12-VI-2004.: Found a house
Went for the beach. Nina swam a bit, not sure about the rest of us. It was very windy and probably still not warm enough, or we got spoiled already. We mostly walked on the beach, on the boarwalk, visited some shops on Atlantic avenue, just generally pretended we were tourists. Even found genuine partisan cowboy hats, with real red stars on them. Straw hats, though.
(... 12 words...)
Changrissa keeps sending us links to the houses she'd like to sell, i.e. more expensive than we thought. On the other side, I'm finding the same house on ad sites, and... well, there's some MSM or MML or whatever number, which I then discovered was a part of the url in the links she sent. Her links lead to the same data on a different website, seems to be some internal dealers' network, far richer in detail than what one sees through ads. What if I inserted a number of a house we like into one of her links? Well, let's see... Aha, it works, so I can have a dealer's view on a house which dealer won't offer. Okay...
So on thirteenth we found what we were looking for. I sent her a link to that house and one more, pretending all the way that she sent it to us among a dozen other links (which she didn't). Can't find those emails anymore, must have put it somewhere special. So we scheduled to see them on fourteenth. First we, of course, had to visit the beach middle, to attend the awards ceremony. The smudge on one picture is the school principal. She had to walk away to the corner, to ask how to pronounce the lj in the surname, and I took the shot when she was running back to center. This other shot is just posing. The four are on the principal's list, which is some honour. The one boy next to Lena got into that magnet school and then gave up and reverted to his area school. Lena never asked him why. Somehow he vacated a slot for her.
Lena, of course, got a bundle of congratulary papers on subject the school was not all about. They have a nice hall for such shows, but no, this had to be in the gym. This school is under totalitarian rule of the PE clique. The one time we attended the PTA meeting, the curriculum and plan for the year took some dozen minutes, and then a whole hour and then some they went on about collecting money for the new basketball semaphore, as the old one is wrong, forgot why. Well that too passed and we arrived on time. What on time, we waited for Changrissa at least twenty minutes, the keys got mislaid, took time finding them.
Well it looked better than on the pictures. Brick façade, a big magnolia and two bushes in front, cool shade it means. And the windows slide sideways, no guillotine. Good...
Then she came, unlocked and... well the insides don't look so good, needs lots of work. And just to spite me, Agfa lost power after a few shots, so we had to rely on our memory a lot. For one, the layout of the ground floor is moronic, there's a big room in front, but partitioned so there's a dark room in the middle, divided from the kitchen by a wall with a bar opening, and the access to the kitchen goes through a small dark side hall, which also leads to the tiny semi bathroom (just a sink, crapper and water heater), but okay, it's the slat and clap walls, easy. Upstairs there's a huge room in front, with a nice big window shaded by the magnolia, two smaller rooms in the back, that'll do for the girls... the bathroom isn't in the best shape, actually each cabinet hosting a faucet had a rotten bottom, each one drips. The rear door is all scratched, and so are the kitchen cabinets, with the bottom corners of each drawer rounded up. Seems to have been a doghouse. But okay, that's what made the price go so low.
The asked price was 55000$, and this being a foreclosed house now belonging to HUD, we need to issue an offer. If we go too low, we may get refused; if the error is in the other direction, we overpay.
Mentions: Agfa, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), in serbian