Showing posts with label Leawood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leawood. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

An experiment

The city we live in is fairly old school. By that I mean things like:

  • We had a big uproar when one neighbor built one of those little lending library boxes in their front yard. Seems that violated some neighborhood by law about putting up structures in the yards. It took some effort to get that nonsense squelched (and the little lending library is still there and I smile every time I drive by it on my way to work). You can read about it here and here.
  • Or this—we were in the first wave of neighborhoods slated to get Google Fiber . . . until Google realized that our lines were built around the same time as all the houses (so mid-50s to mid-60s) and the cost to build out the network was prohibitive. Google said never mind, and all of us who really truly wanted high speed internet not from Time Warner cried and cried.
  • And similarly we don’t have good wireless coverage. Cell towers seem to be on the same no-no list as those lending libraries were. We knew it wouldn’t be great when we moved here but it’s far, far worse than that, and our current carrier (Verizon) is just awful. That’s based on coverage maps and user feedback, not our annoyed anecdotal reports of dropped calls. We don’t have a land line in the house, and don’t want one; you know it’s bad when incoming calls don’t even ring, they just roll straight to voice mail. (You can check your own coverage here if you're interested.)

All of that to say we knew were leaving Verizon and thought we would probably end up back at Sprint because hey if we aren’t going to have great coverage, we can at least pay a lot less for it. I started looking around at Android phones and wow. The current version of our Samsung ones are pricey (although Apple phones are a bit worse). So then I looked at other Android phones, which led me to the Nexus.

And that led me to Google Fi. It’s Google’s mobile offering. It’s cheaper than any of the others, and because it uses both wireless and wi-fi, I think we stand a better chance of having our calls go through.

So that’s our experiment. Our contracts are up with Verizon tomorrow and we are going to give it a try. If it’s wretched, then we’ll go to Sprint—because the really nice thing about the Nexus phones is that they are unlocked and will work on anyone’s network.

Friday, May 1, 2015

I love Leawood in the spring time

Our house was owned by a family that apparently loved gardening. The parents bought the place in the mid-70s, I believe, and planted all sorts of trees and bushes and clearly had a vision when they did so. One of their daughters moved in to take care of the parents as they got elderly and feeble and she also had a big love of gardening. So that means we have a very lovely yard, even though we aren’t particularly good at gardening ourselves. The yard is one of the reasons we bought the place because it truly looks like a park.

And it’s prettiest in the spring. We’ve got all kinds of blooming bushes and trees so I thought I’d share a couple of pictures with you.







Thursday, November 8, 2012

There's no place like home

We started looking at houses a couple of months ago. I'll spare you the long, drawn out process and not tell you about how awful a lot were and how odd it was to have sellers turn down opportunities to show their houses to buyers. For being still in the middle of a housing sale melt-down, people have some strange ideas about what their properties are worth and how accommodating they should (or shouldn't) be.

It's enough to say we looked at well over 30 houses and probably closer to 50. Some had floor plans that didn't work for us (too chopped up for our taste), or were much too big, or too dated in a bad way (I'm looking at you, mirrored walls in dining rooms), or clearly had had water damage in the basement (first thing I checked). Some had real potential for us (an amazing Brady Bunch-style California split level that was horribly overpriced and someone else bought it at that crazy high price, or a great split entry ranch that was just wonderful except for the neighborhood), and of course we saw a couple owned by smokers (although two out of all those houses is not bad).

About three weeks ago, I ran across one that seemed to have everything we wanted: cozy but not a chopped up floor plan, high ceilings in at least one of the living areas, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and small enough (just over 1600 square feet). The price was a bit high but the neighborhood is fantastic and homes have sold well there for years. We saw it the Sunday before we left for Rome and put in an offer the next day. Although it took the entire week, and involved three rounds of counter-offers, the seller accepted our final offer on Friday.

If you click here, you can see some not very good pictures of the house. I pulled these from the listing and I hope to get better ones on Saturday during the inspection.