Since the last post a lot has happened. On one hand getting the foundation related items out of the way took a while, from rain detention tank, to rebars, to many inspections, then came the concrete pouring followed by layering the drainage pipes and whole lot of other visually boring items. But once all these were done, the more visual part and apparently the most exciting part of the building started, the framing.
Framing went at an unbelievable pace, 3 weeks in total. From one day to the next you have nothing but a foundation to the next day where outer walls and floors are in place. and within a week you actually see the shape of the rooms which is an amazing experience after months and months of planning and adjusting and moving this wall over there and that room over here, seeing it take form day over day is pretty exciting. You go from thinking, this is smaller than I thought untill the walls come up and then you realize its actually bigger than you thought and I am told once everything is finished before furniture is moved in, the feeling of everything is smaller than we thought will be back but then go away once moved in. We did make some very minor changes from the original plan on the fly as we saw the shape of the rooms and windows.
So here is a chronological order of things once foundation has been laid (including drainage pipes):
Fixtures are the last on the list, before framing started we started deciding on cabinetry, plumbing fixtures, counter tops and appliances and are now done, we think. Deciding can take a while though; you see something you like, but you may not feel that way tomorrow or in a week, so you have to make sure what you choose as part of your finalists are real keepers.
Some thoughts on different areas:
Appliances – pretty straight forward, the only thing that took time was fridge in deciding between french doors, side-by-side or single door and french door won finally as everything is in convenient height (since freezer is at the bottom)and it can fit big platters. The drawback could be that you forget which side an item is on opening both doors, but that’s minor.
Kitchen Countertop – Still TBD as we are still deciding between lime stone(not durable), granite (comes in matt, aka honed and glossy), soap stone (40% more than granite and same durability) and concrete(not as durable). We want a unique look rather than typical glossy granite but given all the factors including price we will see what we end up with.
Heating/Cooling – Important realization here was to go with multizone control (ie since you only have one unit for AC or heating, the ability to control without manual work how certain parts of the house will get more heat/cool than others). Saves energy and better for the environment. We dropped the option of going with radiant heating which we initially really wanted for environmental reasons, but that would have meant buying, installing, and operating two completely different systems.
Other – I also briefly looked into things like motorized painting to cover the TV as well as home automation control, and cool as the result may be, given the costs and what you get out of it, we dropped it simply wasn’t worth it. The one luxury that I am very much looking forward to is the rain head shower.
Networking – will do a separate post on this as I geeked out a little, at least on paper.
One of the things I really dislike is the idea of buying a new car. Scratch that, I just really dislike dealing with car salesmen because with the exception of one or two, you are surely going to get suckered, you just don’t know how much and most likely you will never find out. It’s different from buying anything else in my opinion (even a house) as it can be researched a lot easier and you can arm yourself with all the needed information before going into a store.
With cars there are just too many unknowns that you simply cannot find out (for mortal people at least) before starting the process, hence that uneasy feeling of “wonder where I rank in the list of people this guy suckered” feeling just won’t go away. The car industry would sure benefit from more transparency as I don’t mind dealerships making a living/profit as long as I am paying very similar to what the other 20 people who bought the same car and that just is not the case.
Anyways, we needed a car for the next many years that we can use as the kids grow up, so we decided to go with a mini-van (which is another post by itself) and Honda Odyssey seemed the natural choice. Next came the buying part. We decided to not trade-in to give the sales person one less parameter they can milk more profit from. This is the story of how we tried our best to minimize the risk of overpaying for the car.
In short, it came down to the following steps (we happened to get our car right towards the tail end of this year’s model and in fact only teen nr of odysseys of the model we wanted remained in our vicinity as one dealer looked it up):
Know the EXACT car you want, brand, model, down to options, exterior and interior colors.
Find out how much the MSRP price & invoice price (e.g. from truecar.com), how much the holdback is (usually 2 or 3%) and if there are (marketing) incentives offered to dealers/consumer by the manufacturer (typical ahead of next year’s model to get rid of last inventory of the current year)
Calculate what price you should be paying based on this info e.g. invoice price minus holdback minus incentives (this is as far as you can get with arming yoruself with the info)
Get a list of all dealers within a readius of X miles from your house (ie as far as you are comfortable to drive to get the car if you get a good deal) from yellowpages.com
Start calling the farthest one.
Important! Ask for the fleet manager or internet sales (fleet manager is someone who is on a fixed salary vs sales people that get commission based on how much they sell)
Tell the person you are looking to buy a car today (don’t lie if you are not planing on this) and are calling a few places to get the best price and go in and close the deal. Then ask them what they can offer if they have the car in stock. If they are savvy they will ask what price you currently have and you can share the lowest price you have and ask if they can beat it. Here is where it gets tricky. When I did this, a lot of them would just say thats a good deal, you should order it from the internet then. Don’t waste time and move on to the next one as if you want to wait, you can always order it from the internet site.
Make sure to confirm that this is the *bottom* line price (usually including everything but tax) as otherwise you will be surprised how much other fees they will try and insert in there. Some will refuse to give a bottom line price over the phone saying you will use it to call the next guy for a lower price. Again, don’t waste time, you started by telling him/her you are looking to buy a car today and if he is not trying to work a deal, chances of getting a good deal from this person are next to none.
If they do, ask to call back, call the next dealership closer to you and repeat the process until you get the price closest in step 3.
Go and buy the car!
Common comment from sales person : I am giving you the car at invoice and not making any money. Well, they may have paid the price of invoice to manifacturer yes, but then they get different rebates and holdback, so in reality that is not how much they paid. Example: if you buy a watch for $20 and you get a mail-in rebate for $8, your invoice was $20 yes, but you actually paid only $12.
How did we do? After buying the car, it turned out one of the parents whose kids are in the same age group as our daughter and we have seen each other a few times works at a dealership and when I told him about the price we paid for the car, he said he would look into it and told us later that we got a really good deal, as good as it pretty much can get for this area.
and here is a very comprehensive site about buying a new car.
I thought I had heard/seen most traditions and customs in the Persian culture, at least the common ones, but here is one that caught me off guard. The other night at a dinner party with some very well educated people, one being a well versed scholar in Persian history and culture, as my wife came in with our new born son of two months, the gentleman looked at him and then with a smiling face looked at my wife saying : he is very ugly!….long silence…. My wife and looked at each other very puzzled but managed somehow to not show it smiling back in silence, thinking “what da?!?”.
Later on we found out, this phrase is said to ward off the evil spirits, for those who believe in it I guess. So I guess you learn something new every day and if this happens to you (at least when someone Persian says it), they don’t really mean it; you can hope.
Our house was build in early 50s and although we remodeled somewhat a few years back, many factors contributed to our decision of tearing down the house and rebuilding a new one. In this series of posts I will talk about each step as we take it and while it will be a good read 20 years from now when all the details will be long gone from the memory, hopefully it will help any readers out there in similar situation to take advantage of our learning during this process as well as maybe soliciting feedback & tips that will lead us to make better decisions.
So let’s get started on the steps taken so far. Here is a summary in bullet points
Custom plan vs. stock plan – after much going back and forth on this, we started by looking at stock plans sold by variuos firms and since we found a plan that had pretty much 90% of what we wanted, we decided to go with a stock plan and modify it rather than do a fully custom plan which would have cost probably 5-7X the amount for a stock plan.
Permits - once the modification was done with the stock plan and we were happy with everything which took about 3-4 months (tips: do not rush into finalizing the plan, sleep on it, then sleep some more on it as something that may sound great for a day or two a week later may sound blah) you submit it to the city and wait for request for revisions and clarifications etc. That’s all part of the process and there is no way you can get your plan approved in one shot. With the semi slow market thankfully this has gone pretty smoothly so far. and that’s where we still are to get the permit finalized. The plan itself includes multiple dimensions of the house from draining plan, structural plan, foundation plan, the house itself (layout) and a few others and each go through a review and approval through various experts within the housing department of the city.
Moving out – this is going to take a while as for some reason we humans are good at collecting junk over time and not getting rid of it, so moving once in a while a good thing as it allows to get rid of the junk.
Salvaging the house – being environmentally conscious we didn’t want to have the entire house to waste so we called several companies that salvage parts of the house (anything from light/bathroom switches/fixtures to the floors, doors, windows and some parts of the exterior of the house. Benefit of this primarly is the fact that there will be less junk produced as most of the salvaged parts get resold/reused by other people and we get some sort of tax deduction as you are donating that material. We called three companies available in our area
Re Store – never got back to us despite several calls
Earthwise – came and assessed and we went with them.
Second use – came and assessed and felt it was not worth their effort.
Old appliances, computers and other stuff - our appliances were all from early 70s and worked so so, along with a couple of old desktops, laptops, cables, vases, chairs and other items that was no longer any use to us. Craigslist.org was invaluable as anything we put on there as free to be picked up, were gone in less than 24 hrs! I also put the house to be salvaged further after the company above came and there people that are interested in salvage more items from the house! This was a great surprise and since others find this useful, it’s win win as far as I am concerned.
Paying the costs – From the blogsphere I came across this credit card from Schwab that according to them : “You earn 2% cash back on all retail purchases, including purchases for services and recurring payments. This excludes transactions relating to refunds or returns, balance transfers, cash advance transactions (including the purchase of money orders or other cash equivalents), out-of-network payments made through FIA Card Services’ Bill Pay Choice® service, purchases made by or for a business or for a business purpose, fees, finance charges, unauthorized/fraudulent transactions and other charges.” Hey, that’s better than any other useless credit card out there that gives you 1% cashback on selected transactions or lots of air milage or other crap that end up never using. And while I won’t be able to pay for the entire house using this card of course, whatever I gain back can be used for other purposes at least.
Once we have the permit ready, next step will be to getting contractors to tear down the house and excavate…and that will the topic of the next post.
A few video’s that once again reminds us about the amazing things we humans are capable of, and while some of these can’t be achieved through hard work, most become apparent only after hard work and perseverance.
Our household is amongst the ~17.5% household in US that does not have a landline and while it has worked very well, there has been occasions where we have felt that having a stationary phone would have been nice.
Recently this got me thinking as I got a Google Voice account (by having one in GrandCentral which Google bought a while back). Here is how we do telephony in our household:
Mobiles – both of us have one but it’s always on silent/vibrate not to risk waking up our baby, so we do miss calls. Also a lot of times we are not home and wish to make international calls to family, in which case having Google voice (see below) & a Rebtel account really helps.
Landline – We have a skype-in number (with skype-out feature) that we use through a Voip phone (Netgear SPH200D) which hooks up directly to our internet router so we are not dependent on a computer (and skype software) being on. And it ends up being much cheaper than paying monthly fee for landline. Of course if your internet connection is down, so is your ‘landline’ with this solution.
Google Voice (GV) – And finally the part that brings it all together: Having a GV nr allows people to call this nr, which in turn will ring all the other phones until someone picks up or it goes to voicemail. Voicemails gets transcribed to text and searchable from gmail. Further you can receive txt msgs on this nr. There are tons of other features on GV beyond these though. Some of my favorite features:
Calling international numbers (call your GV nr and then dial an international nr, not free but very cheap)
Having your voicemails accessible from the web and any of your phones
If you are not familiar with what Akamai is, in one line, they provide an express highway for internet traffic. Certainly worth a watch as to how one of the bigger problems of internet has been solved.
You mayhave seen the movie: The Truman show with Jim Carrey where his character Truman was the star of a TV show with everyone in this world but him knowing about it.
Hearing about it on the radio today, something similar is, in smaller scale, happening around us here in the US at least. It seems with the ongoing recession and home sales so low, real estate agents are taking to new tricks to sell houses: they hire actors to play the roles of good neighbors and plant them around in the emptynext door house or as dog walkers up and down the street or lawnmover neighbor 3 houses down, or a few kids playing on the street…you get the picture.
I personally found it quite disturbing, especially when the buyer in the story realized this after buying the house and moving in that his street pretty much has only empty foreclosed houses.
So, next time you are house hunting and meet a friendly future neighbor, make sure they actually live there.
The concept of microblogging has been around for a while and is championed (based on userbase?) by Twitter. I for one don’t seem to get why and at the risk of making an ignorant statement like these, I find micro-blogging in its current form (with exception of a handful scenarios) frivolous and useless. The main argument I hear about it is that twitter (or similar services) are the real-time web and unless Google or others move towards that, you will be losing the game by serving the users content that is not super fresh and real time. I can see that being the case eventually and maybe the current form is just a stop-gap to figure out how to get us there and just maybe that is why Facebook is so obsessed with turning into twitter to the degree that it changes the site to even look like twitter. And then you have Google to some degree drooling over Facebook and certain aspects of its model and Microsoft trying to catch up with Google. We have a full ecosystem right there with these four guys.
Here is a good video summarizing my sentiments on tweeting (thanks to Karina):
PS. I do have a twitter account (curiosity) but I think I have logged into it maybe twice in the last 6 months.
It baffles me how low the Iranian goverment is willing to sink to continue their violation of human rights. For years, they have persecuted Baha’is of Iran, imprisoned and executed them on the same old and lame charges of espionage for Israel. Why? because Baha’is believe in the same God as Islam, want to achieve world peace and because we have our Holy places in Israel, like every other religion of the past.
The UN and rest of the world has passed resolutions one after the other and this has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian goverment that they can’t just continue do as they please.
And here is the goverment’s latest shameless play: they arrest seven of the Baha’is, imprison them and charge them for espionage. After this, the Noble prize winner and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi declares that she will represent the Baha’is and stand up for their human rights. The government then charges Ms. Ebadi with tax evasion and once imprisoned, this is then followed by formally charging these imprisoned Baha’is for espionage.
Further the timing of these events certainly are interesting. In the light of president Obama studying what to do about the relations with Iran, I personally find the timing of these event very interesting and cunning from Iran’s side. Why? because as mentioned violating the rights of Baha’is has been a thorn on the Iranian goverment’s side and now is their chance to see if they can get away with it with the new US president. I.e. is President Obama willing to prioritize this down in favor of starting a dialouge with Iran and instead focus on other matters that also are in contention with US (e.g. nuclear energy development).
Whether this is all one big consipirasy theory or not remains to be seen over time, but one thing is and continues to be clear. Iranian goverment is ready to sink as low as it takes to continue their shameless persecusion of Baha’is.
It used to be back in the days that news sources (and in particular papers) were started and used as propaganda machines for wars or political systems and you would think in this day and age with information so readily avaialbe to us through a host of sources and technologies, things would have changed. Not so much.
What I see happening is that we are either too lazy or overloaded with information that majority seem to want the news to be fully processed/digested so that we do nothing but be fed, be influences and move on to the next piece of information we need to absorb. And media sources are greatly taking advantage of this to the degree that sometimes the reality seen through their eyes is very distorted if you stop for a minute and think about what they serve us critically.
Even the small sources, e.g. blogsphere, be it technology or financial can’t help themselves and stray away from just telling the facts and background and leaving it to the reader to do the digestion.
So really not much has changed since the days of the past and although we can all agree that the media have both a powerful influence on people’s attitudes and perceptions and a weighty responsibility to contribute to social integration, it is not where they are and that is probably more of a reflection on where our society or mankind as a whole is. Sooner or later though this will need change and the future of journalism will have to be impartial, objective and factual, not processed or entertaining.
Since the last post a lot has happened. On one hand getting the foundation related items out of the way took a while, from rain detention tank, to rebars, to many inspections, then came the concrete pouring followed by layering the drainage pipes and whole lot of other visually boring items. But once all these were done, the more visual part and apparently the most exciting part of the building started, the framing.
One of the things I really dislike is the idea of buying a new car. Scratch that, I just really dislike dealing with car salesmen because with the exception of one or two, you are surely going to get suckered, you just don’t know how much and most likely you will never find out. It’s different from buying anything else in my opinion (even a house) as it can be researched a lot easier and you can arm yourself with all the needed information before going into a store.
