#6 Nobody knows the houses I've seen

Eventually I became less and less eager to look at, or for that matter even consider looking at the emails the MLS sent me. I'd go a month without looking at the email listings and when I did, it was always the same damn thing. The same properties listed as new although I'd seen them before. Or reduced in price. Not that money was so much the problem. It was almost always that the place wasn't right. I stopped taking pictures after a while. It was just a chronicle of misery but you can get what I'm saying.

Whitefish Bay: Theoretically this was very much what I wanted. I loved the style but the master bedroom window looked right out onto the neighbor's driveway. I mean the neighbor's driveway was paved right up to and against the back of this house. To make matters worse there was a basket ball hoop on their garage. The neighbor's garbage was against the back of the the house just outside the master bedroom window. This had been the home of an elderly couple who had both died. Another neighbor bought it (overpaid for it), thinking they were getting a deal and that they were going to turn it quickly and make a profit. That didn't work out so well for them.

Bayview: So many issues, the front door opened directly into the stairs to the second floor. 

Like the door touched the first stair. The place was too small anyway.

Shorewood: The garage was separating from the house. 

I didn't like the house anyway, maybe the garage didn't like the house either.

RiverWest: Yeah, no on this one. 

And the owner, who happened to be outside was a complete asshole.

Electric's in

Glamorous views from the second floor

This will be the view from my bedroom window. The city was pretty insistent that my house fit in with the neighborhood. So I am getting plywood windows.

#5 Shopping on line

My sister is my real estate agent. She is very helpful and has never complained about having to show property to me even when she knew there was little chance I'd be buying. This process, though, became a lot easier for her once I was subscribed to the MLS email notification service. While helpful, it is less than efficient. I was sent the same properties over and over, often as a new listing that I'd already seen 50 times. But rather than sending an image of the property, you were sent a link to the property. So if the email contains 5 properties, which was not unusual, you were sent 5 links which requires you to click 5 separate times to link to 5 different property websites just to determine if you have seen them before. Usually I had.

I am sent various shopping emails 10 times a day from all sorts of places that contain images for 5 to 10 different items for purchase. You can click on, for instance, a bottle of ketchup, if you're interested in it. I don't know how much a bottle of ketchup costs exactly but let's say $5. So these shopping sites can make the email contain a clickable image of a $5 bottle of ketchup, but the MLS cannot manage to put an image of a $350,000 condo into an email. Sloppy, lazy, inefficient and seriously annoying. Still, clicking on 5 different URLs in the privacy of my office is easier than asking my sister to come into Milwaukee, and then going and looking at some crap hole she knew perfectly well I was not going to buy. 

Why I do not do this for a living

Little by little

More of the floor

I am heartened by the progress even if it still looks like less than nothing.

Second floor arrives

There is no way to put a stairway in until the floor is poured. The floor cannot be poured until there's a roof. It's like a catch-22. Fortunately I don't have to worry about it. Except that I do anyway.