beautification

More than a month ago, D. and I went outside to take a walk around the neighborhood. We found a middle aged couple wearing Home Depot shirts (at least it wasn't Lowes) peering throughtfully at the bushes in front of our porch. They introduced themselves and said our landlady had hired them to remove weeds, trim the bushes, put in some flowers, etc., sounding as if this was all going to happen soon. We said oh, that's nice, and went on our way, expecting to come home one afternoon and find that poof! flowers had appeared. This never happened, and just this morning I was thinking that I must have misunderstood something, because clearly they weren't coming. But I was wrong, they showed up half an hour ago and seem to be doing things to the driveway with a weed whacker. (I don't think this will keep the driveway weeds away for long, if the project were left to me I would use roundup, but still.) Now I'm just waiting to see if flowers will have magically appeared next time I go outside.

the end of cheap plane tickets

I've been driving myself crazy this week trying to find plane tickets to Denver for less than $350. One of my good friends lives in Colorado and we're hoping to go visit her and her boyfriend for a few days and then spend a few more days seeing some other places in the area. I guess maybe Colorado is just the place to be in the summer, but I was hoping it wouldn't be that expensive. When D. and I flew to see each other during college (a similar distance), tickets were under $180 nine times out of ten. Another factor buoying my hopes was that after a week looking at $330 tickets to Boston (for another trip this summer), I found some for $160. Fingers were crossed that the same thing would happen for Denver, but it doesn't look like I'm going to get that lucky twice. I guess the ever upwards creep of gas prices means that plane tickets aren't likely to ever be that cheap again.

real estate

One of the condos in the building next to us is for sale. On this street, all of the buildings are upper/lower unit duplexes. Three of them (6 units) are condos, and the rest of them are apartments (about 35 buildings). The condos are a very recent addition, they were finished last fall in 3 empty lots that had not been wide enough for the a standard size duplex with a driveway along the side. The condos solved this lot size problem by putting the garages underneath. The single guy who bought the condo next door arrived in October, and I wonder why he's selling so soon. I found the listing on the internet, and while everything inside is fancy (read: granite counters, built in plasma tv), the layout is kind of weird. In the front there's a living room the width of the building, with a central hallway to 3 bedrooms and a kitchen (each half the width of the building) in a 4-square pattern. There is no dining room, the only public areas are the living room and the kitchen. This seems like a strange choice of plan for a single guy, but who would it work for, really? A family with two kids? The adults would never be able to escape from the kids. A couple with lots of guests? They don't even have somewhere to put a dining table. (Living in a building the same size, we could fit a dining table in our living room, but it would be very cozy.) So now that we've established the layout sucks, the asking price for this place is $250k. Yes, that's right, we live next door to a building evidently worth half a million. (When new, the asking price was $260k, so I can only assume Single Guy didn't pay that much originally.) In addition to the lousy layout, this condo makes even less sense since three blocks from here you can buy a 3 bedroom house with living room, dining room, family room AND basement space for the same amount of money. Sure, you might have to maintain the yard and exterior, but the yards are small and 98% of the buildings are brick. Even worse is that this condo is surprisingly...cheap. (Perhaps it's because one portion of the concrete path to the front door is not level from side to side OR from front to back.) Three miles from here you can buy a 2-bed condo for $500k or more. There are also $500k houses, but they tend to have 5 bedrooms. Moral of the story? I have become obsessed with real estate and I think that condos are ridiculous.