A Cook's Paradise

I grew up in a small town in Mississippi. Some of my family and friends still live there and for the most part they love their home, but there is one complaint I hear over and over from them - the lack of a decent grocery store.

They have basically three choices: A poorly stocked Kroger; the Walmart Super Center; and a small grocery store called Sunflower. If you are lucky enough to be active duty or retired military you can also shop at the air force base commissary. And that's it. This is a really big issue for the fabulous cooks living there like my mom, Sister III,  Brother-in-Law, BFF and her her youngest child.

One day BFF was complaining she could not find shallots anywhere in Small Town Mississippi . In my continuing effort to get her to uproot her family and move up here, I pointed out that the only problem you would have in Cary is choosing between multitude of grocery stores from which to procure your shallots.

She could pick up her shallots at one of North Carolina's own Harris Teeter's. If she wanted organic shallots she could try Whole Foods, Trader Joe's or Earth Fare. For a friendly shallot, she could go to the brand new Publix. I have never been Lowe's Supermarkets or Food Lion, but I bet they have shallots too. I'm not sure if there are Indian, Asian or Hispanic shallots, but if there are, she can pick them up at one of our many specialty grocery stores.
 
So here I am in Cary with at least ten different shallot buying opportunities, and would like to know how many times I have actually bought shallots or anything more difficult to find than organic milk? None. Zip. Zero. Why? Well it is a two fold answer. First and most importantly, I hate to cook. Absolutely loath it. People tell me it's a shame because I am a pretty good cook (I learned from the best - my mom).

The second answer is that I hate going to the grocery store even worse than cooking. No matter how spectacular they are, and let me tell you, we have the most fabulous grocery stores I have ever been in, I just hate going. Luckily for me, Yankee does not mind going at all. He says it reminds him of shopping with his dad when he was a kid, so he does pretty much all the food shopping (that's what he calls it) around here.

It is sad that I have an abundance of food choices and yet do not take advantage of them at all, while the great cooks from home have almost no choice at all. I guess they are just all move up to Cary AKA Cook's Paradise.

California Dreaming

Number One Son and me at the Santa Monica Pier

The last time I saw Number One Son was right before he moved to Los Angeles in April seeking fame and fortune or something like that. So when I had the chance to fly out for his birthday, I jumped on it.

I left early Sunday morning. My love for something or someone can be accurately judged by how early I am willing to get up for it. In this case it was 4:45am which equals much love. Because of the time change, I arrived early Sunday morning. In all of my travels, I have never been to LA, so I made Number One Son show me everything. We literally covered the entire city in one day.

We started in Santa Monica and drove through Malibu, some of the canyons outside of the city, back into the valley, through Beverly Hills and down Sunset Boulevard. I experienced the famous LA traffic first hand. A side note here - you know your child has become a Californian when he spends as much time discussing his planned route for his trip to Northern California as he does the vacation itself. 'I want to take the One all the way up but I'll probably take the Five to the 101 to the One so I can skip this traffic.'
 

What half a million bucks will buy you in LA

As a mom and a REALTOR, I needed to see his house. This boy grew up in a very affluent, very white suburb of Atlanta. He now lives in a working class neighborhood made up of primarily of  Hispanic families. Because it's LA, the house he lives in, which is a 2300 square foot, rather old, slightly rundown, craftsman cottage, sold for almost half a million dollars in January. That makes much pricier than the typical McMansion in the Atlanta suburb. You know what they say about real estate though. Location, location, location.

He shares this house with five other people, but at least he has his room. It is slightly larger than my walk in closet. With no A/C and one tiny window, I imagine it is similar to sleeping in an oven. The entire postage-stamp sized back yard is cemented over. One of the weirdnesses of living in Southern California is they keep their washer and dryer in the back yard. It is fine there since it never rains. I guess you can do some grilling and a load of whites at the same time.

The view of downtown LA from our hotel window

We met up with Yankee downtown. Noah wanted to have steak for his birthday so we went to this great place called Frank's. It's been in it's location since 1953. I am not sure what the neighborhood was like then, but now it is part of Korea Town. The clientele was a fabulous mix of people from the neighborhood and people who looked like they had been eating there since the '60's.

After dinner we were all pretty pooped, so Number One Son dropped us off at our hotel. Yankee and I flew back home on Monday. It was a whirlwind of a trip, but I was so happy to have made it. It was nice to see the boy settling down in his new, way different environment. I am still sad he is so far away, but I am happy that he is happy. 

Painter's Block

When we bought our first house, we were coming from living in those bastions of  builder's beige walls - apartments and military housing. I could hardly wait to put color onto my new walls. I had  the paint picked out before we even moved in. I painted our dining room midnight blue, the living room forest green, and our bedroom burgundy. Trust me, in the early nineties this was the palette.

We moved to our second house in 1999, and I took a break from all that partying to paint my foyer eggplant and my dining room chili pepper. The family room was spring green and the sunroom had yellow walls and a blue ceiling. There was not a wall in that house that I did not make colorful. I was very sad to paint everything the same color when we put it up for sale.

We closed on our new house last Monday. One of things I so looked forward to about moving out of the rental was getting away from the taupe that covers every single wall. The New House has off white walls which is a nice, blank canvas to work with.

Here is the surprising thing - I just cannot get started. I have taken a tree's worth of paint samples from Lowe's and Home Depot. They are taped all over the house, but I have not been able to make a decision. I have owned this house for a week now and have not bought a single gallon of paint.

I clearly have painter's block. As a writer, I know how hard writer's block is to overcome. The only real cure for it is to write which does not really make sense, but it does work. I just sit down and start typing out anything that comes to mind. I often have to resort to writing blah, blah, blah when I am really stuck. Then I come back to that part later and replace the blahs with real words.

I think this what I am going to have to do in the new house. I want to paint my sewing room first because I am very anxious to get it set up, but since I cannot choose between the multitude of color samples taped on the wall, I am going to pick out a nice creamy white and just paint. If you know me, you know how bizarre this is. I have never willingly painted a wall white in my life, but I am pretty sure it is the only way to get my color flow back. The white will be my painter's version of blah, blah, blah. Hopefully I will be able to come back later with a real color.

A Great Real Estate Day

One of the main reasons I decided to be a REALTOR is my love of houses and design. My guess is that the majority of people who make a career out of selling residential real estate feel the same way, but when we get into the business we quickly find out our business really has very little to do with houses and a whole lot to do with people.

The part that has to do with houses is mostly related to our clients, so we see the houses our clients see. According to The Triangle Business Journal, the current median sales price of a home in the Triangle is $231,00. This means most of the homes REALTORS are touring within a range of that price. These are good houses for people to make their homes in, but they are not the million dollar homes you find in magazines. Just like most people, we in the industry rarely have a reason to go inside one of those homes.

That is why when one of our agents had a broker's open house yesterday for her 1.8 million dollar listing, I was one of the first ones at the door. I expected spectacular, and I was not disappointed. This was absolutely one of those houses that could be in a magazine.

The overall look of the house was impressive, but as someone in the business, it was the details that blew me away. They are way to many to list, but I did take a picture of the home theater that I think really shows off the attention to details.

 It is designed to look like the inside of a theater, and the riser even have small lights in them just like in a movie theater. Of course the seats are way more comfy than any movie theater I've ever been to. And this is just a basement room, so you can just imagine how grand the rest of the house is.

Getting to see the inside of an incredible home like this made it a great real estate day for me. If you would like to see it, AND you are pre-qualified to purchase a 1.8 million dollar home send me an email, and I will set you up. 

Buyer's Agent: Don't Buy a Home Without One

When we bought our last house in Georgia, I did what many buyers do. I called the number of the agent on the sign in the yard and made an appointment to see the house. I did not really consider that the person showing me the house was the seller's agent, and I certainly did not know what that meant. I just knew I wanted to see the house and this person had the keys. We went on to buy that house without ever getting our own agent to represent us, and let me tell you, it was a very unpleasant experience. If I only knew then what I know now. Luckily for you I am here to share my knowledge with you.

The agent whose name is on the sign in front of the house is the listing or seller's agent which means she represents the seller and thus is concerned with the best interest of her client, the seller. You are not her client, you are merely a customer. Think of the listing agent as a car salesperson. His fiduciary responsibility is to his employer, the car dealership, and he is going to try to sell cars for the most money possible thus bringing in the greatest profit to his employer. 

If Ms. Listing Agent is showing you her client's home, and you mention that your wife told you she is going to divorce you if you don't buy this house, you better believe she is going to pass that information on to the seller. It is her responsibility to give her client, Mr. Seller, any information that will help him sell his house at the best terms possible.

On the other hand, Ms. Listing Agent is required by the rules of agency to keep important information about her client confidential. Any real estate agent in the state of North Carolina (and hopefully all other states as well) is bound by a code of ethics and must be truthful when it comes to material facts about the property no matter who she is representing, but she should not disclose her clients motivations. She is never going to tell you that he is willing to take 20% less than asking price and throw in the washer and dryer too. 

And here is another surprising fact - every single other real estate agent is working for the seller too - not just Ms. Listing Agent. All of the other agents are considered seller's sub agents, and it is their duty to work on behalf of the seller's best interest as well. It used to be this was the only way real estate agents worked until someone decided it might be nice for the buyer to have some representation in the biggest financial deal she is likely to make in her entire life.

That is how we got something in North Carolina called Exclusive Buyers Agency. With this agreement which can be written or even oral until an offer is made at which time it must be written, the buyer is getting an agent to represent her interests in the deal.  So if your buyer's agent finds out that the seller is willing to go 20% lower on the price, she is going to share that information with you her client.

Having a buyers agent is helpful in so many other ways. She can use the data available to her to come up with the best offer in terms of price and other considerations. She will negotiate with the sellers agent or the sellers directly if they do not have an agent. She will negotiate repairs and other due diligence issues, and in many other ways help you make it to closing as painlessly as possible.

Best of all, these services generally don't cost you a thing because the buyer's agent is paid out of the commission paid by the seller.  Some people worry that a buyer's agent who is paid by the seller will not be loyal to them, but because of the rules of agency and the code of ethics, this situation really does work.

So I recommend you get a good buyer's agent on your side before you start looking at real estate and avoid all of the unpleasantness of that purchase I made without one.

Froggy A Cappella

Our townhouse overlooks a retention swamp. My guess is it was originally meant to be a retention pond, but at some point the developer and/or HOA gave up on its being full of water. They have tried to make it look like it has a purpose by landscaping it  and putting a picnic table down in the middle of it, but the only use I have ever seen made of the picnic table is as a place for the neighborhood kids to put their jars full of tadpoles that they have fished out of the swampy water that surrounds it.* If I were a kid, I would be right down there with them. As an adult I wish it were a full pond maybe with a nice fountain in the middle.

The retention swamp in the day

It would be reasonable to assume that with a swamp a mere forty feet from my back door we would have a terrible mosquito problem, but due to the parents of the afore mentioned tadpoles, we are fairly free of those flying, buzzing, blood-sucking fiends. It really is amazing the frogs even have time to clear the skies of mosquitoes what with their constant ongoing choir practice.

In Georgia the sound of summer evenings is cicadas. Apparently in North Carolina, at least in my little corner of Cary, it is frogs. I have never heard such a cacophony. We can hear it in the house with the insulated windows closed. We can hear it over the TV. We can hear it from our third floor bedroom. It is especially loud when the bullfrogs join in with their baritone ribbits.

The retention swamp at night

There is no swamp behind the new house. There is thick tree barrier that I think will be nice to look at, but I doubt we will have our own froggy a cappella group serenading us on summer nights. I will definitely miss that.

*Don't worry, the tadpole catching is a catch and release program only.

She's Got That Sparkling Personality

The perfect house we are buying is, like all houses, not quite perfect. We did just what I advise my clients do when choosing a new home - separate things that cannot be changed  or would be prohibitively expensive to do so like location and major structural and/or renovation changes, from things that are easier and relatively inexpensive like minor updating such as painting and new flooring. Buy according to the first list not the second.

The perfect things about the house are its location, floor plan, and condition. The not so perfect thing is that some parts of this house were finished to builder's minimums. Although the kitchen has granite countertops the floor is vinyl. The master bath is huge with an eight foot vanity, a water closet with a window (goodbye claustrophobia), and even a large linen closet which is a great.  The not so great features are the same not-so-lovely vinyl floor, a 24" X 24" prefab shower and one of the ugliest prefab tubs I have ever seen.

To be fair, I am slightly prejudice against bathtubs. I have not used one since I was ten years old, so I  see them as space wasters and dust collectors. I want to pull both the shower and tub out and have a nice, big tile shower built plus replace the vinyl floor with tile. The hall bath has a plastic surround that College Girl hates, so we are going to have it tiled and have the kitchen floor tiled as well.

I am pretty good with design, but I needed to pick out about seven different tiles, so I made an appointment with Krysta at Florida Tile in Morrisville. She was a huge help - particularly with keeping me on budget. Yankee says whatever is the most expensive; that is what I'm going to pick out. I like to tell him - I only want the best Baby, that's why I picked you.

Anyway, Krysta and I got the bathrooms picked out but were having a really hard time finding something I liked for the kitchen floor until she pulled a piece out from the back. I liked it the minute she showed it to me, but as I studied it, I noticed something a little different about it that I did not notice at first.

Me - Are those tiny little sparkles?

Krysta - We call those flecks. It's meant to be like natural quartz.

Me - Flecks. Sparkles Whatever. I want it!

A few of my sparkliest items. I've worn the silver shoes maybe three times. I actually carry the purse almost daily because silver sparkles brighten any outfit. As for the gold shoes - what can I say? The caught my eye on the clearance rack at Target a few years ago. I have never worn them outside of the house, but every once in a while I do like to try them on.

I realized I had an obsession with sparkles when I first started working and was going through my wardrobe looking for appropriate work clothes. What I found were the things I wear all the time - jeans, cardigans and tee shirts - and an inordinate amount of sparkly clothing that I almost never wear, mostly because I have no place to wear sparkles. At this point, I had to admit to myself that I am much girlier than I ever thought. Until now, I have been able to hide this part of myself, but in a few short weeks my secret obsession with sparkles is going to be laid out on my kitchen floor for all to see.