What to Know When Buying and Selling a House

In my previous post Young and Naive I wrote a bit about our experience in selling our old house to Castletown Shopping World.

There sure is a lot that I don’t know that I wish I did know about buying and selling a house. A lot of what I wish I knew can be read in the following article: Get Rich Slowly » What I Wish I Knew Then About Home Buying. That article gives a pretty good commentary on another article over at Yahoo Finance: What I Wish I Knew Then About Home Buying.

Like many things in life (like having kids, getting married, etc.) stuff like this can sometimes only really be learned after actually going out and doing it yourself. That said, if you can pick up even just a few pointers from the article it could be helpful.

Sometime soon I want to find the time to write a bit about our experience in purchasing our first house as it was a bit of an eye opener into what people will do to sell a house.

LG LX-M240 Micro HiFi System

This weekend Tamara and I went out and had a look for a micro HiFi system for under $200. Our main three requirements were that it looked good on our book case (more Tamara’s requirement than mine), it had decent sound and it played MP3 CDs.

We tested out pretty much every system under $200 and decided on the LG LX-M240 Micro HiFi System as it gives fantastic sound for that price range and it met all of our requirements. There is certainly a large selection of sound systems out there in this price range and with these specification though.

LG LX-M240 Micro HiFi System

The temptation was definately there to look at the $300 multi-disc changers and to look for more, but since we only needed something small this was a good fit for us. Because access to the system would be pretty easy and it played MP3 CDs, the need for a multi-disc changer wasn’t very great.

The main reason why we were in the market for a micro hi-fi system is that with our living room reorganization we had lost most of the room on our entertainment unit. The old stereo didn’t fit in the bookshelf, so we were stuck with the old one sort of hidden behind the TV. The new system has helped us to better organize our space. The only downside is that our chrome moose had to find a new place to live on the desk instead of on the bookcase.

House Concrete Slab is Complete

The concrete slab under our house was finished a while ago now, but I was a little distracted and haven’t posted the photos and update yet on this site.

Below are the photos of our new concrete slab. Tamara jokes that she has been looking for the gold in slab and hasn’t found it yet. It’s not much to look at right now, but at least I can visualize what will be happening down the track.

The Front of the slab is 50cm above the ground level
Front of the slab

Looking back over the slab - still curing in some areas
Looking where the rooms will be

View of the Slab from the back - You can see the in slab plumbing
You can see the plumbing at the back of the slab

There is about a 30 cm drop in the ground level from the back of the slab to the front of the slab. This is great for the water flowing off our property but it means that the slab at the front is 50cm above the ground.