Friday, February 11, 2005

The Trash Man Cometh!

O Crap!

We gotta get busy this weekend. The dumpster guy called me yesterday and said he was planning to pick up our (mostly empty) dumpster today! After much begging and grovelling I convinced him to delay this until Monday.

So, now it will be a mad dash to fill it up as much as possible by Sunday evening. I may need to call in some backup support for demolition!

Oh, and, anybody need to throw something away? :)

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Ouch

Well, its certainly been a week of bad news.

Our first heating and electrical bills came.. $240 and $60 respectively. Ouch! 300 bucks and we're not even living there full time yet! Maybe we'll do insulation sooner rather than later..

Also, found some news on the building plans review at the Village Hall yesterday. The plans crawled out of zoning review (minus the dormer) and are now in the queue for structural analysis. Slow, slow slow!!

At this rate, maybe it won't matter to us if our condo doesn't sell right away.. The only one to notice will be our wallets!

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Together or Separate?

More of the same going on. Moving. Getting ready to sell Condo.

But, we informed others in our condo building that we would be moving, and our next door neighbors made us an offer already. Should we refuse?

We have the luxury of being the first people to move that own a garage space in the condo building. Naturally, others that have moved in are jealous of us. And now our neighbors have offered to buy just our garage space from us at a premium price. They are confident that I could better determine this price than them since I develop education for real estate appraisers all day.

With our broker's help, we found that garages are going from between 12k to 23k in Oak Park, probably due to the this town's notorious evil enforcement of its parking laws. Anyway, we originally planned to list the condo and garage for $240k. Our broker thinks without the garage, we would have to list it at $230k and it would likely take longer to sell. [Of course, all the units that have sold in our building before don't have a garage, and all went under contract within 1 week]

The question is, should we risk a lower selling price and longer market time for in order to make more money by separating the two properties? We haven't decided what to do exactly, so if anyone has thoughts, please share! :)