The New Place

I thought I'd post some pictures of our new rental house. The house is 3200 square feet. The pictures are NOT in any particular order because I'm pretty lazy when it comes to posts like this. I guess it would have been easier to post the pics to my photobucket account, but I think its better for all of you to be able to see them within a post instead of having to click on a separate link. Enjoy.

This is a somewhat useless room off of the living room which I would have liked to use as a bedroom. However, this wall is obviously open to the living room. Also, the previous tenants decided to leave a big weight machine in there, so we just call this the "weight room".

This is the upstairs area outside the bedrooms. We just put a desk and a mini-fridge in that area so we wouldn't have to walk all the way downstairs, like suckers, whenever we need a beer.

A view of the house from the street.

A view of the neighborhood from the small balcony upstairs.

Chris' master bedroom

The master bathroom

The living room with my surround sound set up in it. We left the old black loveseat at the old house as a present to the bank, so the old black chair here is the last of the old furniture that I bought when I first moved to Vegas.

The laundry room.

A view of the kitchen as viewed from the living room.

The kitchen.

The 3-car garage.

Some landscaping out front. Don't worry, the grass is artificial so we won't be needing to invest in a new lawn mower!

The view of the stairs as you walk in the front door of the house.

This is a separate family room that Jeff and Patrick are using to play Nintendo.

This is the dining room. It would be a really nice dining room if we actually had a dining table to put in here. Unfortunately, the storage space in this house is precious, so this room has most of the empty moving boxes in it along with a card table if anyone would happen to want to eat in here.

My bedroom. It looks small, but its way bigger than the old place. Yes, I AM a bachelor as evidenced by the unmade bed and makeshift curtains. All that stuff on the floor are pictures that I still haven't put up on the walls, which would actually complete the move-in process for me.

My bathroom.

More fake grass out back.

Even more landscaping out back.

A view of the whole back porch complete with Jeff's Grillmaster 5,000! Four burners of gas grill goodness!

Here's a piece of artwork that the previous tenants left us. At first, we figured it was a sculpture of Zeus, but now we're pretty sure its Jesus. Chris had his Red Wings stocking cap on him for the first couple of weeks, but actually used the cap and never put it back on him. That prompted me to turn him into "Buckeye Jesus".

Thomas Kwonged up the Thomas Kwong

This is pretty much the first time I've had a real chance to sit down at the computer without being really tired from work, etc. and give some real thought into a blog posting in a very long while! I'm pretty sure the last anyone heard about the housing situation is when I basically said I'd be moving out of the foreclosed house and going on vacation.

So just to update anyone who is interested, we did find a pretty nice place to move into in the VERY SHORT time period that we had! With the help of "3cats" over on the T2V message board, we found a 4 bedroom/3 full bath house in the Silverado Ranch area at around the same price we were paying at the place in Southern Highlands. Actually, its about $600 more, but we added Jeff's friend Patrick to the mix who had been renting month-to-month over near UNLV. So without getting into too many details, I'm now paying exactly $20 more per month in rent but splitting utilities 4-ways and still getting free Direct TV from Chris. I'm paying the least in rent because my bathroom is downstairs while all bedrooms are upstairs. However, I do still get my own bathroom, which is bigger than the old one, and my bedroom is also bigger. It's not a bad place at all and the neighborhood is still pretty nice.

The title of this post you ask? Well, Thomas Kwong is the name of the complete piece of human s**t who owned the house in Southern Highlands that we lived in for a grand total of 3 months. Apparantly, Mr. Kwong decided it would not be a good idea to repay the debt that he willingly went into with his bank and defaulted on his mortgage. Now before you start coming to this a**hole's defense and citing that mortgage foreclosure is a very common thing these days, please note that his very first monthly default on his mortgage was entered into record TWO WEEKS BEFORE he rented the house out to us!!! So he basically rented out this house to us KNOWING that he was not going to be able to pay his mortgage and just simply pocketed ALL the rent we were paying him during the time we were in the house. We then get a call from the rental office less than a week before the auction telling us to get the hell out ASAP!

The tragedy of all of this is that this douchebag will probably only be really hurt by the fact that his credit score will be hit hard by the foreclosure, nothing else. Unless, of course, he was counting on our rent money to pay off a mortgage on his current house in which I sincerely hope he runs out of money and he and his family are thrown out on the street just like we were! I truly believe that sooner or later, very bad things happen to bad people and this will hopefully all come full circle on this jackass!

The good news is that we did recieve all of our pro-rated rent from October back from the rental company as well as 100% of the security deposit. I've heard that renters in our situation renting directly from the landlord aren't even able to get their deposits back without suing them, so that's good I guess. But I'll admit that the 2 weeks between finding out about the foreclosure and moving into the new place is very easily in the top ten most stressful times of my life!!! It hurt me emotionally, physically and financially, although the financial aspect was very small considering the situation. I helped Chris pay a $50 penalty to Direct TV for moving within a year after setting things up, I missed one day of work to stay home and pack/look for places, and I paid my share of the U-Haul truck. I just hope I don't have to move again within the next year or so. It really takes a toll on my back and its a pain in the ass having to change my address with every entity involved!

So at this point my roommates and I are trying to get the term Thomas Kwong into America's everyday vocabulary. If you get ripped off at the repair shop, you've been Thomas Kwonged! If a used car salesman sells you a lemon, he Thomas Kwonged you! If you buy a bunch of stock in a company the day before it goes belly-up, oh man that's a Thomas Kwong! If you are unlucky enough to try that brown mystery meat at the employee dining room at work, it'll taste like you're eating a Thomas Kwong sandwich! If you look at me the wrong way when I'm drunk, I'll Thomas Kwong the living Thomas Kwong out of you!

Oh, and researching the Clark County Assessor's page turned up Mr. Kwongs actual address. Apparantly, he lives at:

8514 GOLDEN FERN AVE
LAS VEGAS NV 89178-4817

So if you're ever driving around Las Vegas and happen to be in his area, feel very free to leave a flaming paper bag filled with a steaming pile of Thomas Kwong on his doorstep!

Another youtube gem

I simply put 'Billy Mays' into a youtube search and it came up with this!

Trip Pics

Here are some pics from the trip last week. If you are using Firefox, you should be able to click on each pic for expanded goodness. I'm not sure about other browsers. I don't really have enough time to give a detailed description of the trip right now, so these will have to do. More pics should be rolling in later. The pics below start about half-way through the trip last Friday night when we were in Ann Arbor (enemy territory).

Here's a vegetarian restaurant/juice bar. Don't ask why I was in here, just note that even though it is a vegetarian/juice place in Ann Arbor, it DOES have Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap!!!

At first glance, this elevator panel looks okay. But what's with that random #2 up there at the top?!?! It DOES have braille next to it, so I can just picture some blind dude continuously hitting it over and over again and wondering why the elevator isn't moving!

Awesome tailgate action!

This was our tailgate setup. Unlike last year, we were kind of isolated in a pretty little area next to an auditorium building. Most of the other tailgaters around us were Buckeyes.

Danielle experiencing her first Buckeye game.

From left to right: Mike, Matt, Sherri and me.

Apparently there is NO shaving on Buckeye game-day.

Opening kickoff.

Early game action. The student white-out section can be seen. Like last year at Purdue, it was good that Ohio State took this potentially hostile crowd out of the game early!

The press box. The stadium was really pretty nice. The only big beef I have is that the tunnel areas underneath where the bathrooms and concessions were located were TINY! The guts of the stadium were like a large high school stadium built to serve HALF of the 77,000 capacity!

More early action.

We were sitting in an almost entirely green section. Here you can see the main visitor sections.

Outback blimp returned this year.

Late game action....the student section has lost its buzz and most of it has retreated back to their respective apartments/dorm rooms to drown their sorrows.

Game Over

The group scurries over to the Buckeye section to meet the band.

Final Score

Probably my favorite picture of the trip. The team, band and fans singing Carmen Ohio.

Just a random pic out the window of the car on the trip from East Lansing to Columbus on Sunday. I-75 runs right past Bowling Green, Ohio. In the background is Bowling Green State University's football stadium. It felt weird to just pass right on by a place I spent a total of 8 years of my life in.

Buckeye Videos

Here's a couple videos from my lame camera that only takes crappy videos in 15 second bursts. They are out of order. The first is the last part of Carmen Ohio that is played/sung after every home game and every away game when the band makes the trip. This tradition was started by Tressel when he first took the job. The second video is part of Hang on Sloopy before they all assembled for Carmen.

The angle looks different from most of the game pictures because we high-tailed it over to this location as soon as the gun went off anticipating this little Buckeye congregation.

I'm Back!

It's been a long couple of weeks, but we're moved into the new house, I'm back from a week's vacation in Ohio (and elsewhere), and I go back to work tomorrow starting up the same old routine. More pictures and information to come as soon as I can set aside a couple of hours and organize it all.

I may be going away for a while

Very quick update from Vegas-land. I've been in discussion with "3-cats" from the T2V site, who is a real estate agent here in town. Apparently, if the "lender" takes back control of this house, they are NOT obligated to post ANY eviction notice at all! We are pretty sure that nobody bought this place at auction on Monday, so basically the bank could stop by here at any moment, change the locks, and put us completely S...O...L!!!

Therefore, I have everything that I own packed up (with the exception of the computer at this point) and ready to go at a moment's notice. I have no idea what would happen with the bed, TV stand, and anything else that I would not be able to fit in the car. But everything that CAN be transported in my car or Danielle's car is at the front door and ready to go. Electronics, clothes, dvds/cds, etc. etc. Everything! It was amazing how quickly I was able to take apart the HDTV and surround sound gadgets!

My roommate Jeff is out looking at houses with 3-cats as I write this. I was going to go with him, but we thought it best to keep at least one roommate here to guard the fort from the bad men from the mortgage company. Chris is at class, and will be home shortly.

My tentative plan is to wait for Danielle to get off work so that she can help me transport everything from here to her condo as a temporary safe-house for my stuff! The less stuff I have here, the better I feel! That means the computer will be packed up tonight as well.

So with this uncertainty over my living situation, work (which I had to call off today) AND my trip back to Ohio which occurs on Tuesday (for a week), I may be off the blog for a while. Feel free to check back for updates, but also don't be surprised if the blog goes dark until around October 22nd or so when I get back from Ohio.

Until then, I leave you with this nice catchy tune that you can feel free to play OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER again, delighting anybody in your presence!

Foreclosed Upon

Here's a posting I made over on the T2V Message Board earlier today. I don't really feel like making another one on the blog explaining things, so you can pretty much get the idea of what's happened this week from the posting below. It sucks that we have to move again so soon, but it appears the search was very quick this week and we have a good idea on the new house we'll be moving into.

Have a good weekend everyone, and go Bucks! It'll be a very tough one up in Madison tomorrow!

So I wake up Tuesday morning with a knock on my bedroom door. It was my roommate informing me that our rental agency just called him to tell him that the owner of the house we're renting let the damn thing go to foreclosure!

I've heard of this happening a little bit, but until researching it the past couple of days, I had NO idea how common it is becoming out here! So I do feel a bit foolish for not seeing this coming considering there are web sites out there to help forecast trouble like this!

Fortunately, we got this call as a little "heads-up" and the auction does not occur until next week. That has given us a little more time than most in our situation.

The two options that we could take to insure that this doesn't happen to us again are to try to rent an apartment or just buy a house. Buying is definitely NOT in my radar for various reasons. I've also come to the conclusion that apartments are simply a HUGE rip-off, especially here in Vegas. Invariably, I'm stuck living next to, or below, jackasses that crank up their music! The place Mikey and I were in last year was TINY and I was paying MORE than what I've been paying for this house!

So buying and renting apartments are out. My roommates and I are still convinced that finding another rental house is the way to go. However, my question for anyone on the board is how to pick a rental house with much less chance that it'll go into foreclosure while we're in it.

This time around, we're using two web sites to screen the potential houses we have been looking at. In fact, that info on these sites is just as important as the rent being within our price range. We've been nixing potential places that have been sold within the past few years at what would seem inflated prices. For example, the moron who owns our current house paid a freakin' $400,000 for this place. Sure, its a nice place, but $400,000?!?!?!?!? Uh, I don't think so!!! He deserves to take a complete bath on this place!

The two sites we're using are:

rentalforeclosures.com and accessclarkcounty.com/assessor/

The first site simply lets us know if a house is in default/foreclosure. Our current house obviously showed up on the list. More shockingly though, some houses up for rent on some of our rental searches ALSO SHOWED UP! That's freakin' ridiculous! Anyone renting those out will be on the street quicker than us!

The second site is the web site for the Clark County Assessor. It gives all the information on a house including who owns it, when they bought it, how much they paid for it, etc. One house that we've already viewed and applied for is in Southern Highlands, is 3100 sq ft., and was purchased in 2003 for what appears to be a very reasonable $233,000. I know that doesn't clinch it 100% that it won't have problems, but seems WAY safer than renting a place like we're in now.

Seeing as how we basically need to be completely moved by the end of next week, the question might be a little moot and late. But, besides those two web sites to screen places, is there anything else we could be doing to help insure renting a house that won't be having problems before our lease is up?