Tag house (27)

...and it's of our new tree! I just set the camera to auto and it did a pretty good job in the darkness:

There are more new pictures in that gallery, too. Coming soon - a picture of the tree after being planted :-)

Yesterday, we were driving home from work as usual on the onramp to North Mopac just south of Duval when the car in front of me started slowing down and then came to a complete stop. On the onramp.

Luckily, I was watching and was able to stop in time. Even more luckily, the car behind me was barely able to stop in time as well. (David says he could hear them slam on their brakes, but I was focused on stuff in front of me) Then the crazy honking began, both from the car behind me and me, and the car pulled off into the shoulder. I'm guessing they stopped because the sun was just at the right angle so that you couldn't see anything in the side view mirror, which made getting on the freeway from a dead stop rather challenging. Luckily no one hit me.

I was pretty amped up from this and my heart was definitely beating faster than normal. Unfortunately, this continued for quite a while. Apparently reflux can present this way, and taking some antacids seemed to help for a while, but it made me jumpy all evening and made it hard to sleep...

I worked on a new WebOS app last night - this one's a quick interface to BoardGameGeek. To submit it, I had to make the decision again about where to put it. To review:
- To put it on the App Catalog costs $50 (one time fee)
- Not doing that is free, but then it's a lot harder to find without a direct link
I prefer putting my apps on the App Catalog for the widest exposure, but then I feel like I have to charge something to make my $50 back. (and it's not that I really begrudge the $50, I understand it takes Palm time to review the apps, etc.) So I did that and am charging .99, the lowest allowable. We'll see what happens1

Good lost episode last night: At this point my favorite episodes are Locke, Ben, and Sawyer ones. Michael Emerson (actor who plays Ben) is amazing and really sold me on the whole Machiavellian teacher bit. Lots of sweetness when he says "Because no one else will have me" and Ilana replies "I'll have you". Awww!

The excessive "winking" at the audience is getting to be a bit much. I'm fine with Hurley acting as a fan of the show and asking a question about something every once and a while, but asking if Richard was a cyborg seemed kinda silly.

A Lost encyclopedia is coming out in August! I know it makes sense to release it after the end of the show since then it can be "complete", but it would have been helpful earlier. Still, I'll probably pick it up.

Random note: Like Greek food? Try Pars Deli at the corner of 183 and Burnet. Delicious gyros, and it's clearly a family run place. They left the door open today and it was soooo nice :-)

House stuff: We had solar screens installed by Josh Hobbs a few weeks ago. The process was pretty easy (we didn't have to be there any of the time), the prices were reasonable and the screens look nice. (need to take a picture at some point) Haven't really been able to measure their effectiveness yet, but it's definitely darker, so presumably that will keep out heat too.

Next week we're getting a high efficiency A/C unit put in, as well as making it "multi-zone" so we can control the upstairs and downstairs temperature independently. After crunching the numbers it's not going to quite pay for itself in reduced electricity bills, but it will get pretty close and we get a new unit out of the deal. (we spend a fortune on cooling in the summer!) The $1500 tax credit helps, and Austin Energy has some nice rebates too.

Bought the Heavy Rain soundtrack from iTunes. (yay for DRM-free music!) I might try to transcribe the really pretty piano music (Painful Memories), if I feel inspired enough.

Final Fantasy 13 was bought and played yesterday. Even after just playing Heavy Rain, whose visuals were pretty impressive, it looks fantastic - definitely using the PS3 to its full potential. Also, does anyone know if the characters have such ridiculous names in Japanese too, or is that just a translation thing?

I went to a brown bag lunch (or "green bag" as they called it) at work today about putting solar panels on your roof. Here is what I learned!

Two guys who had actually put solar panels on the roof were presenting. One of them has a website, agreentexas.net that has a lot of the information they presented.

- The cost is around $5-7 per "nameplate Watt", which is the panel output under ideal conditions. Of course, conditions are never ideal; gosolarcalifornia.org has a good table of different panel outputs under realistic conditions.
- Austin Energy has a $2.50/Watt rebate described here. It's capped at $15K per home (i.e. a 6kW sized array). You can search for more local incentives at dsireusa.org.
- There's a federal tax credit of 30% (probably after any rebates, although it's unclear) you can get by filing IRS Form 5695.

The general recommendation is to size your panels so that it about equals your energy usage in your lowest-energy months (presumably winter). There are some good calculators at PVWatts and PVCalc.com.

So up to a 6kW system (the Austin Energy rebate cap), it would cost us around
$2.50 per "nameplate Watt". For a 4kW system (one of the guys had this) it would be $10K.

- Rule of thumb: each extra $1K in energy production per year increases your home's value by $20K. This works out to about increase the value of your home as much as you pay after rebates, etc.
- For a 4kW system, based on the PVWatts calculator we'd expect to get 5450 kWh per year, which is $625/year under current Austin Energy rates (7.2 cents/kWH for the first 500, 11.5 cents/kWH after that). So the system would pay for itself in 16 years.
- The life of the system is at least 20-25 years (most solar panels are under warranty for at least 20 years), but you have to replace the inverter ($2-3K) every 10-15 years.

- Austin Energy provides "net billing", so they just take your consumption for the month and subtract your production and that's your base rate. This is fairly generous. Austin Energy will even pay you if you produce more than you consume, but you get a low rate for it.
- Most home insurances cover solar panels, but call and ask. Most panels are rated to withstand winds of up to 110mph, and a direct hit from a 1" hailstone at 80 mph, so they're probably not going to be damaged unless your roof is.
- No, it won't provide power during a blackout. (it shuts down when the grid is off to protect any utility workers on the power lines)

One of the guys used Gruene Energy to install his system and seemed happy with them - a few people were there with brochures, etc.

Anyway, it was a very informative session and there were probably 100 people in the audience!

We finally got our roof replaced (and got a gutter on the back of our house to boot), and are almost done with getting the insurance settlement and paying the roofers and whatnot. I'm looking forward to putting this behind us. How often do roofs get damaged like this, anyway? The damage happened in March and we're still not quite done...

I've been getting back into origami lately - found a really cheap source of paper and ordered a bunch that should arrive today. My sorta-goal is to make all five Platonic solids - so far I've made a (bad) tetrahedron, a decent octahedron and a pretty cool cube. Anything with equilateral triangles = hard.

We cooked something out of the Joy of Cooking last night! Some kinda chicken dish with garlic and lime and potatoes. It turned out pretty well.

Planning on volunteering with the Community Tax Center in the new year. It's been a while (too long!) since I've done any volunteering, so it'll be good to get back into it.

As I mentioned earlier, I've been working on a LiveJournal client for the Palm Pre/Pixi. It works decently for me, but when I gave it to a few people to test it freezes. (luckily, you can just kill it so it doesn't mess up the whole phone) I'm at a bit of a loss as to why this is happening and it's pretty disheartening, so I haven't worked on it in a few weeks.

(before I start, if you're into Lost I found this interesting theory about what's going on - it's long and contains spoilers (and possibly ruins the end of the series if correct))

I took the day off today to wait for the cable guy (the important part being internet so djedi can work from home in the future) and the countertops people. The cable guy said 8-12 and the countertops said 9-11ish so I got up bright and early at 7 AM (there's a 7 in the morning? crazy) and headed over there. Both people showed up right around 9 so I give them credit for that (I was watching Lost episodes on my laptop most of the time)

Cable guy - there was some confusion about my order, but the tech seems to have his head screwed on well unlike the dispatcher, so that eventually gets sorted out. Unfortunately, the signal coming into our house is very week, so he turned on the jacks but no internet for us. Supervisor has to come out sometime next week.

Countertops - man, countertops are loud and dusty to install! Anyway, they look nice, with the exception of the big piece that goes around the sink which wasn't cut right (a bit of a subtle defect, but the guy pointed it out and said if we were paying that much we should have it done right, to which I agree). So they're coming Wednesday 3-5.

The countertops took forever, and because of a bit of poor planning on my part I didn't get lunch until they left at 2:45 (although I did manage to knock out 6 Lost episodes). Ate at Freebird's and finally got home at 3:30. Not 5 minutes after I get home I get a call from the cable guy, who asks if he left his drill at the house. Well, I don't know, but he says he needs it for his next job so I say I'll go back up there to check. I was a little annoyed he didn't seem thankful or hesitant to ask since it was a bit inconvenient on my part, but he was helpful when he came by and installed a faceplate so fine.

Arrive back at house, call him back while I'm looking and he says the drill is expensive. No drill in sight though, and he is friendly and very thankful that I looked. Oh well, hope he finds it.

I could a relaxing and fun night - luckily that's what we have planned!

Yesterday djedi's parents were around and we got a lot of stuff taken care of with the house. One of the more annoying things was countertops. Long story short: I don't recommend buying countertops from Home Depot. So we went back and forth looking at different materials at Lowe's (like this one) and Home Depot. Really, they were about comparable in quality and price, but Home Depot's were $300 off, so we measured the countertops (as seen in this crappy cameraphone picture) and took it to Home Depot.

Well, they charge by the square foot, but what they don't say is that they charge for the waste material too - so we get charged for all the extra runoff in the crazy corners and stuff, and you pay for the space the sink takes up even though no countertops go there. That alone increased the cost around 50%. Then, you get charged for them to take away the existing countertops, which is I guess reasonable but they didn't say anything when we were there the first time so we had no idea. Also, we're leaving the nice tile backsplash in but I guess it's more work for the installers to work around it, so that's an extra $150. And the guy said that sometimes they have problems and it may be unavoidable that they damage it, so I thought that $150 covered the "expected cost" of fixing it. As it turns out, no, if they mess it up they don't fix it at all. Lovely.

On top of that, it's our responsibility to disconnect and remove the sink before installation and put it back and replace and reconnect it afterwards. And, as if spending $4K on countertops wasn't enough, they charged us $1 per "rounded corner" for a total of $7. Seriously.

Compared with this, buying carpet from Lowe's was easy easy easy and I would totally recommend that over Home Depot. Blargh.

Since countertops were way more expensive than we thought we're going to pack our stuff ourselves. We'll set a date when we hear about carpet but if you have boxes and/or a free evening to help us pack, we would be very grateful!

I'm liking having a cameraphone, although the quality of the pictures isn't great: a sign seen at closing (I guess the point is they don't get paid if you don't close so they make you comfortable - we were repeatedly offered drinks, they had plenty of pens, etc.), a sign in the wire aisle of Home Depot.

Tomorrow I leave for Houston for work. Whee!

Obama cleaned up yesterday, winning with 68% in Washington and Nebraska and 57% in Louisiana. Woohoo!

While kicking butt in Arathi Basin last night, I knocked a big ol' glass of tea right onto my $3000 laptop. A good chunk of it went in the keyboard (which made the laptop turn off which is probably a good thing given the alternatives), so djedi hurriedly mopped as much as we could off, disconnected it and moved it to higher ground. (it's currently sitting upside-down on our dining room table in the hopes that it will drain or something) I didn't have the heart to try to turn it on this morning - guess I'll see about that tonight. I did buy the AppleCare for it, although I don't know if that covers spills or not.

The weird thing was that I wasn't super panicked or angry or whatever. I was upset at myself, but I know that I'm prone to clumsiness when I'm tired. (like when I burned my thumb on the oven last week!) And if the laptop is unrecoverable, well, that would suck, but I could get by for iPod syncing and WoW playing and whatnot. It would be nice if it worked though.

Ironically, I was just yesterday reading about jwz's backup strategy and thinking it sounded like a good idea. Not that I had anything particularly interesting on the laptop data-wise (I always back up my iTunes database), but still...

Other than that, work has been going really really well this week. My mom visits next Wednesday, Friday we close on our house (!), and that weekend djedi's parents are coming to hopefully buy carpet for us and stuff, which will be quite helpful.

I'm going to miss campaigning in Florida, specifically hearing about Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani saying that English should be the national language, and then advertising in Spanish. That's some good hypocrisy, there. Via dailykos, an article in Rolling Stone about how Republican's immigrant-bashing is not going to help them, especially in the Southwest.

Finally, on the way home I heard this kinda-brutal story on NPR about how Giuliani should have taken his advice from his leadership book, complete with excerpts from the audiobook itself. (it's the story on top, not the longer story on the bottom)

Stuff we did this weekend that's worth mentioning:

- Saw "Juno". Good movie - the first scene had me worried that the whole thing was going to be very snappy and sound like it was written by writers who thought they were awesome, but it calmed down after that. Also, Michael Cera + Jason Bateman == win.

- Saw "Cloverfield". Also a good movie. I will avoid spoilers but I'd recommend it if you like horrorish movies. Kept me awake for a little while last night :-)

- Bought new music! In order of how much I expect to like them:
- Radiohead - "In Rainbows". Yeah, I should have gotten this a while ago but I was busy or something. Anyway, I've only heard the one track but it was pretty good and, come on, it's Radiohead!
- Arcade Fire - "Neon Bible". I listened to this on mediator and looved it.
- Nine Inch Nails - "Year Zero". I heard some samples and wasn't terribly impressed, but I like the concept so I'll give it a shot.
- White Stripes - "Icky Thump". I liked the samples I heard, so who knows.
- The Magnetic Fields - "Distortion". "California Girls" is a really catchy song but I dunno about the rest of the album. We'll see...

- Took down the Christmas tree in 10 minutes.

- Gave notice to our apartment that we're leaving.

- Went to the NI-sponsored hockey game, which was fun. The Ice Bats won!

- Bought a hot tub! We just stopped by to look at them but the '07 models were on clearance and the guy sold us the floor model for substantially cheaper than the "regular price". Anyway, we spent about what we wanted to spend so it's fine.

- Put pictures and videos of David's brother's wedding up. This was the first event that I used my Flip Video at (besides house-hunting) and let me tell you - editing the videos and such is a real pain. I gotta find a better way...(and fix the thumbnails at some point)

So I'm getting quotes on homeowner's insurance. Called up USAA and it was pretty easy (and cheap!) but I wanted to compare with someone. State Farm doesn't do online quotes for our area, so GEICO it is.

- It asks the distance to the nearest fire department. How am I supposed to know this in general? Can't they figure it out since I gave them the address?

- Who thinks that selecting years (or dates for that matter) from a drop down box is easier than typing in four digits?

- Now they're asking if I've purchased the home within the last 12 months...but if I say yes and put in our scheduled closing date, it complains since it's in the future. I guess I'll say no, but I think the most accurate answer is yes. Gah.

So the two weeks of craziness ended successfully. djedi's brother's wedding went fine, albeit a little hectically and involving more than 150 miles of driving inside Houston. (I was planning on doing a bunch of maps and showing how far apart things are in Houston, but it's not that interesting) Also a reminder to myself that, while I like people being married and all that, I don't like weddings. (the last few I've been to have been awkward, and the emphasis on the whole "man and wife" thing gets old) Which is a little sad but knowing is half the battle.

So! Going forward, this week is "we better make sure everything's OK with the new house because if we back out after this week it costs us a lot of money", meaning home inspection tomorrow and answering more tedious mortgage questions. Also, hopefully a new phone!

Big work meeting today after lunch.

We met with our mortgage guy yesterday and everything seems to be in order, so bully for that. After work we're gonna view the house again and then, in all likelihood, make an offer, which is exciting! This just in: the house was not used previously to manufacture methamphetamines (yes, this question is on the seller's disclosure).

Also, $32 per month is a ridiculous sum of money to pay to a homeowner's association, for use of a pool that we'll probably never use.

I think I'll just live in a hotel for the rest of my life. Room service, maid service, etc. It would be a lot less trouble.

Also, does $44/month for water seem high to anyone else? We're not running a car wash or anything...

I know they're just trying to sell the house, but a 2675 sq ft is not "cozy". "Ginormously huge" would be more accurate.

The short version: Obama wins, Edwards just barely beats Clinton for second. Huckabee wins on the Republican side.

Back in 2003, I was a huge Dean supporter. I got to shake his hand (this was back in April when he was pretty unknown), went to Meetups for him and wrote letters to voters in Iowa, sent him lots of money, went down to San Antonio for a rally wearing my Dean shirt and hat, etc., etc. When he lost in Iowa and then the whole Dean Scream nonsense, it broke my heart. I did get behind Kerry, not terribly enthusiastically, but what's the alternative, right? His loss broke my heart too, but in a smaller way.

Anyway, I feel a little bad that I wasn't backing a particular candidate, because I don't want to lose my passion...but in the end it's really hard to tell who would make the best President. They're all pretty good, and I'd be happy if any of them got elected. (even Gravel...think of what an entertaining four years that would make!)

Tomorrow night: movie
Saturday: drive to Houston, do a bachelor party
Sunday: drive back to Austin earlyish, meet djedi's parents and look at houses. Maybe decide to make an offer on the one we like. That would be pretty neat.

I think we're finally done mortgage-hunting. Which is good because it's starting to drive me bananas. I went to Bank of America today to cash in some savings bonds and (after the guy miscounted them which would have shorted me some hundreds of dollars) the guy asked me what I was doing with the money. I let it slip we're planning on closing on a house soon(ish) and his eyes literally lit up ¹ and he got very excited and started talking quickly and pulled up a web page with mortgage numbers. At one point he actually jogged across the room to ask someone something.

Then on the way back from that, another mortgage person possibility called me to make sure I had gotten the estimate he emailed back this morning.

I think if I wore a shirt saying "About to buy a house" I would be crushed by the mob of humanity coming to offer me a mortgage, is all I'm saying.

1 - I hate it when people say "literally" when they don't mean "literally", so here's my justification: his eyes opened wider, therefore exposing more of the white of his eyes to me, which is brighter than the rest of his eyes/his skin. (back)

when I saw this listing for the house we're interested in - notice the big Sold! at the top. Luckily I'm pretty sure the listing is old, as the backyard doesn't have the deck in it and the asking price is quite a bit lower than the one we saw.

On the plus side - it's a David Weekly home, which I've been told is a good thing!

Here's what has to happen in the next two weeks:

- New year's party (fun!)
- Shuffling money around in anticipation of making a down payment
- Picking a mortgage broker/company and finishing that paperwork
- Next weekend: Drive to Houston for djedi's brother's bachelor party.
- Next weekend: Probably with djedi's parents, looking at the house we're interested in again (and talking to neighbors about mosquitos?), as well as looking at a house we probably aren't interested in
- Figuring out whether a drainage ditch behind a house is bad or not
- Maaaaaybe, if all our ducks are lined up, making an offer on said drainage ditch house
- Holding the big proposal meeting for my big big feature at work (probably the most important meeting in my professional career thus far), attended by my former boss, boss, and boss's boss (and other people) which I stupidly scheduled for the day before...
- djedi's brother's wedding in Houston, for which I will have to drive down right after said meeting unless I can reschedule, which is unlikely given the number of people attending

After all that I'm gonna get me a new phone, the idea of which will hopefully get me through all of the above. I'm thinking either a Nokia 6133 or a Nokia 6263.

I'm declaring it's OK for myself to get very little else done as long as the bullet points above are hit.

We went house-hunting again yesterday. The first house we looked at is now our current favorite (which is good, as we heard our previous favorite is already under contract. Stop buying houses, people!), with a nice big kitchen (with an island!) that opens up to a living room which is a little on the small side but could probably fit the TV and computers. Master bedroom is plenty big and the bathrooms are nice. Plus it was built in the 90s and is reasonably priced!

Downsides:
- a bit far from freeways, although the neighborhood it's in is nice (it's off of Duval)
- there's a deck in the backyard which would be nice were it not so rundown, presumably by the current owners' (don't yell at me, there's more than one owner so I'm assuming they both own the dogs) dogs.
- living room is a little small

We have another good possibility that we'll see after the holidays, hopefully.

Now for the important stuff: at work my building has 8 floors and elevators. I work on the 8th floor, so I get plenty of time in said elevators. (fun thing to do: walk in a circle as the elevator is moving and realize that you're tracing out a helix!) Often I have to wait for other people to get off on their stupid less important floors before I get to the top, so I was wondering: let's say it's a given that we have to make two floor stops from 1 to 8. Is it better to have the stops be consecutive or spread out? For the sake of concreteness, let's say one way we stop at floors 2 and 3, and the other way we stop at floors 3 and 6.

I have an idea but I'll cut it: my guess is that, even though the elevator won't get up to full acceleration between floors 2 and 3, the total time spent getting up to top speed will be the same, so it'll be almost exactly the same. Depending on the acceleration versus the height of the floors, it's possible that stopping at floors 2 and 3 will be faster, though. I'll go with almost exactly the same for now.

Anyway, I was going to start taking measurements when I get my new phone, but it looks like the RAZR V3 doesn't have a stopwatch. (can anyone confirm?) That makes me sad. I'll come up with something, though!

House-hunting! Still no email from T-Mobile (36 hours and counting)! Applied to write for WoW Insider! Bought a PS3 yesterday! Christmas party tonight! Other things!

Friday started pretty crappily (as I noted), then we went to see Beowulf 3D with people. It was better than I expected - I guess 3D technology has come a ways since I last saw it. The movie was pretty typical action fare, except it was all motion capture CGI-y. It was pretty well done - you could tell most of the time that the characters weren't real actors, and some of the emotions didn't come through as well as they could have, but not bad.

The music was also surprisingly good - the few themes they used are pretty catchy, and the "main" song was sung during the end credits by Idina Menzel! (the original Elphaba in Wicked)

Saturday was spent being cranky for a large part of the day for various reasons. We did get to start Super Mario Galaxy which is a lot of fun, and hang out with wildrice13 in the evening. I worked on my arena rating graph which is coming along nicely - got some statistics to show. (did you know we are much better against teams with 0 mages than teams with 1 mage?) Next step is making it so you can choose criteria (say, matches where the opponents had at least one hunter and paladin that we played in Blade's Edge) and show statistics based on that. Should be fun.

Today was church and then house-hunting. After talking for a while about the way things work (helpful if a bit long), we looked at 6 houses. Unsurprisingly, our top choice was one that looked kinda OK on paper, and our #1 choice on paper was OK but not great (and is under contract anyway so we can't buy it). I took a ton of pictures that hopefully will help us remember the one we liked. It was pretty good but not super amazing or anything. I guess in the future we'll just get more listings from our agent and periodically look at more houses. It's a bit anticlimactic.

Busy week! Last night was a WoW raid (more on that below), tonight is game night, Wed. is a church thing and Thurs. I'm probably going on a Rice recruiting dinner thing.

The past weekend at home was nice, albeit a bit busy. And I could have done without the rain. We did manage to assemble a new grill for my dad. I'm getting a little tired of the drive to Houston - if you count the renaissance festival last weekend (you drive all the way to Brenham and then some more) and if I drive on Thursday that will be 3 trips back and forth to/from Houston in less than three weeks. Oh well.

We're going to look at houses on Saturday! Exciting stuff.

I finally broke down and bought the Beach Boys's (that's the correct punctuation, right grammar folks?) album "Pet Sounds". (I say "broke down" because we have very few magazines in our bathroom and the one that's always open is mental_floss and it's always open to the article about Masterpiece #98, which is that album) I bought it from the Amazon MP3 store which I'm starting to love for convenience and pricing. ($8 for the whole album!) Anyway, it has some catchy songs but overall I'm not as impressed...maybe my expectations were high after reading it was #2 on Rolling Stone's top 500 albums of all time. It's growing on me a little as I listen, but not as much as I would have hoped. Also, I have 0 of the top 25 albums on that list (well, except for "Pet Sounds" now). Shameful? Maybe.

So the last (and first) time we went to Zul'Aman, we had to take a PuG offtank, and so we wiped many times on Nalorrak (the bear boss), and finally downed him after like 3 hours. Since we had our real offtank last night, we thought we'd try to do it in 20 minutes. (for "extra" loot, meaning two pieces instead of one) We engaged him within 20 minutes, barely, but apparently you have to kill him within 20 minutes to get the loot...since it takes us 8 minutes to kill him, that will be difficult.

Anyway, we went ahead and tried Halazzi (the lynx boss). We wiped probably 20+ times trying it...we did make some progress, getting him to 70% once, but no better. Pretty frustrating, all in all. We discussed some strategies at lunch (wings!) that will probably help, but we might just try Akil'zon (the eagle boss) instead, whom we thought we were headed towards last night. He's supposed to be easier.

house-hunting: part 2 of 5000
Mood: optimistic
Posted on 2007-11-20 11:01:00
Tags: house
Words: 136

So we've been emailing back and forth with our buying agent (thanks onefishclappin!) and she sent us a list of houses to look over. Observations:

- It looks like our price range is indeed reasonable.
- The locations of the houses are clustered in a few places: near 183 north of where it hits mopac, east of mopac south of 183, and a few out on 360 (too far away) and near parmer (too far north for my liking but possibly doable)
- It's kinda hard to get a good feel from a house from a bunch of words and a few pictures.

There are some promising candidates on the list but overall it's good to know that we can afford a house near where we want to live. I suppose we'll start touring houses next week or so.

It is gorgeous weather outside!

Since our apartment will be converting into condominiums at some point in the undetermined-yet-apparently-not-too-distant future, we're looking into buying a house. (or at least pricing houses so we can compare, but more likely actually buying a house) Obviously we've never done this before, but here's what we think we know:

- Rough estimate of size, location (north of here but not too far), and dollar amounts that we're happy to spend and able to spend. I've checked on trulia and they seem reasonable enough.
- A list of things about the house that are important (storage space, etc., etc.)
- ???

You'll notice this is not a long list. Do we start with a buyer of some sort and tell them this and have them suggest houses to look at? Do we talk to the bank first about a mortgage or is that after we have a house in mind? What other important questions don't I even know to ask? Help!