Created by using the red channel only, sepia toning afterward.
It’s Finally Official
Camille has wanted to live in “The Parks” (in Mill Creek) since she first discovered that neighborhood a few years ago, so when a property became available that was within our reach, she made an offer on it.
After weeks of nail-biting uncertainty, the underwriter finally signed off, so it is official. Our closing date is May 16th, so the last two weeks of May will be absorbed in getting the new place ready and then moving in.
The new address is 3302 153rd Place SE, Mill Creek, WA 98012.
It’s about 5 miles southeast of our current location, but in a much better area. Camille is really looking forward to being able to step out the door and get right on to a walking trail, as opposed to driving two miles to a neighborhood with sidewalks. [Our current neighborhood is actually unsafe to walk in, as there are no lights or sidewalks.] Additionally, she will be closer to work, narrowing her commute to less than fifteen minutes!
The new place is larger, and older (built in 1997), but of higher quality construction. It needs some cosmetic repairs – interior paint, some fixtures replaced – and the kitchen desperately needs an overhaul. But that is all good – it allows us to get into a pricier neighborhood at the ground level.
We’ll have three garage bays (one for my tools), a much larger deck, mature landscaping for more privacy from neighbors, and a walk-in crawl space for storage! 
Our plan is to rent our current house until the market changes enough that we can sell it.
Like every major change, we have a lot of mixed emotions, but overall, this is a significant change for the better for both of us.
From the front:
From the rear:
The Lykowskis
Dan and Lacosta lived in our development, and moved away two years ago. (Already! How time flies!) Dan scored an excellent job at Apple in California, so they decided to scoot north on vacation and check out some of their old haunts!
We consider ourselves lucky to be on the short list of their long weekend! I’m pleased to see them healthy and well, with two well-adjusted kids in tow!
Sidebar: While we were all living in the same development, Dan provided me with the unusual distinction of living near a guy who was building a single seat aircraft in his garage. No lie. This photo was made in May 2008:
May Day Protests Turn Violent in Downtown Seattle
“After vandals smashed cars and business storefronts, McGinn signed an order allowing police to confiscate such potential weapons as sticks. He worried that vandalism could continue during marches scheduled for late afternoon, and that was echoed by Police Chief John Diaz, who had warned city leaders of potential violence two weeks ago.” Source
Mayor McGinn’s proclamation of civil emergency, signed at 3:02 p.m. is here.
It seems that modern protesting has gravitated to the same tiresome format. Lots of people gather for “peaceful protests,” and out of the groups emerge thugs calling themselves “anarchists,” and all the media coverage centers on the actions of those two dozen (or so) people. They create a lot of senseless damage, then take off their masks and black costumes and mix back into the crowd.
I swear – if I was a neo-conservative, that would be my perfect strategy to make sure no “liberal” causes ever get discussed in Corporate Media.
Photos from Seattle PI:
Carbon Monoxide Alarms Required
Washington State residents:
Effective April 1, 2012, RCW 19.27.530 requires the seller of any owner-occupied single-family residence to equip the residence with carbon monoxide alarms in accordance with the state building code before a buyer or any other person may legally occupy the residence following the sale. This requirement applies to all single-family residences, including single-family homes, condominiums, and manufactured/mobile homes.
The building code (WAC 51-51-0315) requires that an alarm be installed: (1) outside of each separate sleeping area in the immediate vicinity of each bedroom; (2) on each level of the dwelling; and (3) in accordance with the manufacturer’s recommendations. The building code also requires that single station carbon monoxide alarms comply with UL 2034. There are no exceptions for properties that do not have fuel-fired appliances or an attached garage. The alarms may be battery operated and can be purchased for as little as $25 from a variety of sources.
In addition, effective April 1st, the building code requires a property owner to install carbon monoxide alarms when alterations, repairs or additions requiring a permit occur, or when one or more sleeping rooms are added or created. There has been a requirement to install carbon monoxide alarms in new construction since January 1, 2011.
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Tagged home, home improvement, real estate
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Staircase Rehab Part 3
Ta daaaaaahh! A marathon weekend project completed! The first thing you see when we open the door:
Predictably, the main floor carpeting now looks even more dingy by comparison. But that will have to wait for another day.
Staircase Rehab Part 2
Onward and upward. Ha!
The toughest part of this job is cutting the skirts to mate with the staircase. I’ve never done this before, so I am improvising as I go. The outline for the skirts was made by slipping a piece of kraft paper between the stairs and the drywall, and tracing the outline of the staircase.
The drawing was transferred to a 1/2″ x 8″ mdf board by – a pounce wheel! (Pounce wheels are usually used by seamstresses and tailors to transfer patterns to fabric.) I love to borrow tools and techniques from unrelated crafts or disciplines to solve problems.
Here, the skirts are made from flat mdf board with a 5 1/2″ baseboard set along the top, and the existing risers are shimmed for the new hickory boards:
Nailing the hickory in place. A squiggle of liquid nails, and 120 psi to blast the 2″ brads through the 3/4″ hickory into the shims:
The very last piece was the trickiest – I had to cut away three inches of Travertine and backer board with an angle grinder to make room for the landing tread. The grinder puts out a horrendous amount of dust, which I tried to capture – with limited success – with the shop vac. Here I’m checking level, square and plumb on the last riser:
It’s been a challenging project, and I’ve learned a lot of things NOT to do if I ever do this again. 😀
For instance, I should have used 12″ wide boards for the skirts so the line between the two boards (the 8″ flat stock and the 5″ baseboard) could ride higher above the tread bullnose.
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
Bidding Wars Are Back
Stunned Home Buyers Find the Bidding Wars Are Back
Excerpt:
From California to Florida, many buyers are increasingly competing for the same house. Unlike the bidding wars that typified the go-go years and largely reflected surging sales, today’s are a result of supply shortages.
The Wall Street Journal’s quarterly survey found that the inventory of homes listed for sale declined sharply in all 28 markets tracked… Inventories are declining for a number of reasons. Some sellers, unwilling to accept prices that are still down from their peak by one-third, are taking their homes off the market in anticipation of higher prices down the road. Meanwhile, investors have been outmaneuvering consumers for the best properties, often making cash offers that are quickly accepted by sellers.
In addition, some economists say that inventory levels are being held artificially low because Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the nation’s biggest banks have been slow to list for sale hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes they currently own. The lenders slowed down foreclosure sales and repossessions after record-keeping abuses surfaced 18 months ago.
My comment: Watch for the appraisers to be blamed, as indicated in the third to last paragraph in the article: “Real-estate agents say an unusually high share of deals are falling apart because homes won’t appraise at the price that buyers have agreed to pay sellers.”
The only time a buyer gets to decide how much to pay a seller is when they are using their own money (cash). When you are using someone else’s money (mortgage lending), appraisers and underwriters have a fiduciary responsibility to assist the lender in risk assessment. Sometimes that means you can’t have what you want. Waaaahhhh.
Staircase Rehab Part 1
Like most new homes, our split level came with carpeted steps. There are only two of us living here, we always take off our shoes at the door, yet the carpeting looks like a family of twenty has been living here for a decade. I cannot imagine where the builder managed to find such crappy carpet.
Camille and I decided to replace the carpeting with hickory flooring, and the staircase needs to be completed first. Earlier this year, I installed Travertine tile on the landing, so the treads and risers are next. The ripout is the easiest, most satisfying part of rehab:
I am now midway through installing skirts in preparation for the hickory:
It never ceases to amaze me how the simple addition of millwork can make such a huge difference in the appearance of a home.
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Tagged home improvement, lot 42, Mi, staircase
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MetLife Exiting Mortgages
Excerpt:
MetLife Inc., the life insurer that’s eliminating most of the 4,300 jobs at its mortgage unit and selling deposits to reduce federal oversight, is finding it harder to escape risk from home loans.
The loan-servicing operation is bracing itself for fines from the Federal Reserve tied to foreclosure practices and may face penalties from other regulators, according to the New York- based insurer’s annual report. Fitch Ratings said last month that MetLife used dubious appraisals for mortgages that were packaged into a bond sale, the type of underwriting flaw that investors may cite to demand a company repurchase the debt.
Chief Executive Officer Steven Kandarian is seeking to exit what the company called a “small, little bank” after the unit subjected the insurer to oversight from federal regulators who twice rejected his plan for a dividend increase. MetLife continues to bear repurchase risk tied to about $60 billion in mortgages issued starting in 2008, even as Kandarian focuses on expanding life insurance sales in Asia and Latin America.
Insurers “tend to be conservative and they don’t like unknowns and I don’t blame them,” said Terry Wakefield, a mortgage industry consultant in Mequon, Wisconsin, who helped start a home lending unit for a Prudential Financial Inc. predecessor. “MetLife found themselves in a position that they never anticipated when they got into the business.”
Through the RELS, MetLife’s captive AMC, MetLife forced competent appraisers out of their selection pool with relentless emphasis on cheaper, faster. Sometimes Karma works. A little.
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Tagged appraising, lenders, lending, MetLife, real estate
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Home Appraiser Blacklists Probed
Home appraiser blacklists probed
Excerpt:
Clay Gregory is a Valley home appraiser who is spending a lot of time at home these day, but it’s not by choice.
“I was put in a position where they pretty much demanded information from me or they were threatening me not to use me anymore,” Gregory said. Gregory claims he’s been blacklisted by Chase Bank, making it extremely difficult to find work.
Chase sent him a letter a couple months ago demanding data on an old appraisal and citing possible violations. Chase apparently needed information on the home which they were buying back from a foreclosure. The only problem was Gregory would be breaking state and federal law by sharing info with Chase because the bank was not the one that hired him.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
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Tagged appraising, chase, lenders, lending, real estate
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Fannie and Freddie to Streamline Short Sales
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to Streamline Short Sales
Excerpt:
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to develop enhanced and aligned strategies for facilitating short sales, deeds-in-lieu and deeds-for-lease in order to help more homeowners avoid foreclosure. The effort will come in stages with the first taking place this June. The new, aligned timelines include the requirement that mortgage servicers review and respond to requests for short sales within 30 calendar days from receipt of a short sale offer.
With the alignment, servicers will be required to do the following:
– review and respond to requests for short sales within 30 calendar days from receipt of a short sale offer and a complete borrower response package;
– provide weekly status updates to the borrower if the short sale offer is still under review after 30 calendar days;
– make and communicate final decisions to the borrower within 60 calendar days of receipt of the offer and complete borrower response package.
By the end of 2012, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will announce additional enhancements addressing borrower eligibility and evaluation, documentation simplification, property valuation, fraud mitigation, payments to subordinate lien holders, and mortgage insurance.
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Tagged lenders, lending, real estate, short sale
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Reverse Staging: Short Sale Fraud
Reverse Staging: A new trick in short sale fraud
Staging a home for sale has become big business. Real estate agents know that presenting the home to appeal to the most buyers possible makes a huge difference in how quickly it will sell and can directly result in a higher sales price. …”staged” homes [can] sell in half the time, and for 17 percent more money.
But a new trend in staging has emerged with an entirely different goal. Reverse staging is designed to make a house look less valuable than it actually is. The goal is to accentuate the negative features of a home in order to change the perceived value of the property.
It involves a short sale where a Broker Price Opinion (BPO) is all that is required to determine the value of a property. It is often done by real estate agents or investors who are in collusion with a buyer who plans to then flip the house for a much higher price, said Ann Fulmer, Vice President of Industry Relations at Interthinx. Fulmer, an attorney, has represented lenders in mortgage fraud cases and prosecuted mortgage fraud as an assistant district attorney during her career.
It can involve anything from simply not fixing broken windows, or not taking care of the grass, to actually breaking things, or punching holes in the walls.
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Tagged fraud, RE Fraud, real estate, short sale
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US Banks are Back and Bigger Than Ever
Excerpt:
For years treasury secretary Tim Geithner lectured Europe on the need to rescue banks as a prerequisite for rescuing economies – and look at the US economy now
America’s banks are bigger than ever. JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs have emerged with more firepower than before the financial crisis following Hank Paulson’s generous bailouts and the freedom to swallow rivals on the cheap.
According to the Federal Reserve the big five held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011. This enormous hoard, much of it in loans on commercial property or to foreign corporations, is equal to 56% of the US economy. In 2007, ahead of the financial crisis, the largest banks’ assets amounted to a still large, but healthier, 43% of US output.
With only a very brief lull in 2008 and 2009 to check their progress, the big five have grown in every other year of the last decade to double in size.
Source
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/apr/16/us-banks-back-bigger-than-ever
The Big Five generate 80% of residential mortgages. Through the AMCs (Appraisal Management Companies) that they own, a monopsony is created, by which Appraisers have no leverage in the market by which to control their fees.
A monopsony is a market condition where multiple sellers, [the majority of sellers in that market] all have to sell to the same individual buyer because that buyer is buying a significant portion of the entire market. This gives the buyer the advantage because the buyer can keep asking each seller to match or undercut the competing sellers prices, thus driving down the prices of the products in that market.
Romney Strategy: Use Women to Woo a Certain Kind of Man
[Paraphrased from here.]
In an interview about Romney on CNN, Rosen said, “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life.”
Minutes later, Ann Romney posted her first tweet: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.” She had plenty of room to add “count me privileged,” but she didn’t.
Republicans immediately accused Rosen of disrespecting all stay-at-home moms. Rosen soon apologized, but by then, mothers were on trial in the court of public opinion. Or so Republicans wanted us to believe. However, neither Ann Romney nor stay-at-home moms were ever the point of Rosen’s comments.
The media have a habit of ignoring virtually all women who are hourly wage earners, except to relegate them to a voter demographic. Thus, we know little about the lives of mothers who work on assembly lines or who mind our babies in day care facilities or who add up our purchases at the local Target.
The men who stoke this imaginary fight believe women are put on this earth to marry and reproduce. They insist that mothers belong in the home, not in the workplace. Nothing sets their teeth to grinding faster than an unwed mother getting assistance from the government.
Which brings us to a speech Romney delivered in January, in which he said, “Even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well, that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that day care, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'”
The “dignity of work” is now the euphemism for the neo-conservative hate for Regan’s imaginary “welfare queens.”