We are the very proud owners of a 1911 craftsman home in northeast Portland.

A very empty home we now get to decorate and furnish. I’ll be honest.. it seems really daunting. I have been tearing pages from magazines and saving images off the web for decorating inspiration for many months. But I have no idea where to start on my own.

We named our home Bauhaus! For more photos click the pic above. Feel free to share ideas on colors! I think I want to paint the kitchen a yummy green but beyond that not sure what to keep or paint over yet.

Tomorrow the POD gets dropped off. If you are going to have a POD parked on a Portland street you have to get a permit, by the way. $20 and you can only have it parked there for two weeks.

I want to give a plug to the team that made our home buying process go so smoothly. Kudos to our amazingly patient and helpful Realtor Deb Counts-Tabor with Oregon Realty and savvy broker Michael Sullivan with Capital M Lending. And thanks to all our friends (old and new!!) and family for tips and support along the way.

Creepy Crawlspaces
Lots of houses have unfinished basements. Portland interprets unfinished a lot more literally, and they neglect to wall off half the underside of a house. They call them crawlspaces but what they are are exposed dirt piles. Some of them are out in the open, others are visible behind an opening, all of them are creepy.

Creepy Crawlspace © Susan Lawson

Potbelly Furnaces/stoves/heaters
They’re chubby and cute and period-looking. I see the appeal. But I see a huge thing taking up space in every room, which removes walking space or furniture arrangements.

© steveyb

Garages not meant to hold cars
You could chalk it up to older garages built in a time when we didn’t have such massive vehicles on the road, but we’ve seen many that were built this decade. They’re houses with a one-car garage, according to the real estate listing. But in reality there is no way these things could house a car. They’re too small, and more shed-like.

Also we see a lot of garages that, if cleaned out, could fit a car.. but seems Portlanders like their storage space more. I think the lack of need for car shelter can be explained by the lack of snowfall here. These folks don’t know what it is to dig out your car every morning.

More details here.

There is fear that this is just another incentive for people that really can’t afford a home to get one anyway, but if used responsibly it’s a great incentive that just got sweeter. Note this is only applicable for FHA loans. Other loans will still qualify for the tax credit as it was before.

On Monday I found a listing for a duplex that met all our needs and we signed and mailed off the papers today! It is nerve-wracking to commit to a place sight unseen (aside from photos), but the great news is that it is right near all the SE neighborhoods we plan to do our house hunting in. And it’s only a mile or so from our UPS Box.

It’s near the Irvington/Sullivan’s Gulch neighborhoods, right by Lloyd Center. It’s got a great walkscore and a place to park our scooters so we can ride those around.

We committed to a three-month lease with month-to-month option after. I hope we can find a place in three months but from what I am learning it can take awhile. Plus we’ll want to do any painting/repairs before we move in, so we’ll see. It’s nice to have the flexibility.

Countdown’s at under 2 months…

Irvington Lizard © DancingSloth

Tree-lined Portland Street © misternaxal

No, we don’t have a house yet. We got a box at the UPS Store. I called them to see if we could go ahead and set it up remotely and we could. Peter and I were worried about how we would do the change of address thing on all our stuff since we are going to have a temporary place for an undetermined amount of time before we get our permanent address.

This is a big relief because now we have a guaranteed address for a year we can give to our clients. We can slowly segue them to our permanent address when the time comes. Although the more I think of it the more I like the idea of having a separate address for business, so we may just keep it.

We have a P.O. Box in Saint Louis with the USPS. Those who know me know I am a total USPS groupie; I love the Postal Service and have a slight stamp obsession. BUT I have learned that UPS boxes are totally awesom-er because:

• Your address looks like a suite, not a P.O. box. Example: 123 Sesame St #987, Portland OR
• You have 24-hour key access to go check your mail
• You can CALL AHEAD to see if you have mail so you aren’t making an unnecessary trip

Anyway our UPS box is around Laurelhurst/Grant Park area, which I adore and hope we will live near.  Hoo-ray!

In this meeting she doesn’t actually verify any of the information you give her – no credit check is performed. And no loan or rates are locked in. But now we have a number, which is wonderfully exactly in line with what we hoped. So we can start perusing listings in that price range with more confidence. We learned a lot of valuable information at our meeting…  she was so nice and patient with us (90 minutes!) that I felt guilty that we won’t be able to consider Commerce for our loan. They don’t have any branches in Oregon.

I really prefer smallish, region-based banks over the big national ones. But ultimately the mortgage will come down to the numbers and best rate we can get. I’m more concerned about having a friendly small bank for day-to-day checking stuff, the mortgage we hopefully won’t have to deal with very often aside from sending a monthly check. Besides, mortgages get bought and sold all the time so even if you do your financing with a small bank there’s a good chance they’re not the one you’ll be dealing with and sending checks to anyway.

We were pleasantly suprised to find that it doesn’t appear that both of us being self-employed will hurt us on getting a loan *knock on wood*. You just have to have meticulous income records and two years of tax statements. While most people walk out with their pre-approval letter same day of that meeting, ours will take 7-10 days because of the research the bank will have to do to check our income history. But we should get it based on this good faith estimate.

I’m going to start researching banks in Oregon (any suggestions)? With plans to visit a few shortly after we arrive in June and get some good faith estimates. It will be as much as us interviewing them as them interviewing us. I want a loan officer as awesome as the lady at Commerce we met with today.  Since Peter and I are fortunate enough to have good credit scores, no debt, and are going to pay enough down on the house to not need PMI on our loan, it seems like we will get the best interest rate possible at any given bank on our own. So I’m not sure if we need a broker, really. Is there an advantage to having one we don’t know about?

Once we find a bank in Portland we like we’ll apply for the Preapproval Letter from them, which locks in a rate and amount that is guaranteed typically for four months. This will help a seller to have confidence that we have a bank backing us up when we make an offer. However even then we won’t have to end up using the lender we got the letter from. Different loans have different stipulations, depends on the property and so many things.  It all comes down to numbers.

I guess if all else fails though…

P.S. It’s worth pausing on the fine print screen to read the most ridiculous interest rate ever.