows like Flip This House. Reality-show contractors, as you may know, often disappear without a word, overcharge, go way over on time and materials, lie/cheat and skimp wherever skimping should never apply. Those poor misrepresented contractors!

Then I talked to people. Don’t get me wrong: there has to be, has to be good contractors out there.

In fact, we saw one (count them: one…) good contractor on FTH who worked on more than one project for featured house-flippers. He was on budget, on time, and when new problems and costs arose, he warned the clients before any work was done. Well, if anyone can get me his number, I’d like to use him.

This epidemic of dishonest contractors not only bothers me as a hardworking human being, but as a new homeowner who will no doubt need a contractor at some point. They make heading into a project feel like going into a gas-station bathroom barefoot and licking the seat. You know only bad things can come from it.

What Ward Cleaver said to Suzie Homemaker-Cleaver…

2008-06-08T18:42:00.000-07:00

Ms. Homemaker-Cleaver: Did you ever think, six years ago, when you picked me up over freshly brewed iced tea in the kitchen at work that you would, some day, be buying a garden hose with me?

Mr. Cleaver: Can we get a gas can for my lawn mower too?

***

Romance is at its peak in the Cleaver-Homemaker household. Neil and I have officially become Lowe’s/Home Depot/paint-store junkies; we’ve been to one store or the other at least 5 times since last weekend. And we’re thinking about buying stock (while it’s still low).

What was on the list this week? More paint for the kitchen. Primer for the kitchen. Spark plug, gas, gas can, oil and drip pan for the lawn mover. A garden hose and a garden hose reel. And at least one smiling home-store employee. He was at Dunn Ace on Mayfield/Richmond and he gave me this lovely sample of Benjamin Moore:
...which ended up being a pretty color, but not the one on which our grateful hearts finally settled and rejoiced.

It’s been rough these past couple days to find an employee at one of the above stores to really crack a smile. In fact, when we picked up a sample of paint at Lowe’s on Saturday, the paint-desk guy barely looked up from what he was doing long enough to identify us in a line-up. He was, however, nice enough to hook us up with a sample of Valspar “Weathered Glass”—our new kitchen color.

We tried for a few days not only to deal with last week’s “Hazy Blue” incident, but to paint samples of other colors—Benjamin Moore’s “Palladian Blue,” Valspar “Stillness” and mixtures of them all—around the kitchen:

But during a lawn-mower run to Lowe’s we found the color. And it’s a thing of beauty.

The second painting occurred without much incident. We had a few drips and at one point I lost my balance and laid my entire right arm into a wallful of wet paint. Even after two coats and a couple hours of drying, it was still the color we imagined. It was right on with my initial color aspirations:
Worry not: the rest of “Hazy Blue” won’t wallow alone of some crowded basement paint-shelf. It’s living a new life on the lakefront as a base layer in my mom’s first-floor bathroom (it’s been enhanced with a metallic, pearly sheen). What a happy ending.

Painting and shopping wasn’t all for the weekend menu. While Neil was flexing his manly muscles getting the lawn mower to work, I was pulling weeds an destroying my mom’s old garden. We turned over soiled in what will become the vegetable/herb garden, and I pulled miles and miles of what appears to be the most obnoxious and intrusive ivy I’ve ever seen.

It was one hot weekend, so I threw on a flowery shirt and tank top to work in the yard. Wearing my gardening gloves, I scurried among the plants, cutting overgrown Shasta daisies for my vases (which you can see on the table above) and drying excess chamomile for tea, as if I knew what I was doing.

Neil, fresh off his lawn-mower success, looked at me, scurrying to check on the dogs and digging up roots, and said, “Look at you, Suzie Homemaker!” Who would have known I’d fall so quickly into my new life. Did I mention I have a really beautiful apron for the kitchen too?

My plans for vegetables and herbs are not yet set, but I tripped up to the Heights Garden Center with my mom on Saturday to pick out a pepper plant, butternut squash, herbs and a tomato plant, which will be used for the Great Prodan Tomato Competition. More on that later.

I hadn’t ever checked out the Heights Garden Center, but had driven past it for about the past ten years, looking longingly at its lush flowers and irresistible hanging baskets, promising myself that when I had my own house, it would be the first place I would go. And there I was.

If you want an awesome hanging basket, make your way there. It’s near the corner of Cedar and Taylor. Three thumbs up—between the people, the baskets, the flowers, the atmosphere… it was just one great experience.

Right now I’m on the hunt for window boxes. Heights had some really beautiful choices, but I wanted to check out my options. Besides, I haven’t even gotten to my front-yard landscaping. We’re going to clear out the space and start from scratch. But there’s that whole getting-to-scratch digging to do.

Groovy side-note: Belated congrats to my brother, Nino, another stellar Euclid resident, who graduated from college last month. My parents were beaming like the sun with pride, and he crossed the stage decorated like a five-star general.

He's in a wild northern state right now, smack dab in the middle of nowhere, working for a vote r-education initiative. Changing the world, one voter at a time. Isn't that how many a great leader started out?

An Interesting Perspective

2008-06-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

While this article was published long before my quipping, it's some quick coverage about the exurbia imbalance of the Cleveland ratings.

Read "Stop rating the suburbs? Magazine's criteria tilt toward exurbia, critics say" from the Chagrin Herald Sun.

Should they stop rating the suburbs? Absolutely not.

Not only is it a service the magazine provides to readers, it's one of Cleveland Magazine's biggest issues of the year. And I support the success of any local business. Just because I don't agree with it or like the way my city appears, I don't think our inner-ring whining should change things.

If we don't like it, either do something about it or don't read it.

Like I've said before, everyone's opinions of the inner-ring versus the exurbs differs wildly. And as I duly discovered during the house search, attributes that I like (i.e., short commute, close-knit neighborhoods, lakefront area, closer-to-urban setting) might be on some one else's must-not-have list or not on a priority chart at all. It's all A-OK.

Some people, for instance, want a city that's already been cleaned up and shined for your arrival. There's nothing wrong with it, but where's the fun in that (for me, at least)?

I just don't think one should complain about the state of things if s/he isn't willing to get in there and do something about it. Maybe it's too much Corey Booker-worship in my head or the bleeding liberal heart in my chest. Who knows!

I will, however, be using much less gas than the most of the people in Solon (wink) and walking on more sidewalks than, say, Moreland Hills (0 percent walkability... how does that happen?).

And that accessibility, that freedom, that mobility is what makes me happy here, in Euclid... like the 1,538,029th best suburb in Cleveland.

Come On, Cleveland Magazine! We’re Neighbors!

2008-06-04T19:44:00.000-07:00

One of the things I prize most about my co-workers is our shared set of values that drives us to be the people we are and to do the things we do.

For one thing, we all work in higher education on an urban university campus, where most of us could run to the city or thousands of other jobs, but prefer to do something—be it communications, writing, teaching, network administration or design—for a greater good. And I think that while a) it’s not the only way to do something for the greater good and b) non-urban higher ed workers are just as cool, many of the people in my office are, well, like-minded. Like-minded with me.

In fact, many of us share the desire to contribute to and improve our communities, so we move to inner-ring and inner-city neighborhoods to be agents of change.

When I chose to move to Euclid, a fantastic lakefront city 10 miles east of Cleveland, I knew the city needed work. And not like repaint-the-kitchen work, but some real support for its neighborhoods, its businesses, its schools. Like anything else, it just needs more good people (don’t get me wrong: it’s already bustling with plenty of green apples!) and some love.

It was nice, during the hunting, buying and moving stages, to be surrounded by people who supported my choice. Not only was it good for me personally—the commute is incredible, the neighborhood is top notch and my house is pretty awesome too—it felt like we were contributing to something greater. Like a great city.

So, you can imagine my dismay when Cleveland Magazine’s annual “Rating the Suburbs” issue hit the stands this month. As with any publication’s rankings, you have to take it with a grain of salt. There’s way more marketing, bias, ins and outs to really grant charts like this one any true merit. But people read them. And they believe.

I didn’t believe much of what I read (all due respect, Solonites) and didn’t agree with any of the magazine’s top 20. In fact, most of the cities the magazine chose were at the bottom of my list. Sure, the schools and “safety” ratings were high for places like Solon and Chagrin Falls, but I didn’t get a sense that quality of life—short of larger cars, fancier TVs, nicer baby strollers and expensive dogs—was any better out there than here. But I guess it’s just a difference of needs and opinions.

One big point: walkability. I noticed that most of the cities, like Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights and Euclid, received 100 percent walkability ratings. One hundred percent walkability! And that to me is actually about #2 on my list of wants/needs (and I don’t understand how, in the current climate, it isn’t of greater importance).

It seems, though, in the Cleveland Magazine rankings, walkability was an undesirable factor. Most of the walkable cities ranked low and the 100 percent-winners didn’t really get props for the awesomeness of their landscape. I guess it isn’t weighted to the Gina scale. Oh well.

Yes, yes, yes, I understand that the greater walkability occurs closer to the inner-ring, where the crime is greater and the schools are apparently not. But if you’re going to present a walkability rating, factor in whether or not someone would and could walk the city and walk it safely.

Now, THAT is something to rate. Let me know how hit-and-run Hudson ranks then!

This issue of Cleveland Magazine lay on a credenza outside my office at work. And as a number of people ushered by, they were eager to see how their cities ranked. Needless to say, most people sighed and were disappointed to see the greatness of culture in Cleveland Heights, the close-knit communities across Shaker Heights, the traditions of University Heights, the lakefront living in Euclid were all overlooked. For McMansions in Solon.

Is Euclid the number one suburb in Cleveland? Maybe not to Cleveland Magazine. It topped my list.

Sure, there’s the walkability, but there’s also the uber-friendly neighbors on every street, the lakefront views and breezes, the easy access to the freeway and the less-than-20-minutes to anywhere you need to be, the countless places to run or ride your bike or walk your dog, the diversity and smiling faces, the good-for-planting soil, the best bleeping fireworks west of Paris, the proximity to so many parks, the lower gas prices than other parts of the city, the possibility of growth and a new future, the opportunities to contribute to a place that should top everyone’s list.

Now, where to start…

Is it a one-person job? Pshaw! But I’m certain there are dozens of other Euclidians willing to make this city shine as well. And shine we will.

No Gas, No Cry

2008-06-03T17:06:00.000-07:00

When the world gives you lemons, you make lemonade. And when Benjamin Moore gives you Bahamian blue, you have a Caribbean carnaval.

We’ll get around to updating the shock of teal (which can welcome guests into our home half a block away), but for Monday night Neil and I invited the family over for a Caribbean celebration of the new kitchen. See, I had issued myself a challenge—prepare a Caribbean-themed feast with just the food I have—on my way home from work. Kind of like Iron Chef set to a Bob Marley score.

So, I pumped up No Woman, No Cry, established my game plan, picked herbs and flowers with the dogs (Lucy loves to eat mint and Harley chowed on a ton of cilantro) from the backyard and began the Iron G Cheffing.

On the prospective menu: Jamaican cornbread fritters with chile-spiced mango and steamed shrimp salad accompanied by yellow rice with cilantro Cuban black beans and finished off with banana brulee and fruit salsa. I was a little bummed when I realized I didn’t have any bananas. But that was just the beginning.

As part of a compromise, I was going to brew some mint and cilantro to blend later with lime for some makeshift imitation non-alcoholic mojitos (sounds fun, doesn’t it?) when the stove burners wouldn’t light. I called my mom, who previously owned the stove, to ask if she had ever experience such a problem. And then I realized something: it was the beginning of the month.

It didn’t take long for us to realize our gas had been shut off. While my mom and Neil worked out the transfer and explicitly stated to the gas company that the gas shouldn’t be shut off, it was. Darn you, Dominion East Ohio Gas!

We called, and they wouldn’t budge, even if it was their mistake. So, no cooking, no washing, no nothing until THURSDAY!

We could have spent all night feeling sorry for ourselves and the now-impossible menu, but we didn’t. They just upped the ante on the challenge!

It was all raw food and microwavables from that point. So, I celebrated my kitchen paint job with my family to the tune of I Shot the Sheriff and a menu that included fresh greens salad dressed in mango pico de gallo with a roasted chicken, naan and lime-cilantro rice topped with black beans, paprika-spiced pumpkin seeds and chile-spiced dried mango, followed by fresh pineapple for dessert.

Not exactly Caribbean, but kind of spicy. (I admit it: the chicken was cheating: my mom picked it up when she and Neil ran out for drinks, but it was a crowd-pleaser!).

Maybe it’s strike 1.5 or 2 in welcoming ourselves into our first home, but who’s keeping count? I think it’s easy to let these things get you down; I just look on the bright side. Or in my kitchen. Where we be jamming…

First Things First: The Kitchen

2008-06-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

One of the things we liked about our house was that it not only had the BR/BA-count we targeted (and a peachy price), but it also came move-in ready.

I wrote in a previous post that while foreclosures and TLC homes came with even peachier price tags, Neil nor I wanted to deal with fixing uppers or doing anything but transporting our stuff from apartment to home. And you know how fun that can be!

But none of this is to say we didn’t want to do ANYTHING with the house. We have tons of plans! Knock down this wall, build up that basement, paint that room, replace that window. None of it is screaming for a change (except an extra layer of paint in the master), but we’re eager to start making it the Mr. and Ms. Neil-and-Gina home.

First up: the kitchen.

The kitchen started Saturday a light spearmint green color; it ended up having a party.

For months I thought about kitchen colors—what to do, what to do!—before I settled on a light-but-robust turquoise, a color Benjamin Moore calls “Woodlawn Blue.” While I thought it would be a full enough color to complement my white cabinets, I thought it would be understated enough to run with the black Florentine chandelier I’d like to hang in the room.

It wouldn’t be so. Woodlawn blue turned out to be a whole lot of gray. So, I flipped through paint samples and palettes with Neil and my mom, looking for a fuller shade of my something blue.

We narrowed it down to four Benjamin Moore colors: seascape green, Antiguan sky, waterfall and hazy blue. My mom and I walked in and out of the store, testing the samples in different lights, and compared the chips to samples we thought matched the countertop and cabinets.

My tastes started in the light and bright region, then slowly got deeper and deeper as I feared how much the white cabinets would wash out the color or contrast.

I had just set my heart on seascape green when Neil pointed out waterfall as his favorite. But it was the richness of hazy blue that caught my eye. And with a little motherly influence, I bought a gallon and we painted!
The first coat was promising: the color was darker than I had intended and a little more teal than my tastes allow. But what’s a first coat really show anyway, right? Plus the wet color, the color drippings on the can and the flecks on my hand all seemed to be heading in the right direction.

It was just the drying two coats of paint on the wall that were going dark and just a little bit Caribbean.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the décor of, say, Bahama Breeze, but this color is too seaside for this kitchen:

When we left it to dry overnight, I said aloud that it would look better in the morning. It wasn’t. In fact, it was deeper, brighter, Aruban now.

Suddenly I felt inclined to replace the Swedish dishwasher with a pair of steel drums and listen to I Shot the Sheriff while sipping mojitos.

So, home improvement project one didn’t exactly fly. I’m headed back to the paint store this week to find a color that will a) meet my light-but-robust turquoise aspirations; b) cover well the mmm-chakka, mmm-chakka blue; and c) not result in another surprise hue.

The photos don't do the reggae-awesome blue justice. Perhaps my monitor needs to be calibrated, but the captures of my kitchen don't look too different from the samples below, which are the few ideas I had in mind next:

Going back to Woodlawn Blue. Oddly enough, I found a photo of Woodlawn blue WITH the type of chandelier I’m seeking AND in a kitchen no less! While it was neat to see a demonstration of my idea, it was a little disheartening to see someone had beaten me to the punch. It looks swell, though.

Waterfall. It was Neil’s favorite and one of my top choices. It just didn’t seem rich enough at first, but I’m fairly certain it will bulk up over hazy blue.

St. Patty’s Day. It isn’t too far off from hazy blue, but this color steps closer to the green and turquoise family than my current hue. They both speak to that retro mint green, but St. Patty’s pulls more green than teal. And I like that.

Don’t get me wrong: hazy blue is a pretty neat color. It’s just not the color for my kitchen. In fact, I wouldn’t mind using it somewhere small—like a wall in a tighter area or as an accent somewhere else. So, it wasn’t all for naught.

Besides, Neil and I spent some quality time taping up the kitchen (you can see the blue painter’s tape still on the walls for phase 2) , moving the refrigerator and scaling countertops to paint above the cabinets. We sharpened our painting skills and will be better prepared for next time.

Now for a quick flashback: It's been almost two months since Neil and I signed for our first house. It only took me that much time to get the photo of our grand signing at the McDonald's in Stow. And now we're actually here!

The Big Green Move, Part IV: And When You Think It's All Over...

2008-05-26T17:18:00.000-07:00

...it's not over. It's not over. It's not over.

But we did the move and we're in!

Progress on my mom's house is a little behind schedule—thanks to some inspector stand-ups!—so, Neil and I have some roommates for a couple weeks.

A few perks of our new roommates: 1) two of them are dogs—while they bark a lot and do doggie things, they’re lovable pooches with boundless energy who have introduced us to life as dog-owners; 2) we didn’t have to unpack our kitchen stuff (yet); and 3) I get to stall a few weeks on making wall-paint decisions, room arrangements and furniture purchases.

Oh, and I get to spend some time reveling in my new commute, focusing on training and figuring out how/where to get a green thumb.

Right now the bulk of our stuff is piled up in the family room, with a little living space—a couple couches, coffee table, TV—in the back, and our master suite. Once we found our pillows and blankets this morning, we started feeling “at home.”

Now, if only I could find my toothbrush and makeup…

The Big Green Move Part III: It Takes a Village

2008-05-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

For the past several months I’ve been trying to pinpoint what makes or breaks a move. Is it planning? Is it organization? Is it the boxes?

Nope. It’s help.

Neil and I butted heads over how exactly we’d get ourselves from Stow to Euclid on Memorial Day weekend—I wanted movers; he did not. Sure, my approach costs more. His approach actually required me to put forth some effort, which I just wasn’t ready to do. But self-moving did make more sense for a 1,300-square-foot apartment and two people with not-too-much stuff. I would just have to stop being lazy.

Lucky for me, our friends and family weren’t lazy that weekend either.

We had 11 people and it rocked! Tina, Alan, Nino, Katie, Mendo, Jeff, Diana, Matt, Jon, Neil and I moved our 16-foot truck’s worth of stuff (plus some extra packings in the cars) in 1.5 hours. No joke. It was incredible.

What surprised me most was a) several helping hands couldn’t make it, yet we had 11 people on moving day; b) how quickly 11 people can get you out of town; and c) how nice 11 people can be when a move goes off without a hitch!

We met everyone at our Stow apartment at 9 a.m. on Saturday. I brought Starbucks coffee, bagels from Bruegger’s, fresh fruit, water and Clif Bars; they brought helping hands, smiling faces and a lot of muscle. I had race-day fueling in mind when I planned breakfast, and it appeared to work just fine.

Neil and I had packed much of our stuff into some way oversized boxes, which we stacked up in our living room for moving day. When our awesome clan arrived, pretty much everything was stacked and ready to go (that was another fast-moving key), and we had anticipated our movers would take the oversized pieces down two people at a time. But I think someone muscled up—was it Matt or Mendo?—and took a big box down by himself, setting the tough-guy standard for the day. And I was OK with that!

Aside from a little shimmying and shaking of stuff when we thought the moving truck was going to fill early, we had an assembly-line movement toward the door and back up the three flights of stairs.

Over the three straight days of moving (Neil and I did plenty of car packing on Thursday and Friday), I felt the importance of cardio health when you’re moving and now think I’m prepared for Tackle the Tower in Cleveland. Woo hoo!

Of course, I caused one of the few hitches in our day: when the truck was about to close, I remembered that I had one more oversized box stuffed in my garage (alongside a snowboard, boots, golf clubs, spare tire and bike) that needed to get on the truck. And it almost ended badly. Nino almost got stuck and had to ride with the furniture, and my box was throwing off the whole balance of the packing. As they fiddled with configurations, Matt said, “I didn’t play Tetris my whole childhood for nothing…” and they made it work. Whew!

Our families were very helpful covering all of our bases—Tina cleaned as we packed (and there was way more of that to do than we realized), Nino sacrificed his body for that last oversized box, and Alan and Mendo almost walked off with our neighbor’s stuff!

Actually, they were helping collect Neil’s garage effects, but didn’t know Neil and I didn’t share a garage. How would they know? So, they started walking off with my garagemate’s bike, which looks just like Neil’s, golf clubs and other things. They were quick to return the stuff when they realized the error (and wiped away their sheepish grins) and then packed up Neil’s real garage in about 6.2 seconds. Talk about efficiency!

Things stuck to the smooth track when we made it to Euclid, and it was no surprise that the haul into the house was easier than the way out of the apartment. Nino backed the truck right up to our front door and we led the ramp directly into the foyer.

About an hour later, we were snacking on leftover bagels, wiping the sweat from our brows and heading to my mom’s house to check on the progress. Things are looking good!

The Big Green Move Part II: Books, Boxes and Craigslist

2008-05-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

Two main things carried the most weight in our move (literally): boxes, which you can never have enough of and books, which you always have too many of.

Don’t get me wrong: I love books. I love books. I love books. Except, of course, when I’m moving. In fact, on more than one occasion, Neil and I decided against moving because we didn’t want to deal with my book collection. And I have a feeling the prospect of moving to our own house for several years and not having to move books for a while was icing on a sweet, sweet cake.

We all know how much I love cake.

There’s no rough estimate of how many books I have, but I do know at some point in college I sold over 200 books (to pay for—you guessed it—books for school) on Half.com and it didn’t even make a dent. Here we are six years later…

We tried to be smart about everything we were moving this time around. Not only did we start packing (and recycling) early, but we tried to be economical in how we transported the stuff to our house. Instead of making multiple “moving trips” from Stow to Euclid (~40 miles), we packed our cars to the brim every time we traveled north or happened to go this way. And it actually saved us about half a truckload in the end.

It saved our friends and family members from the experience of carrying my books again. Well, most of them.

As time for moving approached, I had packed most of my books and left some books for game-time decisions. Some things I kept; a bunch was given away; some were donated; and plenty were recycled. But the books are only half the load: what about the bookcases?

Because I had so many books and so little concern for my bookcases, I tended to overstack the things and cause some of my shelves to bow. They weren’t on the brink of snapping; they just weren’t pretty.

So, in my new house I decided to get built-in bookcases and ditch the old ones. But in the midst of the big green move, I couldn’t just pitch them in the trash. I pitched them online.

While I hadn’t checked out craigslist.com myself, my brother seems to be big fan of the site and had, on several occasions, shared stories about how quickly things fly off it. I decided to give it a try.

At 4 p.m. I posted my shelves under “free stuff” and by 7:30 p.m. (when I returned from seeing Melissa, Ryan and their new lil’ girl Emma Isabel) I had an inbox filled with responses. Wowee! I chose the message that offered to pick up the shelves the very next morning—most of the others wanted to check out the shelves, arrange for shipping, to set up time next week, etc.—and the cases were gone the next morning. Oddly enough, the couple who took my bookcases live across the street from our old place in Stow. Oh, the small world!

That crossed off two things from our to-move list. Now, all these boxes!

We really lucked out on boxes this move: Neil knows people who know people with boxes. And now we’re the people with all the boxes. Day after day he would come home with incredible numbers of boxes, and I’d think what are we going to do with all of these?

Well, we used them all.

The packing started out really orderly and distinct—short-sleeved summer shirts in one box, eight-inch books in another, bathroom towels in one, dinner plates in another. Toward the end it was an arm-swiping free-for-all! One of my last boxes contained wasabi peas, maple syrup, a stereo, a coffeemaker and some children’s books. And I think I saw one of Neil’s last boxes today: bike wheels, wrapping paper, toiletries, laundry detergent and picture frames.

In the end, we’ll have to tear down all the boxes and figure out what to do with them. Do we dare hope for box connections when we move again? Or do we hold onto these things like something that’s too good to be true?

The Big Green Move, Part I: Paperwork

2008-05-20T06:28:00.000-07:00

So, I was thinking that once the ink dried on our house-signing, it was all fun and games. Turns out, I just wasn’t thinking. What about the move?

If you’ve ever done it, you know moving is the perfect opportunity to get rid of stuff. To shed the junk. To start anew. But even if you give away your books, sell your clothes or hand-down your extra furniture, there’s still that mass of… trash you just can’t shake. And if you’re anything like me, most of that stuff is paper, paper and more paper.

The big green move started about a month ago when we chose Memorial Day weekend as our moving date. My desk has long been the big paper dump and the one thing I didn’t even want to think about. But it was time and here’s how it went:

Step One: Take Junk Out of its Place
I carried all of the paper, books and junk from the desk back in my room to the floor in my living room. Surprisingly, that didn’t turn out to be the biggest disaster of 2008. Not only did hanging out with Neil and watching How I Met Your Mother make the time fly, it also prevented me from shoving things back into the desk or other cubbies in my room.

Step Two: Make Piles
Depending on your local recycling program, you might separate your paper collection into different types, including white paper, newspaper, magazines, color paper, cardboard, etc. I also have a nearby staple-metal recycling bin, so I pulled out those pieces as well.

While separating the mess takes more time, it does give you a chance to review your piles, find old papers or fiction stories you haven’t read in forever, pinpoint and shred documents with your SSN on them or finally locate those important papers you needed six months ago! So, it’s not as bad as you might think.

Step Three: Create an Exit Strategy
Some of us are lucky enough to have curbside recycling; some of us are not.

I am not.

What on earth would I do with all the recyclables? Well, I googled “recycling in Stow” and “recycling programs in Stow” and “recycling centers near Akron.” I called a list of centers listed online, but I hit a disconnected number, wrong number and temporary closed for business number. Sigh.

Lucky for the environment, I don’t give up that easily!

I packed up the color papers, magazine pages and white paper into the cardboard amazon.com delivery boxes I also needed to recycle, and carried them—one each day—to work, where we have a collection bin for paper, magazines and cardboard.

Every morning, I delivered a pile of paper or cardboard to the bins. And eventually I made a dent. I have since moved the boxes to my car and will continue the deliveries until it’s all recycled.

Step Four: Fight the Good Fight
Even with the desk behind me, recyclables popped up with each room we packed and each closet we cleaned. Who knew we had so many papers, boxes and magazines? Well, I guess we all knew about the magazines (whoops!).

So, keep in mind that even a coordinated clean-my-desk effort, your recycling-on-the-move plan doesn’t end there. It just keeps going and going and going. Whew! We cleaned out the kitchen, where we tossed out cereal and collected the cardboard boxes, packed the bookcases, which houses stacks of unneeded print pieces, and cleared out my closet, which was a whole new novella.

Each project produced another several boxes of recyclables and a little more stress. I realized I’d feel far less stressed about the recycling collection if I didn’t have to deliver the stacks myself (not only do I drive them to work, but I also lug the boxes a half-mile from the parking lot!). Recycling shouldn’t be this intense!

My solution: carry as much to the new house as possible and use the curbside service there. Or something else nearby! I know it defeats the purpose of shedding the junk on the move, but it gets my junk to a better place than the local landfill. Sigh. And this way I’ve already separated out the pieces. All I have to do is pass it off to the friendly neighborhood recycler near me!

Step Five: Look Both Ways Before You Collect So Much Junk
As I’ve talked up my green move to friends, they’ve warned me of accumulation tendencies in your first house. And I believe it.

Perhaps it won’t actually help, but Neil and I have decided to make a concerted effort not to collect junk in our new house. That way, I won’t have an entire blog post about paper recycling on the move!

So, She Bought a House and We Never Heard from Her Again…

2008-04-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

Wow! What a whirlwind! To recap: in late March, our offer was accepted on the house and we flipped into financing mode. Now we own a home and will move in late May.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not so fast…. How did this happen?

As I read and read and read (trying to have a clue what fixed rate, adjustable rate, points and closing costs really mean) about mortgages, loans and lenders, Neil was three years ahead of me and presented our best candidates for financing. And he did a stellar job.

He managed to wrangle 5.05% for our loan, which, surprisingly, was not his best rate of the year. A few days before the offer, WaMu had 4.95% but we had no house to buy! I had no idea that interest rates scoop up and down throughout the day (Neil reported that the rates jumped .1% during a phone call to WaMu a few weeks ago!), but we were happy when a local bank offered 5% and then 5.05% just in time for our financing needs.

Neil will have to guest blog to provide any real details about financing (I managed my portion of the process like a test in school—I studied, I read, I listened, and I could have answered any number of questions about mortgages and interest and closing costs for the days surrounding our signing, but I don’t think I could write about it or speak about it in public), but the local bank provided a friendly product for this 15-year home loan.

Not only did we receive a first-time homebuyer discount on closing costs, the bank has a track record of not selling their mortgages and promised to match lower interest within three days of locking in our rate.

Diligent Neil scoured the Web for two days and actually found a lower rate (.05% lower), but the closing costs on the competing loan were higher than ours. So, we’ve booked ourselves with 5.05% and I salute Neil’s top-notch performance with a high five!

And in the end, paying three dollars less each month doesn’t amount to much, particularly because we intend to pay off our mortgage as soon as possible.

I don’t talk much about my financial conservatism (mostly because I don’t like to be thought of as conservative in any light), but let’s just say I don’t like bills. Period. I would pay years in advance on my cell phone bill if I could and when I graduated from college, I put every waking dollar into paying back my loan.

Thankfully, Neil shares my financial obsession. And when he sought lenders for our mortgage, he made sure the product we chose did not include a prepayment penalty.

Prepayment penalty? You mean they punish you for paying your bill faster? That’s right. The thought made me crazy for days, until I reconciled myself to the reality that banks are businesses and providing loans is a service. But that didn’t mean I had to like it. I had been told that prepayment penalties were inevitable; I’m just glad that piece of advice was wrong and that Neil found a loan without that stipulation. Whew! That should buy the next bank I visit a little bit of leniency for their plasma TVs.

Loan locked in. Enter the paperwork.

Aside from the sheer quantity of paperwork (it was mostly just papers to read/sign), I was really underwhelmed by the mortgage process. On one hand, Neil’s command of the procedure took a load off my mind; on the other hand, I was prepared for a big, fat mess in light of the mortgage crisis. I figured they would have agents following me around during the day, calling to ask why I opened a Victoria’s Secret credit card in 1999 and never used it (it was for a one-time discount, I swear!), observing my family and friends, digging through my trash and contacting past employers and boyfriends to gauge my trustworthiness.

Unless they were really low profile on the operation, none of that happened. We filled out forms, faxed driver’s licenses and wage proofs, and then signed a stack of papers that surprisingly didn’t include any mention of giving up our firstborn.

We spent one full night sitting on the couch reading documents, making sure we understood what was being said (and surrendered) and noting what didn’t make sense. It was funny to see the deterioration of my signature—it began as a neat inscription of legible letters before it morphed into a celebrity-style autograph before a forensic scientist might have needed to identify it before we looked at it and said, “I think there’s a G and somewhere a P in it.” I think I need a stamp.

Next came appraisals, inspections and insurance (more on this in next post). We were glad that the house had very few violations and appraised very well. Even in this market, our middle-class colonial in an inner-ring suburb has appreciated since it was last reviewed. I’m really hopeful that as the Euclid Renaissance flourishes, our home value will grow just as well.

I had been warned that paperwork for the appraisals was hard to come by. In fact, one of my professors said he had to visit the appraisers office, nearly wrestle the paperwork from his hands and fight off objecting appraisers as he made copies on the office Xerox. And we were ready for the fight.

You can imagine our surprise then when the appraisal documents came in the mail with some other paperwork. It gave us a good idea about the comparable homes in our area, as well as a better understanding of what ups value in an appraisal and what doesn’t have much effect.

So, after the intimidation-free appraisal and inspection, it was time for signing. We had aimed to close by April 14. It was really a random date that we chose just to complete the seller’s agreement and get the mortgage application rolling. But the bank stuck to it!

We were first trying to make arrangements to drive Mentor midday on Monday, April 14, but just weren’t going to make it happen on time for closing by day’s end. So, our awesome transferring agent actually drove to Stow on Saturday to sign and transfer our house.

And what better place to sign for your first house than McDonald’s? It was awesome and just one of those cute, quirky details of a pivotal moment in your life that you’ll always remember and have fun sharing. McDonald’s.

We met Angie (a quick side note: between our loan officer, transferring agent and pretty much every other person involved in this house purchase, we worked exclusively with women named Angie—I guess the banks like to keep it easy on us!) at 11 a.m. on Saturday morning at the McD’s in Stow. She walked us through our paperwork and we signed page after page. The process didn’t take remotely as long as I had expected. It helped that they sent us most of the pages in advance, giving Neil a chance to parse each word and do his due diligence.

My friend Jeff called me earlier in the day to remind me that you can’t read everything at the signing. And he was right. While I did read all of the pre-sent paperwork before we arrived at McD’s, I admit it: I skimmed and signed the rest. I looked for keywords like “penalties” and “children” and “death” to ensure I wasn’t getting into anything too murky, but I put plenty of trust in that bank. Don’t fail me now!

That was it. We collected our copies of the paperwork and free transfer agency mugs and let Angie go on with her day. I was headed to a baby shower (and Neil was eager to read what exactly we did sign), so we had a quick celebration. Neil ordered some food from McDonald’s and we toasted with—you guessed it—French fries.

We each grabbed a slice of incredibly salty (read: delicious) and gloriously greasy potato, clinked and chomped. To homeownership!

These Charming Places

2008-03-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I originally eyed the Heights was its character. The neighborhoods are so old and have seen so many lives, recessions, depressions, booms, block parties, move-ins and move-outs that the houses — from Dutch colonials to center halls, Victorians and French provincial, modern ranches and brick tudors — wear that history on their facades. And its beautiful.

My new neighborhood has always had character, but that stemmed, to me, primarily from the people (they're always walking around, exercising their dogs, greeting one another by name) who live here. That's still true.

But as I was running today, I noticed this place has such charm. And I don't find anything charming these days. Except, of course, tall, dark-haired guys with info systems degrees and high-tech jobs. Named Neil. And this place called Euclid.

Sure, it doesn't have the architectural integrity of Shaker Heights; it doesn't have the literal history of Cleveland Heights; Euclid has its own lakefront community charm that comes in the form of perfectly navigable blocks and pleasant-to-run streets.

I like that while everything is within 20 minutes that you still feel like you're some place sunnier than Northeast Ohio, with a bluish lake in view and cool breezes biting your face. At least in the summer I'll be grateful for that breeze!

Our house-to-be is a late 1960s colonial with a center hall and side-oriented front door. I'm eager to start playing with the exterior's architectural details — like a new front door, protruding front windows for the second floor, nouveau Victorian trim for the under-roof — and I actually found plenty of inspiration in our north-of-Lakeshore neighborhood.

The houses in this neighborhood were built anywhere from Euclid's agricultural 1800s beginnings to, well, last year. Talk about diversity! Colonials, like mine, however, appear to be most abundant. You'll have that. Mine will be the raddest.

More than a few colonial-type houses have thought outside their box shape and made additions and flourishes that have caught my attention. I might have to take around a camera to take photos. Who would have thought Euclid had tourists?

While I won't mock anyone's architectural ideas, I'd like to have a look around.

For inspiration.

Here's to Wrenford!

2008-03-28T07:08:00.000-07:00

If you're just joining us, you might not be familiar with the saga at Wrenford. Long story short: we fell in love with a house on Wrenford in South Euclid. It was a gorgeous Dutch colonial with hardwood floors, a new kitchen, finished basement and a yard made for autumn clam bakes. Sigh.

What it didn't have: a first-floor bathroom. It also had some pretty small third and fourth bedrooms, which may or may not have been compensated by a finished attic and early 20th-century charm. But that gosh darn absent bathroom!

After a couple of visits, including a confirming viewing with our stellar agent, we decided the no-bathroom was a dealbreaker. No, no, no, I didn't cry. But my heart did go on.

That was November.

Nearly five months later, I'm still keeping tabs on the house and I'm happy to report that it's currently listed as "under contract," which means the sale should be pending. My fingers are crossed for the family. It's been almost a year since it was first listed. I just hope they were able to catch a good bid. And a good family.

In other news, I was happy [for my mom and step-dad] that her soon-to-be house was pulled from MLS today. My mom's movin' on up!

Needless to say, I did a bit of house-stalking or, as I like to call it, follow-up this evening. News looks good on all fronts (knock on wood). While a couple of overpriced houses are still listed and floundering, almost all of the houses we visited and nearly loved have been sold to people who can appreciate them. Ahh, closure.

Perhaps this is the silent sound of the market shifting. You heard it here first: couple buys a house in Euclid, Ohio, and the rest of the world falls into place. My karma has been down lately. It's time for a change.

Precision Pricing: Sellers Take Note

2008-03-27T05:33:00.000-07:00

While it’s not something I have to worry about (yet), house-selling can be gut-wrenching for homeowners. Even when the market isn’t scraping the floor. But you know that.

Older homes face competition from amenities of newer constructions; newer constructions will soon face competition from locations of older communities. And with the Internet (I should know), buyers have immediate access to thousands of homes and guided online tours of their insides. It’s difficult to stand out from the crowd—particularly when it’s as vast as today’s market.

Aside from jumpstarting a Renaissance in your neighborhood, upping your curb appeal and neutral-painting your walls, there is something else you can do to sell your house faster: price to sell.

Priced to sell doesn’t mean low-balling your value or posting a price that puts your property in the bargain bin. It’s all about precision pricing. A recent Cornell study found that precise prices are perceived as better deals than rounded prices.

In the study, researchers showed participants house listings and their prices, and the participants judged whether the prices were high or low. Rounded prices, such as $200K, were judged higher than precise prices, like $201,563.Why?

Because consumers are accustomed to precise numbers for low-cost items (think bubble gum, plywood, T-shirts, yesteryear’s gasoline) and expect round numbers for high-cost things (including cars, boats and houses), they tend to perceive prices as smaller when the cost ends in digits instead of zeros.

Researchers arrived at the number bias through the survey data and then confirmed it when they looked at 150,000 nationwide house sales. That’s a number bias home-sellers should take into careful consideration when listing their properties.

Few houses I’ve seen listed have taken this approach to pricing. The study was only release this month. But I have to admit: when I see a precise price, I stop and take notice. It’s not because I think it’s a lower price; I mostly wonder how on earth they arrived at the precise number. Whether I’m getting marketed on the “good price” or not, precision pricing does grab my attention. And isn’t that half the battle?

Neil and I were talking about our search the other day, trying to guesstimate how many houses we had viewed. Rumor has it that you’ll look at over 30 houses before you find “the one.” But “seeing” a house isn’t what it used to be.

In person, we probably looked at close to 20 houses; I visited at least ten on my own. Online, however, we probably toured hundreds. Honestly.

For the past two years, Neil and I scoured real estate listings on HowardHanna.com, realtor.com, remax.com, zillow.com, trulia.com, cleveland.com, forsalebyowner.com—you name it! We flipped through photos of houses and, when we saw one we liked, we would share it with the other person. Our neighbors probably wondered why were always shouting “MLS!” across the apartment.

Precise prices might get your house noticed, but sellers must have something to show once prospective buyers come inside. I can’t tell you how many house exteriors charmed me into clicking further, only to find the listing had no interior photos or simple had a series of exterior shots and maybe a backroom. Photos were definitely dealmakers/deal-breakers for me. No photos, no sale.

Essentially, it all comes down to good marketing. From the price (first impression) to the photos (lasting impression) to findability (making impressions), house-listing is all about getting a buyer’s attention and keeping it.

And that’s how I found my soon-to-be house!

Searching zillow.com, I found a house listed for $159K (not a precise price, but a notch below $160K) with 4BR/2.5BA in one of my targeted neighborhoods. While it only had satellite photos (one advantage of zillow.com; it also lists countless other public-record details you wouldn’t otherwise see), the house’s description of amenities, spaces and neighborhood roped me in.

It was only when I recognized the address that I realized I didn’t need to see additional photos. I was quite familiar with this property!

Whatever price my mom paid for her zillow.com listing was worth it—she sold her house! If I hadn’t seen the listing, fallen for the house, celebrated the find with Neil AND THEN realized it was hers, I think we’d still be searching.

My question for the Cornell researchers, however, remains: while buyers are attracted to precise prices, on what types of prices do they finally settle? In other words, are home-sellers as attracted to precise numbers as their buying counterparts?

Fireworks in Euclid

2008-03-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about moving back to an inner-burb: civic services. Garbage pick-up. Leaf collection. Public transportation. Sewers.

Their luxury began to dawn on me recently when I described Boston's compost-to-energy program to Neil, who didn't know the city collected your leaves. In fact, he remembered having to bag up the mounds and drive them to a recycling location. How green could that possibly be?

I've never had to maintain an autumn yard, but I imagine the collection service is nice. But what's even nicer: fireworks.

OK, I don't actually have a thing for fireworks, but I'm not lying when I say the city of Euclid has the best fireworks. Ever. I've seen the New Year's and July 4 displays in New York, San Francisco, London and Dublin. Not one even compared. And NYC is the display they show on TV.

Somebody call NBC. It's time to send the production crews to Euclid.

I've always wanted to plan a July 4 weekend around Northeast Ohio that ended at the Euclid Fireworks, and then write about it for Travel & Leisure. But I'm not sure this part of the country is even on their maps. They're missing out.

Video doesn't really capture the deafening excitement and blinding spectacle of fireworks, but here's a glimpse of what you could be watching this summer:

Grid Systems, Mobility and the 38-Minute Commute

2008-03-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

What a lucky girl am I: it was Easter, so I spent the weekend at my mom’s house, visited family and drove to work from Euclid this morning.

I had set my alarm for 5:25 a.m., which is 25 minutes later than I normally wake up, to squeeze in an extra run before I returned to Stow this evening. But when the alarm sounded, it was still pitch black out and my mom’s guest bed was, well, still too cozy.

So, I decided to use my laziness to my advantage, rest the alarm for 6:40 a.m. and tested the rush-hour commute from work.

Keep in mind that I’m typically halfway to work by 6:40 a.m. In fact, on many days I’m sitting at my desk eating Coco Wheats by 6:30 a.m. because I just don’t want to deal with the traffic. There last couple times I’ve driven to work from Euclid, it’s been a similar situation—too early to tell the true nature of traffic flow and work-morning rushes. Now I had my chance.

Here’s how it went down:

6:40 a.m. Alarm sounds
6:45 a.m. Shower, dress, lollygag and pack
7:22 a.m. Leave the driveway in Euclid
7:53 a.m. Park in garage near work
8:00 a.m. Open the door to my office

Not bad for a girl who generally leaves the house before she was even awake this morning.

What’s even better? I-90 W was packed to the gills this morning because of an accident at East 156th. As I approached the freeway at East 200th, I saw brake lights and quickly exited the freeway. I cut up to Euclid Avenue and took the Monticello route through the Heights and into Cleveland.

If I haven’t talked or typed your ear off about it already: I HEART GRID SYSTEMS AND TRAFFIC MOBILITY. Nothing angers me more than single-route traffic systems and having no choice in your commute. Sigh. I feel like my already-low blood pressure dipped even further today. Thank you Mr./Ms. Urban Planner. I love you.

Grand total, including morning-traffic detour, non-freeway/city driving, four school zones, plenty of lights and a Monday morning: 37:52.12. I think I’m going to like this move and that the time should be my summertime goal for the HOF 5-miler in honor of today's triumph!

On another good side, traffic moving the opposite way on the freeway appeared light and airy as usual. A huge plus for certain fellas headed from Euclid to Solon in the near future.

The Tragedy of Suburbia

2008-03-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

It's time we start "living locally" and bringing vitality to the city. Here's to the inner-ring renaissance, eh?

Wait a Minute...

2008-03-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

Yep, it looks like we have a winner. And it was sitting under our noses all along.

The offer for my mom's Edgecliff house has been accepted (yippee!) and we're moving forward with buying my mom's house. Can I get a hip-hip-hooray for us inching toward being homeowners?

Our future house is a 1967 colonial in Euclid, with a center hall, side-aligned door, shuttered windows and a bay window. It's not an uncommon house in middle-class neighborhoods, so you can probably imagine it.

But to aid your imagination, I've put together this, umm, collage interpretation of the house, complete with Neil and Gina waving from the second-floor window.

Now we need to figure out all of this financial schtuff. And get some dogs.

Just a Quickie

2008-03-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

We're still waiting to hear whether my mom has a new house on her hands and has many breeze-cooled evenings overlooking the lake on her bedroom balcony in her future. Methinks the bank is taking such a big hit on the foreclosure that their only payback is watching the buyer writhe in anticipation. Will they or won't they? Oh no!

And once that decision hits the airwaves, Neil and I have to start thinking and deciding as well. I've already decorated the place in my mind and plotted out all of my routes to grocery stores, restaurants and the way to the City of Euclid economic development office (I have some thoughts to share), but we haven't bought the house yet. I still think it's time for the inner-ring renaissance to begin, no?

So, we'll all be taking our fingers, hopping in our seats and watching the phone for the next several hours. Only for my mom's agent to call and say... we'll know tomorrow.

Getting to Know Neil

2008-03-04T11:21:00.000-08:00

So much of my own tastes and ramblings goes into this blog that you wouldn't even know this house-hunt is a two-person endeavor. Sure, I include "and Neil liked this house" every once in a while, but do you really feel that you've gotten to know Neil? I didn't think so.

In case you missed it on my other pub (sorry for the repeat), here are seven little-known factoids about the mister...

My boy’s wicked smaht.
Neil can add, multiply, percentagify, derivate, double, triple, flip and find the limit of a gazillion numbers in a single bound, Will Hunting style. I sacrificed that part of my brain; I don’t know how he does it.
In fact, Neil’s multilingual, in a way.
Believe it: Neil could probably carry on an entire month’s worth of conversations in movie quotes alone. And while I often spend 5-10 minutes staring blankly at him mid-quote, he still loves me until I figure out what on earth he’s saying.
But he was supposed to be the next Joe Montana’s next Jerry Rice.
Jackson Township legend has it that Neil and his friend Jon were stellar childhood football players. Jon could throw for miles; Neil could catch anything thrown in his zip code. Then puberty hit. Neil’s career, however, didn’t end before he had the opportunity to be laid out by Mike Doss, who has since won championships with Ohio State and the Indianapolis Colts.
No one told his feet.
The average American man wears a size 9-10 shoe; Neil wears sizes 13-14. That puts him in the ranks of LeBron James (size 15), Dwayne Wade (size 14.5) and Peyton Manning (size 14). While he’s not quite Shaq (size 22G), Neil is at least 2.5 sizes larger than Boomer the Blue Lion, the Indiana Pacers’ mascot.
Neil is still a football champion.
Fantasy football, that is. Neil didn’t make it to the big field, but he did hoist the big trophy at the end of last season when he won the MFFL Super Bowl. So, he’s still kind of like Jerry Rice. Instead of doing sprints uphill wearing 20-pound ankle weights on each leg, Neil spends the off-season making player-stat spreadsheets, completing mock fantasy drafts and advising the fantasy boards.
A Vegas champ, he is not.
Poker, craps, roulette, blackjack, nickel slots, coin toss… you name the gamble and Neil will lose it. In fact, he recently co-organized a poker tournament and opened with an all-in bet on three kings/two aces. Only to lose to three aces/two kings. Lucky for us, he knows his karma and values compounding interest.
He fights bears instead.
That’s right. They’re Central Park bears, too. His skills didn't help me on that one run through the park, but Neil makes me laugh until I cry. On a regular basis.

And all those laughs reportedly add 7-10 years to my life. Have you had your whole-hearted laugh today?

If you're also dying for more details on this author, you can check out my Top 7 from a previous Iron G post as well. Instead of battling the wild animals in my profile... I'm dressing as them.

My Mom’s House: Part III

2008-03-03T07:06:00.000-08:00

Mom: (answers) Hey G!

GP: Are you selling your house?

Mom: Yeah, why?

GP: I just saw it on zillow.

Mom: How cool! Did you want to buy it?

***
And that’s how history began.
***

At first I started giving her tips on enhancing the posting—describe the neighborhood, mention the master suite, list the additional family room—then I started thinking.

Several times over the past two years of house-hunting, Neil or I have said, “kind of like your mom’s house” or “my mom’s house has that” or “if it were like it is, say, at your mom’s house,” so putting it on our list only made sense. And when she offered to give us a family discount, Neil’s eyes lit up (mine were already sparkling at the idea).

It’s a 4BR/2.5BA with a master suite and plenty of living space. Neil’s concerned that there’s no mantuary (more on that later), but he toured the basement a few weeks ago to start thinking about possible basement layouts. I’ve always loved the neighborhood—even if Heinen’s and Whole Foods are 15-20 minutes away, shucks—and would love to be part of the Euclid Renaissance. While the lakefront neighborhood is pretty devoid of hills, it still makes for great running terrain for a runner like me (plenty of places to wind, turn, stare, speed, slow and breathe spring, summer, winter and fall air), and it’s within reach of pretty much everything.

Neil may cringe when I say this: it’s pretty much 20 minutes from everything.

Following that initial conversation, Neil and I really got to talking. Was it strange to buy my mom’s house? Would it be even stranger to live there? Despite several people’s attempt to make me uncomfortable with it, truth is I hardly remember living there. We moved to the house when I was a teenager and I moved out immediately after college. I spent most of my time either at school, any kind of sports practice or holed up in my room for most of those years (ah, aren’t teenagers fantastic?) that the house in its entirety just doesn’t factor into my memories of that time.

Plus, I’ve become so accustomed to my own spaces that most of my memories are superimposed on my last couple of apartments. It’s like I’ve deleted that part of my memory. Kind of convenient.

We tossed the idea around and bounced from “it’s a great idea!” to “it’s a bad idea!” to “we should totally do it!” to “we shouldn’t, should we?” to “how could we do it?” to “how couldn’t we do it?”

The real test came in the weeks and house listings that followed. One house after the other hit the MLS with the same square footage, same bedrooms and bathrooms (some with finished basements, some without), less attractive kitchens and varying driveways widths. These listings fell in Cleveland Heights, University Heights, Lyndhurst—all of the places we had been planning to live—but when we saw how much house we could get in Euclid for the price and the level of taxes, it was hard to turn a blind eye to the numbers.

Wouldn’t it be difficult to swallow $40K more for a comparable house in a less accessible area where the taxes were $2K more each year? Now, the houses at which we were looking in the Heights and Lyndhurst still had reasonable (according to our established goals) tax rates, but they were still a hop above what we would pay for this house.

What could we do, we thought, with that extra $40K and the $2K each year? Plenty! We could add a finished basement, buy me a La Cornue, retire earlier? Sure, there will be other house expenses and things to fix, but the differences in upfront costs were hard to ignore. So, we didn’t ignore them.

We’ve battled within ourselves, trying to decide whether it’s what we want to do. And I’ve evaluated why I wanted to live in other places and how those needs will be affected by moving to Euclid.

Moving to the Heights, I figured would a) move me closer to work; b) put me in closer proximity to my favorite shops and food spots; c) make me feel like I lived somewhere nifty; d) certainly land me in a charming 1920s center-hall colonial; and e) give me plenty of places to run and play.

Moving to Euclid a) does put me closer to work—even if it’s not as close—and gives me a flexible locale for future changes in my commuting life or Neil’s; b) it does put me closer to my favorite food stores than Stow, just not the two-minute hop from, say, Glendon in University Heights; Euclid and surrounding areas, however, are on a fooding upswing, and it’s not far at all from the Heights anyway; c) nifty is as nifty does; d) OK, this one I cannot quite help… but this house comes with a new furnace and central air, working plumbing and a history with which I’m very familiar; and e) plenty of parks and neighborhoods with be all mine.

No, we haven’t yet made our final decision. Although we have each started thinking about where we would put things or what we would customize to our own tastes. With any luck, this house-hunting blog will become a home décor and nesting blog by spring. The future looks bright.

What a Difference a ‘Burb Makes

2008-02-18T09:29:00.000-08:00

Because I had a doctor’s appointment at 7 a.m., I stayed at my mom’s house in Euclid. The appointment was in Willoughby. Here’s how the morning went down:

Woke up at 6:15 a.m. (1.25 hours later than normal)
Left the house by 6:45 a.m. (15 minutes later than I normally leave home)
Arrived at the hospital at 7 a.m.
Had an ultrasound and blood drawn
Drove to work, parked my car, walked to work
Sat down at my desk less than 30 minutes later that usual

I'm not going to lie to you: I feel about 16 times happier this morning and 20 times more energetic. What a difference a suburb makes! Whew!

Never has my need to move been illustrated with such strength. Imagine the things I could (and did!) get done if I had those three hours each day back!

Granted, most people say things like that, but I actually take advantage of my time and use it wisely. As I cruised into my parking lot, I was dreaming about the hours of running and reading and relaxing I could get back some day.

Long commutes really take it out of you, and I highly recommend to anyone with a 40+-minute commute to think about what better things they could be doing with their time (not to mention the environment—unless, of course, you’re taking public transportation, in which case, you are doing a good thing and kind of have some down time to do things like read and relax; now, if only they could install treadmills and stationary bikes on your express-bus ride home!). Not only did I get more sleep, but I literally tended to my health and took a stress-free drive into work. That sounds like a healthy life-approach to me!

Sure, moving isn't an option for everyone, but cutting down a stressful, never-ending commute does wonders. That's just my opinion and, well, my experience.

My Mom’s House: Part II

2008-02-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

Final decisions haven't been made for the Edgecliff house, but at least I feel accomplished in my brief life as a real estate agent. Not only am I batting 1.000 on hooking up buyers with houses, I managed to match up buyers and house in one try. Woo hoo!

But where does that leave us?

Well, we crossed off the Edgecliff house from our list: too big, too soon. We're able to get more than a "starter home" but we don't want a be-all/end-all home either. Besides, who's going to clean, decorate, furnish and maintain all that extra space? Certainly not the dogs! Nevertheless, I liked to idea of moving back into that Euclid neighborhood, so I added north-of-Lakeshore houses to my list.

So, I'm on zillow.com a few days later checking out Euclid listings. There's a plethora of 3-4BR houses, but very few on the market right now with more than 1.5BA. Ideally, with resale in mind, we're eying homes with at least 2BA, preferable 2.5.

You're right, though: we don't need 2.5BA when we only have two people. At all. While the reassurance that you'll always have a spare bath when you need one is stellar, it's not necessary. Until we started thinking about who would buy our house when we wanted to sell it. And two of those audiences would be 1) families who need more than 1.5BA and might actually cherish 2.5BA; and 2) DINKs like us who want to resell later to the same two crowds.

We figured that if 1.5BA was making us stop and think too much, it wouldn't be different for people just like us in the future. And, I suppose, there are just people who think they actually need more bathrooms than people (they might also fall into the same category of people who think you need twice as many televisions as people, and three times as many cars). To each his/her own, right?

Right. So, I'm cruising the Euclid listings on howardhanna.com, realtor.com and a private agent-established search site, but nothing is tickling my fancy in our price range. Believe me: there were plenty of gorgeous houses on the market in that neighborhood. They just weren't in our neighborhood for prices and size. Some were huge on space, others were too huge on price.

Then I found it: a 4BR/2.5BA totally within our price range and apparently priced to sell! It was listed "by owner" on zillow.com and featured a master suite and a family room on the first floor. The basement wasn't finished, but everything else seemed stellar. You can imagine my excitement.

Suddenly something struck me. The address was strange. And familiar. Perhaps too familiar. I read it over and over again. What was the deal? I took out my driver's license and -- what do you know? -- it's my mom's house (that's right, I still haven't changed my license address)!

So, I pick up the phone and call my mom...

Another Beauty Hits the Market

2008-02-16T05:39:00.000-08:00

Two new houses have shown up on the market: 1) a stunning Cleveland Heights three-story colonial with tiled roof (have I mentioned that I love tile roofs?), brand new kitchen and bathrooms, and more window light than your favorite sidewalk cafe; and 2) a newer Lyndhurst colonial with a finished mantuary (a.k.a. finished basement) and gallery lighting that tickles Neil's fancy.

We both found our respective dream homes on Friday, sending MLS numbers to each other in fits of panicked glee. I think there's always this feeling of excitement mixed with that we-must-buy-this-right-now anxiety that comes with anything you want, want, want and that someone else might buy, buy, buy first.

The good thing is that houses are a little bit different than, say, the must-have sweater you found at the vintage store. Sure, there's only one of each, but chances are you can find another sweater that suits your needs, but you might be waiting around, kicking yourself, for a while if you miss out on YOUR house.

Obviously, it takes a while for other buyers to find the house in question, get a showing, arrange their finances and make an offer the seller can't refuse. Buying a house generally doesn't require reaction times comparable to buying stock. And that leaves some wiggle room and, thankfully, some time to react in a well thought-out manner.

Which I am always fighting myself to do. Neil, as I have mentioned, takes a more metered approach to these things. Thank the home-buying gods! But it gives us a nice mixture of raw emotion (me) and low-key numbers-crunching (him) that makes our agent's head spin whenever he sees us. He's very understanding ;-)

The unfortunate thing is that our emotions rarely flare up on the same house. This Friday is case in point. We threw our respective MLS at the other, holding our breath and waiting for the other person to just up and pack his or her bags to move, move, move today! Of course, we both just shrugged and sighed at the other's choice. What a let down!

I'm going to schedule viewings of each house this week to better inform our decisions and rev up or emotions about these houses. It's better to check out the homes and not buy them than forever wonder -- not knowing their flaws or true dimensions -- what could have been so beautiful, so right.

Cast Your Vote...
Check out the exteriors of our latest two contestants. What's your vote? Bonus question: which house is which?

Oh, the mortgage crisis…

2008-02-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

There are always three sides to any crisis: 1) the people who caused it; 2) the people suffering because of it; and 3) the people benefiting from it.

I don’t think it’s wrong of me to say that, with respect to the mortgage crisis, I’m part of the third group. And, baby, we’re reaping.

Because the real estate market isn’t healthy, we all know it’s a “buyer’s market.” What exactly that means in any given area varies, but in Cleveland it often means that you’re either dealing with motivated sellers or banks. And there’s just a lot of off-loading going on right now.

First, you have the people who have already bought another house and would love to give you their firstborn before they pay two mortgages. The second group is hightailing it out of foreclosure-land, a top destination for NE Ohio homeowners these days, before the gates close. And then you have the not-so-happy-to-own-your-foreclosed-house banks that want to recover as much of their investments before they must forsake firstborns as well.

But then you get this smarmy third group, looking to swoop in and buy an awesome house for far less than it would have cost in 2003. Perhaps they’re investors, apartment-dwellers, people moving from higher-value markets, first-time buyers or homeowners able to sell one house at a decent price and buy the next at an even better mark.

What’s more is that interest rates are scraping the floor again. So, some people who were saving for a house during high-interest years have more money from those investments to put into a house that costs less now than it would have a few years ago and can take out any additional mortgage funding at a lower rate than one could have imagined just a year ago. Follow that?

Now, with respect to financing, I would be a first-time home buyer. According to gossip, bank employees and financing experts, that puts me at a disadvantage. But having a good credit history and score does not. In addition, we have a good percentage of money to put down on the house, as well as the cash to pay "loan points" if that approach pays in the end. We're both pretty numbers savvy and aware of the myriad financing pitfalls and high points that come with home-buying.

Plus, we're really lucky to be surrounded by truckloads of financial experts. And cupcake bakers, if some sweet tooth needs a bribe.

I’m biased, so excuse me when I say that the third group isn’t evil for taking advantage of the crisis. We could be caught up in a future crisis, so I hope no one catches the hubris bug. But we’re not doing it for personal gain. Able-buyers right now are making wise investments that have great potential for higher returns. I like to think of it as everything being on sale, and I’m being rewarded for saving, waiting and putting up with apartment neighbors for way too long!

I don’t think the real estate market has hit rock bottom, but we all have a good feeling and a sense of history that tells us it eventually has to climb. Right? Granted, there’s no marked moment when you know the tables are going to turn—either for better or worse. But I think it’s fair to assess that the market just won’t live in the basement forever.

Knock on wood.

(Note: I'm not pretending to be a foreclosure or mortgage-crisis expert; MAS asked what I thought about it and how it was affecting my quest for housedom. Thanks for the question!)

On the Market Again

2008-02-14T07:17:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the first house we toured (Avalon Station was our first condo tour, but this was phase two: houses)? It was way back in August 2007. While it was dreamy to me, it didn’t quite tickle Neil the same way (hence the post The Dual Meaning of ‘Oh My God’), so we moved on.

The house had been listed at $200K, which was a little high for this 4BR/1.5BA in Cleveland Heights. Don’t get me wrong: it was beautiful. But Cleveland Heights offers a lot more house for $200K can this baby was giving.

Nevertheless, I was a little bummed when I saw it go off the market. After some research, I found that it had, in fact, sold for $200K. Good for them, I thought. Even if I was a little bit jealous.

Well, here we are, six months later, and the house is back on the informal market (it’s been listed on online real estate sites like trulia.com and zillow.com, but not MLS). Some more research uncovered that the August purchase fell through, and now they’re trying to sell the place again. And somehow, I’ve managed to resist.

One problem is that it’s still listed for $200K; it might be worth $160-170K. But I think the real problem was karma.

When we visited the house, the listing agent was mostly chipper and friendly, but her snobbiness was only thinly veiled. I didn’t have my new job yet, and we weren’t in a hurry to move. So, when she asked about our timeframe and we said we wanted to move in the next 6-8 months, she said with a bit of a snap, “Well, a house like this won’t be on the market in six months.”

Looks like she was wrong.

My Mom’s House: Part I

2008-02-13T05:59:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, we’re still looking for a house.

I know, I know, you had probably thought I had neglected my blog because I was busy packing, moving, unpacking and decorating. But it’s not true.

What is true: the house search has continued, has been ramped up and has become more important than ever since I started my new job in early January. Commuting from Stow to Cleveland isn’t as bad as I imagined, but three hours in the car each isn’t my cup of tea. And I like tea.

Plus, it’s rained on my tri-training parade, and I think we all know how much it stinks to be in shape, fall out of it and try to crawl back again!

So, what’s happened since we last met? Well, I found a house in my mom’s neighborhood, which I wrote about in my training blog, but not my housing blog (oddly enough). It’s an older brick tudor on a corner lot that faces Lake Erie and has magnificent water views from most rooms in the house. The house was a foreclosure; the location was impeccable; the price was irresistible.

I told my mom about it, and we planned to check out the house together and have lunch while I was in the area. And the morning of the visit, my step-father, Philip, decided to join us.

It’s blimy cold outside when we get to the house, but there’s something warming about being so close to the lake. Maybe it’s the mental correlation with summer, beaches and swimming; I totally dig it. And I think I could dig living here, even if it’s two blocks from my mom’s house.

Not only is she a non-intrusive mother (no way she has Everybody Loves Raymond syndrome), but she lives in a killer lakefront neighborhood in Euclid; it’s the neighborhood where I grew up.

Granted, it doesn’t have the proximity to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods (there’s a Heinen’s 5-6 miles away; although I should rally for a closer one), but it has a certain charm and friendliness you don’t find much anymore.

What’s more is it’s great for running—even if it doesn’t have hills—and was built in the middle of a grid-structured community that’s easy to get around and close to public transportation.

Plus, it has a killer pizza place down the street. How can you beat that?

Well, it’s blimy cold when we get inside the house as well. It’s obvious no one has lived in the house for a while (it’s actually colder inside than outside) and the pipes have burst, damaging the walls and ceilings. Aside from the damage and the radiators (that’s on Neil’s deal-breaker list), it’s a top-notch house with sprawling, open floorplans and gorgeous hardwood floors. Wow.

The master bedroom spanned half the entire second floor and had a balcony and windows that overlooked the lake. Then the third floor wasn’t your average attic; it’s a real, livable floor! You could make an entire apartment at the top of this house.

Meanwhile, the kitchen needed some serious work. It was wholly livable, but I’m kitchen picky. No La CornueFe was going into that kitchen in that state. So, it definitely needed some work.

What was my overall impression? Gorgeous, impressive and too flippin’ big for us.

When I talk to people about buying houses, most people seem to believe you should a) buy the most expensive house you can possibly afford; b) expect to find the perfect house with everything from your wildest dreams; and c) always think bigger is better.

I happen to disagree.

Perhaps I’ve already mentioned that my original square-footage expectation was 1200 square feet. It’s roughly the size of my past two apartments and has suited us well. We’ve had two bedrooms and two bathrooms, which has been more than enough space, and the only additions to our clan might be a couple of dogs. But how much more space might a schnoodle and a pound puppy really need (note: this is a rhetorical question)?

Unlike most houses I walk into (see The Dual Meaning of 'Oh My God'), this one didn’t strike me as THE house. There’s nothing wrong with it, but part of me knew it wasn’t my house. It was my mom’s house.

When my mom and Philip walked through the house, they could see themselves living in it, repairing its broken limbs and having family over for the holidays. My mom has always wanted to live on the lake, especially on this street in Euclid. She squeezed into the neighborhood 15 years ago and always had her eyes fixed on the next street.

And truth is: I didn’t feel right moving to Edgecliff before my mom. There’s some order to things that I respect, especially within my family. This house just seemed right, and they might just buy it.

Don’t feel bad for us. We might have found our house. We’ve already started imagining ourselves living in it and plotting out our possible commutes. More to come...

The Opening of a House-Hunter’s Mind

2008-01-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

One of the greatest influences on this house-hunter’s house-hunting mind has been the magazine Dwell. I’ve read the modern architecture magazine for a couple years, but only recently did its message about modern living really click. Rather than telling me what I should like, think or accept, it has helped open my mind—a phenomenon I’ve described in a past post.

But sometimes having an open mind about houses requires a little extra work.

Dwell champions the modern lifestyle through modern arch/design, rejuvenation of downed structures and just plain green living. While some of its stories are architecturally over my head (not for long I hope; I want to learn it all!), the collection of seemingly banal houses real people have made into crisp, modern gems inspires me to someday do the same.

When my housing search began, I looked almost exclusively for Victorians or center-hall colonials in the Heights. The idea of a ranch or bungalow almost made me sick. And if the house didn’t have character at first exterior glance, I wasn’t even venturing inside. Now I have gotten a sixth sense about what an inside will look like based on a house’s exterior and landscaping, but sometimes those instincts are wrong. And I’m quickly learning that if the structure and basic elements exist, the interior doesn’t have to be perfect for me to work some magic. I don’t want a fixer-upper, but I don’t mind giving a house some love.

The February 2008 issue of Dwell features an L-shaped Belgian ranch an architect and his chemist wife bought because they fell in love with a big, fat beech tree in the backyard. It’s a long, fast house will little dimension and no surprises on the surface, but the family adds depth and a modern touch with a utilitarian approach to furnishing (no purely decorative chairs, pillows and stands here) and walls that burst with color.

Each wall, it appears, has another brilliant color—as the house moves from kitchen to living to dining to bedroom, the colors advance from green to blue, brown and orange. Colors may turn off some people, but this use of the rainbow vitalizes a house that could, in another painting life, pass for my 1960s-era elementary school. Split level with metal windows, anyone?

My obsession with colorful interiors apparently puts me at a disadvantage in the housing market. Everyone seems to paint their houses off-white, eggshell, bone, beige or brilliant white when they go to market. Does that speak to you? Because neutral-painting is the market suggestion, I’ll have to see the character beyond the paint.

I think I’ve matured as a house-hunter because I will open a house listing that features a beige 1950s-era Beachwood bungalow, which I know has wooly carpeting, wallpaper and the slight scent of rosy drawer liners before I even peak inside. So long as it has an updated kitchen and bathroom, I can work with it for a reasonable price and timeframe. It's not about the so-called "Pottery Barn" decor; it's about finding a cleanable slate for my own masterpiece of domestic expression. I only hope there’s a hardwood floor hiding—protected—under that carpet.

As the new year turns, I’m hoping more people with gems or diamonds-in-the-rough will resolve to sell their houses this year. And soon... before I close my mind again!

To Rent or Not to Rent?

2007-12-27T20:47:00.000-08:00

Should that be the question? Truth be told: I’m sick of renting. When I hit a wall in searching for houses today (yes, we look every single day), I thought that perhaps we should just give in for a year and rent. My new job starts in less than a week and a half, and I’m getting a little relocation antsy.

I’ve accepted that I’ll have to drive 35+ miles to work every day between now and [probably] April. Our current lease ends in April, and we’ll be tasked with a decision: a) renew here from month to month until we find something perfect to buy; or b) rent a place up north for a year while we search and search and search.

Moving closer to Cleveland would make day-to-day logistics easier, but my fondest for moving (or lack of it) makes the rent-again decision a difficult one. I think one of the appeals of buying a house right now—aside from the “buyer’s market” and other perks of homeownership—would be that one last (for now) move.

I don’t think I could bear the thought of relocating all of my stuff just to move it again once we find a house. And if we did rent a new place, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t even unpack (we’ve been in this apartment for closer to three years and I still refuse to hang anything on the walls!).

It’s a strange new feeling I’m having these days: suddenly I’m willing to settle down. Not in a get-hitched-have-kids-buy-houseplants-and-raise-a-golden-retriever way, but physical location-wise settling down. It’s crazy! Musing about my new job the other day, I was thinking about what I could do in the position over 3-4 years and how I could grow in this new place.

Until recently, I couldn’t accept the idea that I would live in NE Ohio for another whole year let alone enjoy a job for more than six months. It isn’t that I’ve ever been so unhappy in my jobs or in NE Ohio. Perhaps I just wasn’t happy with who I was or I was worried about what I could become. And (knock on wood) I think I’m more secure on that front now.

Sure, I don’t have it all figured out—or anything figured out, really. But whatever it is I’m doing now, it all seems cool. So, I’m ready to find a house and move somewhere for a while. The idea of owning a house sounds appealing for some reason. While I can’t put my finger on what it is, I have put together my...

Top Five Reasons I Want to Own a House:
5. I can put crown moulding wherever I want in the house.
4. Even if I don’t have noisy neighbors, I can sound-proof whatever I want.
3. Finally: I’ll have some space to plant and kill my own flowers, vegetables and herbs.
2. I can paint the walls and not have to “paint them back” before I leave.
1. My very own kitchen.

Of course my apartment has a kitchen. And it’s a very nice kitchen with sturdy appliances, plenty of cabinet and work space, a breakfast bar and even vaulted ceilings. But it’s not mine. I can’t buy a La Cornue Fe range or a Subzero fridge that either fits into the cabinets or matches the steel on my French hood; I can’t buy those vintage-looking appliances that match the accent color in my Spanish-tiled backsplash; I can’t listen to French accordion music while frosting made-from-scratch cupcakes, sighing with glee because I’m doing all of these things in my own dream kitchen.

Maybe I should have never learned to cook.

It’s likely that I won’t buy the range or fridge (they’re not sensibly priced, let’s just say) anyway. But it’s nice to have the possibility.

Sure, there’s more to homeownership than building your perfect little kitchen, painting walls, killing plants and getting your hands on that beautiful range and other appliances you don't really need.

Right now, for me, it’s the feeling of being planted, rooted somewhere. For the first time. We're not talking forever here. But long enough to dream and frost cupcakes.

But I Don’t Want it 'As-Is'

2007-12-22T20:44:00.000-08:00

I know that the near-perfect house we checked out in November had a treehouse, but this house in Shaker Heights is just ridiculous. What could the listing agent been thinking when s/he selected this photo for the house posting? It’s on all three of my major real estate sites (HH, Remax.com, Realtor.com) and I can’t quite believe it.

But what blows my mind most: when I bring up the tree-house on zillow, I see no trees. Which makes me believe the house either dressed up as a tree for Halloween or sprouted a forest between the time of zillow’s satellite swipe and the listing photo.

I’m not sure which is worse, but what’s what worse than either scenario is the “As Is” listing. After a few too many foreclosure flips on Flip That House, I think I know what “as is” means: crap. I’ve seen properties littered with garbage, Pringle cans and daybeds, wall-holes, sheet curtains, asbestos and moldy carpet. It’s no wonder they don’t feature photos; it would only scare us away.

The phrase "as-is," however, says enough to me. Now.

And it’s too bad because there’s a charming blue colonial in Cleveland Heights listed for the foreclosure special price $74K. It’s a 2K-plus square-foot pad with 3BR/2BA apparently new windows and fresh-looking exterior paint.

Put plainly: it looks like a dollhouse from the street. Considering it’s being sold as-is, however, I imagine the inside is speckled with Wendy's Biggie cups, loose insulation and headless Barbie dolls whose matted-hair heads are stuck in the radiators. Sigh. The exterior looks like it could use a little landscaping, but when the description says the home needs "a little TLC" and has "plenty of potential," I know that means we'll be doing more work than we'd prefer.

I know that a good deal has its drawbacks. You always pay for it somewhere, right? I’m just not ready to buy a house as-is. Ready-to-move-in is more like it. Neil and I have agreed that we’d like to know what it’s like to own a house for a little bit before we learn how to tear it to pieces and build it again.

Sure, some painting and tearing up carpet to reveal pristine hardwoods might find some acceptance in this camp, but too much else isn’t in this first-time buyer's to-do list. And I’m coming to this purchase as-is!

The $860K Flip

2007-12-19T18:51:00.001-08:00

So, I did a search: not a single $860K house exists in the state of Ohio that a sane person would buy for a flip. But Ohio, as it turns out, doesn’t operate on the same currency as Southern California.

On everyone’s favorite show, Flip That House, a guy named Ty bought a Pasadena 3BR/2BA for $860K. And that was pre-flip! Neil and I have a tradition of guessing the starting house price when the show introduces each episode’s flip house. This property wasn’t in too shabby shape and it was in a pretty sharp neighborhood. The kitchen and bathrooms, as always, required serious updating, but it looked good in general. What would it cost?

Neil said $450K; I went for $550K. While we wouldn’t have been out by The Price is Right standards, we weren’t even in the same tax bracket. Eight hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Repeat that to yourself. Wow.

It made me wonder how anyone moves from the Ohio economy to the West Coast world of what, to my inexperienced eyes, appears to be play money. Yes, yes, I understand the difference in prices of living, salaries, etc. But what a shock to your system—not to mention your wallet, your checking account, your savings, your IRA—it must be to make that change.

Nevertheless, changes to Ty’s house cost $65K and included new tubs, sinks, kitchen cabinets and appliances. It was the same-old-same-old for a FTH episode, including the firing of a hard-to-trust contractor. Neil and I have noticed that building contractors on the show are often deemed untrustworthy, shady and more likely to cheat you than the pickpocket spying you at the corner bus stop. I’ve scoured the Internet looking for some outrage from the contractor community, but there doesn’t appear to be any… which makes me wonder: is it a true characterization?

When I was younger, my mom was big into the flipping game and worked often with a contractor named Chuck. He was a bulky man with Irish coloring and a Croatian wife (so he tried to elbow friendship with that cultural connection to our family) who talked like a Mafioso and always referred to guys with names like Skinny Joe, Big Tom and Quick Smitty. No joke. More than once I heard him talk way too loudly about cracking someone’s knee or breaking their legs. My mom and my step-dad often bickered quickly about what “Chuck’s guys” did or did not do for one job or another. Yet while he seemed to prove himself a little unreliable from time to time (maybe it was just “his guys”), they continued to work with him. And I wondered on more than one occasion whether it was because Chuck would snap their breaks if they broke ties. I hope not.

But like Chuck, my experiences with guys who built decks, bathrooms and patios for family members have reflected the same negative characterization shown on FTH. In fact, my dad made the mistake of paying more than 50 percent upfront to a guy who never returned to build the rest of his deck. Tisk, tisk.

I don’t make generalizations about people, so I want to know whether my impression of building contractors is just an erroneous collision of bad examples or some semblance of the truth? You’d think that because I’m looking to buy my first house, I wouldn’t really have to worry about these types of things, but one never knows what repairs lie ahead.

In the end, Ty’s house turned out really well (he listed it for $1.03 million). He and his crew shined the floors, knocked down walls and added solar tubular skylights to a few choice rooms in the house. The skylights had the appearance of recessed lighting, but drew natural light from outside through tubes and pulled it into the rooms.

Ahh, natural light at its finest! Not only did it make the ceilings appear higher and flood the rooms with light, I imagine they were quite green. They looked like they would nix the need for lamps during the day. Even when overcast.

All of these FTH ideas are healthy for our house-hunting (we’re very attuned to what makes a good kitchen now and how to spot some water damage), and it’s a good deterrent for any latent desires to flip a house or just get a fixer-upper.

It hadn’t entered our minds or searches, and it’s going to stay that way for now. Neil and I are ready to admit we’re not suited for that level of repairs. Maybe after a few years of home ownership.

And the Market Takes a Holiday

2007-12-17T19:56:00.000-08:00

When we checked out the South Euclid house last month, our agent warned us that the holidays (or winter as a whole) might not be the best time for house-hunting. He wasn’t discouraging us from continuing the search, but he was absolutely correct.

I’ll type on about the advantages of the “down” market, but one disadvantage is the lack of killer properties being listed everyday. For the past several months, I haven’t seen any houses in NEOhio—in or out of our price range—that knocked my socks off (OK, the architecture on a new house in Pepper Pike was unique, a little old-world and pretty stellar, but not for $800K).

One or two houses we would deem “acceptable” make their way to the market every now and then, but they always have deal-breakers like single bathrooms, ghastly kitchens or radiators. My imminent job move makes our current location a little inconvenient, but we’re not at all in a rush to buy, buy, buy! We’re lucky in that respect.

I do, however, find myself getting a little desperate when the snow starts falling and the snow ploughs can’t quite keep up with the roads. So desperate, in fact, that I caught myself looking at pre-fab new constructions and 1970s split levels in Solon and outer Beachwood. Settling for those houses (if that’s your speed, it’s cool; it’s just not mine) would be like buying a dress three sizes too small and promising not to order fries each time you hit McDonald’s in an effort to make the dress fit.

And while my search was once focused entirely on Cleveland Heights (and then Shaker and then Lyndhurst and then University Heights), it’s grown so vast that I don’t think there’s a house from Euclid to Mentor, Walton Hills to South Russell whose interior photos I haven’t browsed. The hardest part is sifting through so many listings I know I’ve seen, maintaining hope that something new will surface. Unfortunately, Howard Hanna’s redesign ditched the “only include properties listed in the past 14 days” filter from their search.

So, I’ve shifted my attention to newspaper listings (online listings, that is) and zillow map searches to find something new. As I’ve said before, I know our perfect house is just waiting out there. Somewhere. And any day now, some family will make the decision and plunk a sign down in their front yard. I’m just waiting to see it hit the Internet.

Pick this House, Flip that House

2007-12-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

Believe me, “flipping” houses is the furthest thing from my mind right now. But watching Flip That House (which is not related to the show Flip This House) is a different story.

If you’re not familiar with the show, Flip That House follows investors/flippers from the time they purchase a rundown property through their contractor talks, planning, demolition, building, sanding, painting, sweeping and selling. It’s a reality series, so there’s no intense dialogue—although the plot twists are 100 percent real with contractors falling behind, rotted walls collapsing behind new drywall and water-based primer just not working on woodwork—but it’s addictive as all get-out. And informative too.

I don’t intend to buy a fixer-upper, but chances are that whatever dream house ends up falling into our laps won’t be perfect. I realize that. Even if it’s top notch when we move in, the house could still hit bumps in the future. And it probably will.

Watching Flip That House, I’ve learned more about kitchen cabinets and countertops, laminate floors and windows, bathtub glazing and vanity pricing than I could have hoped. I’m pretty astute about housing structure and architecture, so learning the more consumer-accessible ends of homeownership will be helpful. Because living in apartments for my whole adult life has really only taught me to how to buy curtains.

Obviously I don’t get all my lessons from Flip That House, but it’s an entertaining supplement to real-life and Web resources. But it’s also an interesting foray into the world of real estate outside NE Ohio.

When Neil and I tune into the show, we’re always blown away by the West coast episodes in which investors buy fixer-uppers for $410K. FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND? Then they put $80K into repairs and sell the thing for $575K. It blows my mind. But if I had an extra half million dollars lying around, I might do something else with it. That’s just me.

Housing markets, however, are fascinating things. I keep having friends who live in far more glamorous cities tell me that I’m lucky because the NE Ohio market is so bad. But is it? Really? I suppose it all depends on your goals in buying houses and your definition of “bad.”

I think a market in which I can buy a sturdy house with a Neil-sized yard and Gina-acceptable charm that not only fits into my budget without making me cry but suits my lifestyle, offers public transportation and makes me smile is a good market. Sure, I need a good grocery store and a place to run, swim and cycle nearby, but that’s not too much to ask. Is it?

For years I had hoped to buy a brownstone on the Upper West Side, but the New York market is just unbelievable right now. Walking along Riverside Drive last spring, Neil and I found a few places for sale in the West 90s that were priced in the $4-6 million range (I’ll take two!) and the distance between NE Ohio and Manhattan had never been more clearly marked.

Sure, we could rent a place for way more than we would pay for a house in Cleveland, but it’s just not a priority to live in the city anymore. And the thought of paying into a house and building equity is a lot sexier right now.

We’ve kind of butted heads over moving to New York for a few years, but my career has done well in Cleveland, so the move hasn’t been as imperative as it once seemed. And, as I like to say, my ability to accept living in a cardboard box—so long as it was near Zabar’s or a good creperie—has diminished severely with age.

So, I actually accepted the idea of buying a home when I saw those $4-6 million townhouses. It dawned on me the only way I would have any hope of scratching together a down payment for a place like that would be to make good investments now. And if I still have the desire to move to New York years from now, perhaps the opportunity will be there.

Then I start thinking about Cleveland. Among a billion reasons I’ve decided to stay, I didn’t want to be just another college graduate all too ready to abandon ship. None of my friends from high school or college stayed, so perhaps I just don’t like to follow the crowd.

But then there's my sense of responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to stay in this city to make it viable again? I realize that I’m not going to be Cleveland's Joan of Arc, but I hope more people follow suit. It’s a fantastic city with plenty of arts and culture and food and great stuff to do. Not to mention the stellar grocery stores and beautiful houses in the inner ring!

It makes my skin crawl when people talk about this area or that area being intrinsically good or bad or going down the drain because it’s not as Donna Reed as they had hoped.

When we see schools or houses or neighborhoods heading in the wrong direction, it shouldn't be our instinct to head for the outerburb hills! Our solution of building clone houses over farm- or woodland so far removed from civilization that we have to gas up the SUV to buy a gallon of milk is destroying our city. This isn’t even about being green anymore. It’s about being practical. And for me it’s just not.

(Pause a moment while I step off my soapbox.)

Good neighborhoods need good people. I want to be good people. Now I just need a neighborhood.

What’s in a Name?

2007-11-30T08:37:00.000-08:00

Everyone says that when you walk into your house for the first time, you know that it’s yours. Or it will be. Should be. Unfortunately for us, I have that feeling every time we walk into any 1920s center hall colonial, Dutch colonial, Queen Anne… you get the idea. I get sucked into the romance of hardwood floors, plaster walls and sun-loving bay windows. Sigh.

And after all of this love-at-first-sight, I still don’t think I know exactly what I’m looking for. Three to four bedrooms and at least two bathrooms (resale considerations), a finished basement for Neil and a place to shelve my books. A fireplace would be nice for the charm of it and it just has to feel like home. We’ve sat down over the past two years on more than one occasion and really hashed out the things we need (roof and walls topped my list!), and as the search continues, it narrows and widens and changes. Neil and I have vastly different taste, so we don’t have much overlap. Compromise and a glorious middle ground are out there. I know it!

But for all this unknowing on the housing front, I know the areas in which I’d like to live and what I would like nearby (ahem… Heinen’s and Whole Foods). And when I was driving home from John Carroll a few weeks ago, I found the street on which I would like to live: Glendon.

It may not be wholly possible—there’s only one house for sale on the street, and it’s double our range even if most of the other houses are feasible—because you can never guess if or when anyone will sell a house. And this wonderland stunned me when I drove down it by chance. Why? I’ll admit that I’m name biased. If a street name is just uninspired or just silly (there’s a street in Lyndhurst named Chickadee that turns me off like no other), I just don’t see myself proudly telling someone “I live on Chickadee.” Seriously? Glendon didn’t hit me as a glam street. So much for vast overgeneralizations about street names and what they reflect.

Driving down the street, however, just felt like home. Granted, it was a sunny fall day with the leaves still falling from the trees and happy neighbors working on their yards. It was like a happy dream. Most of the houses are brick colonials with big trees and plenty of windows. No particular house stood out, but I really like the Carroll neighborhood, and this one was tops.

Believe it or not, I’m not limiting my search to Glendon (although I do run a street search on HH once a week to see if anything has hit the market), which sounds like something I would do. This house hunting process is interesting: I thought that as the search continued, my mind would narrow and I would get increasingly focused on a singular set of attributes and end up on a single home. But it’s been the opposite.

I went into this search knowing exactly what I wanted—even if I can’t remember what that was anymore—and now I’ve never been further from knowing myself. And I think that’s a good thing. While I may not be open minded at all about houses, I’m less singularly focused on a single type of house or list of specs now. In the end, I really believe that not-knowing will help me find something with Neil.

Eastward, Ho!

2007-11-28T11:28:00.000-08:00

My house hunt took me east today. I grew up in Euclid and have long loved living by the lake. Nothing sounds better than a gem of an old house on the lake. If one of the houses on Edgecliff in Euclid opened up in my price range, I’d have to convince Neil we needed to snatch it up. Even if we would live a little too close—like Everybody Loves Raymond close—to my mom. At least she’s not intrusive.

So, you can imagine my pleasure in seeing a Willoughby house for sale with a lake view. It’s not on a waterfront lot, but across the street from an open space on the lake. Granted, the land across the street belongs to the homeowner next to it—and it could be developed someday—but the front of this house has a clear shot to Lake Erie. It’s almost like having a huge yard leading to the lake… with a street running through it.

This two-year-old house is $230K with 3BR/3BA, 2,100 square feet and the new-house look Neil really digs. The inside isn’t quite the modern or antique chic I adore, but it wouldn’t take any apparent repairs to move in. And I could always paint and decorate on my own.

So, what’s holding me back? Well, I brought it up on zillow.com and it looks like it’s just another best-house-on-block deal. Like Wrenford. Short of one house in the area, most of the other houses are smaller cottage-style homes (many lakefront houses on the east side used to be vacation cottages in the days when NEOhioans vacationed in NEOhio) that have half the value of this one. Figures.

That’s just at first glance. But it might be worth a drive-by.

Foreclosures: Benefiting from someone else’s misfortune

2007-11-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, I know: I swore that I would never look in Shaker Heights again. It’s an abusive relationship and I’ll only end up hurt again, right? Well, I dared to check back, and look what I found!

While I typically set an upper and lower bound for my house searches on HowardHanna.com, I accidentally left the lower end at $0 (free houses, what?) and found a beautiful-on-the-outside Warrington Road colonial for $128K. It has 5BR/2.5BA and taxes that are over $3,200/half. Why the high taxes for a sub-$150K house? Well, it’s a foreclosure worth around $210K. That’s a rough estimate.

It’s a gorgeous house from the SINGLE photo offered on any of my sites (realtor.com, HH, trulia.com), as well as aerials from zillow.com. And while the taxes are way high, we could get this house for almost $100K less than its value. So, if we’re paying $2,000/year more in taxes than we prefer, it should take us 50 years to be uneven. Sounds like a steal to me!

But as a new buyer, I don’t know what to think of foreclosures. On one hand the house could be as glorious inside as out—why wouldn’t you keep up a house like this and love it with all your heart? It’s in a peachy location near the high school and with easy access to things like the freeway, Trader Joe’s and Heinen’s. The foreclosed status, however, acts like a blackmark on the house. It’s like a divorce or a scarlet letter.

Maybe I listen to NPR too much, but the first things I imagine when I see a foreclosure (other than saved dollar signs) are that the owner a) didn’t have enough money to pay for or keep up the house and b) might have damaged the house to spite the bank. And the fact that most foreclosures on the real estate sites feature only exterior shots and strange directions for agent to get keys and limited commissions only scares me off more.

So, I’m just curious whether it’s even worth my while to call my agent, who knows we’re shying away from Shaker, to have a look at a foreclosed house or two.

There’s another looker under foreclosure that was recently listed: a blurry Shaker colonial in an undisclosed location with what looks like a nice collection of freshly painted windows, decent landscaping and a Juliet balcony on the second floor. It’s a 4BR/2.5BA with decent taxes (around $2K/half), but I can’t tell if the $121K foreclosure special is a good deal because I can’t get any specifics on the house. Bummer.

The photo on HH looks like it’s trying to protect the house’s identity, and its lack of address is even more frightening. Is it in a good location? Is it located by a school or toxic landfill? I don’t know! Looks like someone needs a hint about marketing a house. And I need a hint about foreclosures.

Value of the Second Look

2007-11-16T13:50:00.001-08:00

Watch your heels, people: we’re coming to a grinding halt.

They say that visual memory is the least reliable source for recounting events, places, people, things. And it is. But pantries still don’t make good off-the-kitchen bathrooms no matter which way you cut it.

We went back to Wrenford on Thursday to see the no-bathroom-on-the-first-floor Dutch colonial about which I had been dreaming for the past several months. Our biggest stumbling block with the place had been that there was a full bath in the basement, another on the second floor, but nothing on the first—except the remnants of a small watering closet in what is now a decent-sized-albeit-not-large pantry.

When we first visited the house in August, I hadn’t really examined the pantry to see if the plumbing was still in place, and my fingers had been crossed for the past three months that it would be. And it was! Simple as that: we would just bargain down the price to make room for a half-bath installation and—viola!—we have our first house. Right?

Wrong. Looking at photos of the kitchen, I thought this particular set up might make it strange to have the bathroom walk RIGHT into the kitchen. I’ve visited a number of house that have converted an off-the-kitchen closet into a half, but most were located in more recessed areas of the kitchen or nearer another door or exit. Sigh. This kitchen, however, is a very open space… and the would-be bathroom’s placement would have been just a tad awkward.

If and only if the space weren’t about two feet wide. No joke. The space was tiny. Despite the remaining plumbing (yes!), I could hardly believe it was a room in which people ever stood. Sure, we could install some fixtures, but it would still be a closet. And if we ever had any larger guests who couldn’t take stairs, umm, they might get stuck if they could ever close the door. Plus,

So with the bathroom-turned-pantry-turned-bathroom out of the question, darn it, I sped from one first-floor closet to the next, checking out their size. Unfortunately, there were only two (I had previously imagined one off the living room that would have been a PERFECT location. But alas, my visual memory burns me again!) and neither had standing room. At all.

The rest of the house checked out as well as it did the first time. The basement and second floors brimmed with closets fit for half baths… but they were a floor too late. And we realized (OK, I realized; Neil knew all along) that if we were as put off by the no-bathroom deal, we would have just as much trouble offloading the house if we were to sell in the future.

Once we were done, we stood in the kitchen with our agent who helped Neil help me admit that we had to nix this frontrunner from our one-house hunting list. He said that the listing agent was a little… optimistic, we’ll say, in her listing price and comping the house as a 4BR/2BA. Because the second full BA was in the basement, he said it should have been listed as a 4BR/1 BA.

So, good bye Dutch colonial. Good bye big oaks in the backyard. So long to the tree house and to Bexley Park. Good bye to the location near Heinen’s and Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. So long to you all.

But hello to our new agent. I picked Robert, whom we met at a house on Maplewood in Cleveland Heights, because he seemed honest, straightforward and helpful. Plus, he not much older we are, has handy/building know-how and seems like someone Neil could talk to and with whom he could level (I just tend to talk to everyone—whether they like it or not). And he proved his worth so far: when we checked out the pantry, he outlined a couple ways we could make the bathroom work (which would entail redoing the recently redone kitchen); he spent plenty of time listening to our tastes, needs and preferences to get an idea about what kind of house we need; and he was honest—but neither disparaging nor other-way-guiding, as is the real estate agent code—about the house and its future prospects.

Plus, he didn’t say anything about the fact that we lost him in a parking lot (seriously, the guy just disappeared… down a driveway we didn’t see), that I drive like a nut or that I almost turfed the neighbors’ lawn when I was pulling out of the driveway.

When we met him at his office, he explained that our situation was less than normal. I called him last week, explaining that we had some houses to check out (two sold in our slow-to-action ways, so we didn’t see them) and one we might actually want to buy. Apparently, people come to an agent with no houses, but want a house. Well, we kind of like to find things ourselves.

We’ve been searching online at every available site from howardhanna.com and trulia.com to forsalebyowner.com and zillow.com, and then scouring the Heights streets on open house Sundays. It’s plenty of work, but this is my first house we’re talking about. And it’s out there. Someone, somewhere, is getting a new job or a new divorce or a new house and will put my house—the house—on the market any day, week or month now. I just need to be patient.

Are Agents Like Elephants?

2007-11-11T15:05:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite stories to come out of this house search was our adventures with an agent named Lynda. We were still looking around Shaker Heights this summer when I found one of Lynda’s listings. I got in touch with her, and she put together a great neighborhood tour for our sunny Sunday afternoon.

First we visited a house on Glencairn, which was a boxy colonial with a big bay window, paneled library and not-so-bad taxes, where we first met Lynda. She was opening the drapes and ensuring everything was just so. As we walked around the house, she looked at Neil a couple times and said to him: “Have you been to a lot of open houses? Or have I shown you something before?” He hadn’t. “Because you look so familiar. I feel like I know you from somewhere.” She didn’t ring a bell for him.

So, we hiked up the street to a couple of homes on Lomond—one that was another boxy colonial with new windows and countless bathrooms, and the other was a way-too-big and way-too-wallpapered thing—that didn’t quite fit our personalities or tax levels. The tour, nevertheless, gave Neil some in-touch time with the type of neighborhood I’d love to find in the Heights.

And Lynda was like Superman. She could look at a house and tell you how long the tenant had lived there, how many open houses it took to sell a property or how many bathrooms were being redone in that tudor. Plus, she had fantastic hair.

We were headed back on foot toward Glencairn, where the car was parked, when we passed an ungodly electric blue-painted house. Lynda explained that the paint was actually against ordinances and would probably be covered any day now. And it brought back memories fro both Lynda and Neil.

About 10-15 years ago, Neil’s grandmother had a helluva time selling her house in Maple Heights. While there were concerns about the neighborhood’s direction, grandma’s biggest foe was her next-door neighbors’ bad taste. The neighbors had painted their house hot, hot, hot pink. The type of pink that you could remember and wince 10-15 years later; the type of pink that made grandma’s house glow on the inside; the type of pink you could see on Google Earth. Or so I hear.

So, Neil begins telling the story when Lynda suddenly looks like she’s seen a ghost. She stops on a dime, turns, waves her hands in the air and says, “On Raymond?”

It was on Raymond. She remembers the house and the yard. She describes in gross detail a heavy granite table that Neil’s grandfather had built and that sat in the kitchen, and the exact spot where she had buried her St. Joseph statute in the garden. She was Neil’s grandmother’s real estate agent!

By the time we had established Neil and Lynda’s connection, we were back to the Glencairn house and back to the car. Lynda, who had been pretty chatty and sunny, was pretty quiet and still stunned. I guess it was that bad—but I’m not sure whether it was the pink house, the distant connection, her memory, her relationship with Neil’s grandmother (a seriously sweet, sweet woman whom Neil and his friends sometimes call “burning bridges”), the missing St. Joseph statue or the whole mess. She bid us adieu with a few quite real estate tidbits and walked in a cloud away.

I saw her at Williams-Sonoma a few weeks later. She seemed to know that she should remember me, but didn’t appear to know quite whom I was. Funny how Neil really stood out for her (probably because he’s such a fox ;-). Or maybe the trauma just set my face in the recesses of her mind, and maybe it’s just better that I stay there for her.

But in other agent news, we have decided to appoint an agent for our first house—despite some much-appreciated advice to the contrary. We’re just more comfortable working with an agent for this first purchase, and I believe we have found someone who knows the area and knows his stuff. (My fingers: crossed.) Besides, it doesn't cost us anything. We first met this guy at an open house for a near-perfect house we visited in August. I saw him several weeks later at another showing, and he remembered our names. That must be a super power. Or maybe real estate agents are just like elephants.

Will you be my agent?

2007-11-03T14:03:00.001-07:00

On one hand, I think it’s a little superfluous to have a real estate agent when you’re the buyer. I understand some of the advantages—having an expert in your corner, someone else to take the fight, a guide through the bog of real estate transactions—but I’m not sure that I couldn’t take care of those ends on my own. Or at least have people I know well watch my back on those ends. Plus there’s the whole commission thing that I don’t want the seller or seller’s agent to have to miss out on because I had to hire a fourth party, and the fear that I’ll unknowingly choose someone who doesn’t have the other three parties’ best interest in mind.

So, on the other hand, I totally appreciate the idea of someone taking care of many things I don’t understand or cannot personally do. Like negotiating.

Neil and I have been inching our interests toward a particular house and start narrowing down what we would like to pay for a house. We’ve told several real estate-savvy people about the property (it was recently marked down $10K after several months on the market), and they’ve suggested we offer $30K below the asking price. And that blows my mind!

I mentioned in a previous blog my problem with the real estate conundrum: we want our property to be worth top dollar, but we wouldn’t in our right minds pay top dollar. So, I’m confused as to how we can expect to pay/offer $30K below asking when we wouldn’t in our right minds accept that offer. Granted, the sellers would counter offer and kick off the bargaining process… but I would just feel disrespectful initially offering on the low end.

And that’s why I need an agent. I’m a total wimp.

Neither Neil nor I really has a clue how to begin a house-bidding process. While we’re both decent at personal negotiations (he’s an actually expert advocate), real estate is outside our realm of understanding. And I don’t think either of us would know how to even begin putting in an offer. Do we pick up the phone and say, “Hello, Ms. Houseowner. I’d like to give you x dollars for the home you know and love. How does that sound?” Do we send them a note that says “We’ll pay x dollars. What do you think? Yes/No (circle one).”

Sigh. Yes. I think I'll go look for a bidding agent. I can find the house myself ;-)

Where Has the Search Gone?

2007-10-26T13:09:00.001-07:00

Oh, the search is still on.

Ever since we visited the Dutch colonial in South Euclid, my ability to look at anything else has just been a bad comparison. It could be that the houses on the market right now aren’t up to snuff, my future home just isn’t for sale yet or the Dutch colonial is the one. THE one.

By no means is the house perfect: the bedrooms are a little snug and the closet space is a little limited, and then there’s that whole missing first floor bathroom. But it’s rife with fantastic qualities like large windows, opening living spaces and a yard that just begs for a clam bake. Plus there’s a park a block away and it’s surrounded by some swell hilly neighborhoods (and that’s just good running practice for St. Malachi).

There’s also the added bonus of price: not only was it well priced before, the house has actually come down $10K after being on the market for 3-4 months. When we visited the house in August, it had been listed with a real estate agent for about three weeks. The owner tried selling it on her own for about 1-2 months before that. It’s very affordable (and I cross my fingers each day that it’s still on the market), but buying your first home isn’t exactly a snap decision. For me at least.

But here’s the conundrum: when we buy houses, we try to get the lowest price possible. Yet we obviously want the opposite when we’re selling. So, what makes us think that we can buy a house for the lowest possible price and then hold out to sell it for so much more? This process totally makes sense to the financial types, but it just runs uneven with me. I, however, was the kid who didn’t understand why health care and everyday utilities (i.e., water) weren’t pro bono businesses. And I guess that’s why I have an investment guy… and I’m not one.

But on the actual housing front, I did find a gorgeous little gingerbread colonial in Cleveland Heights the other day. It’s new on the market and already under contract. Must be a steal. I’ve never been a fan of brown homes, but it has a German fairy tale charm—it’s brick and wood with plenty of floral accents, what appears to be trim and some landscaping. The room in this home measured pretty small as well, but that’s the nature of older homes. The living spaces sprawl, but the sleeping rooms shrink. That’s fine with me… but doesn’t tend to suit others.

And then I went and fell for another house in Shaker! I must hate myself. For months I swore off even looking at Shaker Heights because the taxes were prohibitive—I didn’t need the temptation! But then I was looking at Heights-area homes and a very elegant and bright Shaker colonial popped up.

Hardwood floors, plenty of windows, four bedrooms, two bath, a good price and a third-floor suite. Price: $155,900. Taxes: $4,844/half. That’s right, a half! Almost $10K/year in taxes for a $160K house. That just hurts.

I cried for a little bit and then remembered why I’m not allowed to look in Shaker Heights. It’s like dating the same abusive guy, breaking up and going back. I thought I had more sense than that!

It Just Got Interesting...

2007-08-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

On our way home from my mom’s house in Euclid on Sunday, we stopped by an open house for an expanded bungalow in South Euclid. I’ve never been a bungalow fan, but the house looked so promising online. And it had potential.

The original frame had been embellished with a side sunroom on the first floor and a couple hundred extra square feet on the top floor. Two of the bathrooms were newer and it was obvious that someone had tried to turn this house around. But they had left it unfinished.

What we were most disturbed about, however, was the basement “half bath”—a toilet and sink plopped in the middle of the unfinished portion of the basement. Seriously: you walk down the stairs and… BAM! Toilet!

My next goal on the road to conquering the world is to become an able handyman—I’d like to do drywall, electrical, plumbing, the works. In fact, some friends and I intend to do Habitat for Humanity next year to gets us some skillz. But since I don’t yet have those handy skills, a house that needs some serious work (this place needed cabinets in the kitchen installed, rooms painted, a garage window installed, garage door fixed, etc.) falls off our list.

Fortunately, this house was on the same street as a house we had attempted to see a few weeks ago. I had contacted the real estate agent for this second house, but trying to get a showing on a weekend was like pulling teeth. So, we had resigned ourselves to waiting for an open house. But today the owner just opened it up for us!

We thought we would just walk down the street and eye the house. It’s a charming Dutch colonial with all of the texture and curves in its interior and exterior design that give that illusive “character” I gab so much about. As it turned out, the owner of the house was sitting outside and asked if we were house-shopping. And we were.

She took us for a walk around the exterior: it has a Neil-sized yard, a rear-attached (a.k.a. hidden and Gina-approved) 2-car garage, a tree house and a sun room. The windows are newer and it just looked like a healthy, well-maintained older home.

Sigh. “Will it be open anytime soon?” I asked.

“It can be,” she said.

Neil and I went for a 25-minute stroll around the neighborhood while she and her daughter made the house open-house ready (which is pretty quick—my mom used to give us a few days to open-house-ready our house when it was on the market!). Then she took us around.

It’s a ready-to-move-in beauty whose only real flaw is that it has no first-floor bathroom (something on Neil’s checklist… but it also has a finished basement with a full bathroom, which is also on his checklist). Hardwood floors, fresh colors, a new kitchen.

And somehow Neil and I walked out of the house both feeling positive about it. That’s never happened! The owner expressed that a couple had come by twice to see the house and talk about utilities, so time may be of the essence. Obviously we’re not going to rush into buying a house—I believe that if it’s meant to be it will happen—but we’ll have discuss if we can see ourselves in it. For real.

If nothing else, we’ve finally found a home on which we came pretty darn close to agreeing. We’re going to let it sink in a few days to see how it makes us feel.

Hot Times in Montclair, New Jersey

2007-08-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Neil and I found our way (via bus from New York) to Montclair, New Jersey, where our friends Betsy and Dan had a backyard wedding at the mother-of-the-groom’s house on Myrtle Avenue.

We took an early bus and had time to kill before the ceremony, so we took a stroll around what had to be the quietest street in America. It’s an older neighborhood with colonials, Victorians and Queen Annes, big trees and not-too-huge yards. Most of the houses appeared to be built in the 1920s and the area reminded me of a stretched-out version of Cleveland Heights. And, of course, I was in architectural heaven.

It was only appropriate then that we would actually run into a Montclair resident/architect, who was Dan’s mother’s friend, at the reception. The man had worked with a number of high-profile firms and architects, including I.M. Pei, but found working residential architecture on his own was his bag, baby. As we talked about the neighborhood architecture and the current state of residential design, he settled a descriptive issue Neil and I have faced.

It has been well established in this blog that Neil and I have disparate taste in houses. I’m the Queen Anne to his French Provincial (and we all know the British and French don’t get along). I’m lil’ miss fancy-pants to his neutrals-and-symmetry. Neither of us is right or better (except, you know, I am… just kidding), but we often butt heads over what I think makes older houses… better.

I won’t recount our numerous discussions that often revolve around the meaning of the word ‘character,’ but Mr. Architect hit my argument’s nail on the head with the word I’ve been searching for: charm. He explained that his work has forever harkened back to early 20th-century architecture because those houses had “character and charm.”

The houses of that era, he said, were built to stand forever and to have personality. And he said that while the houses lacked some of today’s conveniences (i.e., forced air, air conditioning, wiring for every-room T1 connections), retro-fitting was invariably easier than correcting the aesthetic problem of attached garages.

While I felt that my aesthetic sensibilities had been validated (because I am, in fact, a wannabe/wish-I-could-be architect), it didn’t actually get us any closer to understanding what kind of house would suit own hybrid needs. I keep returning to the notion that Neil should buy his house and I should buy mine (because in my snobby way I think that my house will draw him back with its undeniable character and coolness), but that’s really just avoidance isn’t it?

Nevertheless, we’ve been keeping our options open. Who knows: I could fall in love with a wholly symmetric cape cod with an attached garage or Neil could dig a 1920s center-hall colonial with a craftsman porch. Or not.

In the meantime, I’ve been flipping through the latest listings—including open lots in cool neighborhoods where we can build my Queen Anne imitation or something.

Unfortunately, the Heights isn’t really bursting with open lots. But at least I know of a residential architect who respects my style.

I Can Handle Death, But Taxes...

2007-07-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

Among the myriad things Neil and I have learned to consider while house hunting (i.e., forced air vs. radiators, air conditioning vs. window units, yard size and the cost of updating a bathroom), the idea of property tax will take some getting used to.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all about paying my property taxes—funding public services, paying for the schools, keeping kids like me off the streets. But we’ve run into the baffling inconsistencies of taxes in Cleveland’s inner-ring suburbs.

At the outlet we had read and had been told to “assume” 1.5-2 percent for property taxes. Fine. Different areas have different tax rates, however, and the Heights area has more tax diversity than I can wrap my beginner brain around! Taxes for the Ormond home I discussed in my previous post were about $2,300/half for a $200K house (that’s about 2.3 percent); yet for a 4BR/2.5BA home listed at $220K in a down-the-street location pays $1,900/half (about 1.7 percent). That’s Cleveland Heights. In Shaker, we looked at a $160K colonial whose property taxes were $2,200/half (2.75 percent), which was one bathroom short of a similarly priced colonial two blocks away whose property tax weighed in at $3,000/half. Whew!

(Yet somehow, amidst all of its glitz, glamour and gigantic public pool and new municipal building, Beachwood’s property taxes seem pretty doable. Maybe they live on income taxes? If only the homes had even remotely the charm and character of the other communities. But my architectural snobbery is for another post.)

I realize that there is a science—literally—to calculating these property taxes. But I don’t actually know the steps or processes of assessments, zoning and the rest. I would like to know and understand how it works, so I better get googling!

When we first started looking at home in the Heights, Neil noticed the sometimes-steep rates. And of course I shrugged it off.

Once I realized that paying property taxes wasn’t just a one-time party (when that whole death-and-taxes thing kicked in), my tax-sensitivity was heightened: You want what? Six THOUSAND dollars a year ($500/month) for the rest of my life in that house? My current rent is only a bit more than that each month!

So, now I stick to the Howard Hanna Web site when I find homes or a good MLS. Not only does the site provide images when some other sites don’t quite (have you seen Realtor.com and its warped photos?), it also lists property taxes when available. If my hunt wonders into Shaker Heights or the outskirts of University or Cleveland Heights, I scroll to the taxes and see if it’s worth my photo-flipping and inevitable longing and obsession.

But we haven’t let taxes get in our way: the other night Neil found a pretty special house on the edge of Shaker/across the street from University Heights. It was a 4BR/2.5 BA colonial with an attached garage and a finished basement. It was a Neil house, and only $175K. The taxes: $3,300/half. We seriously thought about it.

We looked at the features of the house, the area, the yard, the public services. How bad would $550/month be for the rest of our lives? Would we still have our pride and healthy retirements? Maybe. Maybe not. And that made it someone else’s house.

But ours is out there. Somewhere. It's just waiting to be listed.

The Dual Meaning of 'Oh My God' (a.k.a. Our First Showing)

2007-07-06T23:33:00.000-07:00

Everyone says that buying a house is largely emotional and that when you’ve walked into “your” house, you will know it.

They also say that you’re not supposed to wear your house feelings too noticeably when you look at the house, but I’ve never been one to hide the way I feel. But it’s good to have Neil around for our showings because he’s always stone-faced and silent.

So, I was simply beaming when I walked up the driveway and past the beautifully landscaped front yard of a gorgeous colonial on Ormond in Cleveland Heights the other day. We met with the Keller Williams agent after work on Friday to have our first house showing. And it was just dreamy.

It’s a tastefully painted muted-green color with an arts-and-crafts front porch (complete with swing). The owners played with different green hues throughout the home (wall colors, artwork, furniture, window treatments) that gave it a cohesive feel without overwhelming.

The hardwood floors shine in just about every room, including the brand new kitchen with in-cabinet refrigerator, granite counter and stainless steel hood.

While the rooms are a bit small, one of the children’s rooms is complete with blue walls, bookshelves and—get this—a big wooden tree that grows up one of the walls (it’s not a real tree; it’s something the artist owner created)!

We were a little disenchanted with the cramped 1.5 bathrooms—we’re looking for at least two—but I envisioned knocking down a few walls to make a grander bathroom while Neil was just plain concerned. He has his fingers crossed for a master bath. And let’s just say the hallway bath on the second floor and the closet-turned-half-bath on the first left much to be desired.

The real disconnect in our Ormond house experience, however, happened in the backyard. We opened the backdoor to walk out onto a nice deck and into a well-landscaped yard. It was brimming with all the plants and flowers I would easily slaughter with my brown thumb! And as we looked at the backyard of the 0.18 acre lot, we both said, “Oh my god.”

To me it was a HUGE backyard that had been landscaped with gardening techniques I’d have to drop my master’s thesis to understand. I had already planned to mow down/dig up some of the perennials to make room for the “playing catch” space Neil requires and include an herb garden close to the garage. So, I looked at this place and said, “Oh my god!”

For Neil, on the other hand, it was more of an “oh my god…” He was disappointed. It was tiny.

See: while I grew up on a 0.10 acre yard and went to the park to play or used the neighborhood as my space (because we knew all of our neighbors), Neil’s family has an acre lot and I assume they stuck to their own bounds?

So, we’re really coming at this yard thing from two wholly different perspectives. I like to have my neighbors close by—within “scream distance” as I like to say (i.e., if something ever happens to me, I would like to think I would know my neighbors well enough that if they heard me scream that they would come running to help… it happened more than once to my neighbors growing up!)—and have a good and respectful relationship with them.

Neil likes bigger yards and plenty of space between the houses. And that makes sense for where he’s grown up. But it doesn’t make it any less strange to me (or my close-knit living any more desirable to him). Sigh.

So, perhaps that feeling of “I can totally see myself living here” isn’t always right. The house had its downsides and just didn’t jive with the middle ground we’re trying to achieve. It was just on Gina ground. But I guess you can’t expect to find your house on your first try. Right?

Our house is out there somewhere. And it would be great if someone would put it on the market already!

It All Started in August 2006...

2007-07-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

Last August, Neil and I tripped up to Boston for a few days, and when we flew home to Cleveland Hopkins Airport we saw an airport advertisement for the Lofts at Avalon Station. Avalon is a new collection of condos near the Rapid (and a Heinen's!) on Van Aken in Shaker Heights. And it was our first step in the direction of buying our first house together.

Some background: as of July 2007, Neil and I have been together for about five years, and have been sharing apartments for four. I had my sights set on New York for most of my life (my heart's been stuck on that beautiful brownstone on the Upper Westside for as long as I can remember), but have bounced back to reality and decided to find something in Cleveland... and, you know, build some equity and then think about the NYC leap.

The problem: Neil and I have one overlapping interest in a house. A roof. But it all falls apart from there (I want tile, he wants asphalt). We've spent hours upon hours surfing the real estate Web, attending open houses and getting showings only to find out that the house for Neil and Gina either doesn't exist or isn't on the market yet.

The solution: Just keep looking! I've joked (OK, semi-joked) that there is a marriage somewhere ready to dissolve or a family about to expand and a perfect house on the verge of falling into our laps. We've had a few close calls, but stupid things like Shaker Heights' insane, unpredictable taxes or inexplicable low-hanging duct work or ridiculously connected driveways/backyards have all been dealbreakers. It hasn't, however, hampered our habit of calling out "MLS!" when we find that next prospect. And maybe someday we'll find our home.

Where are we looking? The east side of Cleveland in general (I'm an Eastsider and our jobs are eastsiders as well). Although I prefer the neighborhoods of the Heights, while Neil digs the lay of the land in places like Beachwood and Solon. He digs development settings and architecture; I'm looking for that gorgeous center-hall colonial in a tight-knit 'hood.

Oh, the adventure continues...