Apps for an Efficient House Search

For some reason, people love to buy their homes in the spring and the summer. There are lots of search tools out there to help any potential home buyer come by the house of their dreams more easily and more efficiently. You don’t need to rely on classified ads or brokers to find the right property anymore. Most of the heavy work involved these days is done on by iPhone apps, iPad apps and websites. Let's look at a few of the best house search tools you have these days.

The National Association of Realtors (the people who run the listings on Realtor.com) have their new iPad app out. It's a free download, and it allows you to browse a map of the country, district by district. You can draw a line around the places that you wish to look at. Once you do find something you like from among the listings that it turns up, you can take a look at how other potential buyers have rated the place.

One of the most challenging parts to a house search has to be keeping track of all the houses you find in your search that appear promising. BuyFolio has an iPhone app for that. You use the app to browse through all thousands of listings that you will process in your house search; any time you find something that piques your interest, you drag the property to one of the various folders you get to keep to categorize what you like, and what you need to think a bit more about.

The free ZipRealty app for all Android and iOS, once installed, finds out where you are and tries to give you details of every house in your neighborhood that was recently bought or sold. The moment you pick a house to look at more closely, it connects you to Zillow to provide you with the price the house was sold for so that you get a good idea of home prices in your area at the moment. It's a great way to keep yourself in the loop.

And finally, once you've completed that house search and zeroed in on a fixer-upper, is there a search engine that can help you get a few ideas for how to go about fixing it up? Try Houzz (who comes up with these names?). It happens to be an interior design aggregator that lets you look at tens of thousands of idea books. Every idea you see comes with information about the interior decorator who is responsible for it.

Should you Choose Regular Land for Sale when Several States give it Away?

From time to time, we all hear about how small towns in America, in places like Ohio or Iowa or Michigan, are quickly turning into ghost towns. At one time, people just left these towns for the better job opportunities that the big cities offered. These days, people leave these towns because even the kind of small-town jobs that these towns used to have for those who wished to remain are beginning to dry up. Still, the governments in these places are not ready to throw in the towel yet. Working together with economic development groups, they have chosen to fight for the possibilities they still see in these towns. The way the Homestead Act of centuries past allowed settlers to just find unclaimed land and to call it their own, many of these states are allowing people to come in and lay claim to county land. This isn't land for sale that they offer you; the land is free. Nebraska, a state that has battled with the problem of having a vast land area and almost no people, has enacted a new Homestead act. Alaska has done the same, offering vast parcels of land for free. There were no takers when they did that though. If you are someone who has the heart of an early settler, you might be amazed to know that America is still open to that sort of thing. If the idea appeals to you, this is where you need to head.

Consider the community of Marne in southern Iowa about 100 miles from Des Moines. This isn't some postindustrial wasteland. It's a beautiful green, wooded area with fertile soil and vast expanses of unspoiled natural scenery. This beautiful farming community has nevertheless had quite a time getting young people to stay. Apparently, young people aren't really interested in family farming anymore. The town's housing development office has decided that free land might be just the ticket to revive a little interest in the town. To take advantage of the giveaway, all that an applicant needs is a serious intent to build a home on the land he gets. As soon as an applicant submits his plan to build a house there, he gets the land for free. Regular land for sale couldn't be as picturesquely set as the land they give you for free in Marne.

Speaking of picturesqueness, consider the town of Beatrice in Nebraska, an area that gained most of its population through the Homesteading act of 1862. The town, a hundred miles from Omaha isn't really one of those dying, abandoned towns. It has a healthy population of 13,000 and is a thriving community. The town is giving away free parcels of land to people not to try to boost the local population but to get people to set up home here so that they will pay property taxes and utility fees. The town is a bit short of money. If they offered land for sale, one wonders if they wouldn't achieve their aim a lot more easily. After all, this is a town that's only 40 miles from Lincoln.

Learning how to do it Right Hiring Air-Conditioning Contractors

If you are planning on getting some work done on an air-conditioning system this summer, looking at hiring the skills of professional air-conditioning contractors could be the way to go. Thumbing through the Yellow Pages or looking through Craigslist for your area, you'll find that the air-conditioning area is a well-supplied one with all kinds of professionals available for residential and commercial work in the installation, servicing and maintenance of heating and air-conditioning equipment and attic ventilators (in case you're wondering what that is, it's a device that keeps the air in your attic fresh so that the heat coming in from the roof doesn't try your attic out excessively and cause damage).

Whoever you pick, looking for air-conditioning contractors to work on your home, going with recommendations from friends and family, advertisements, Craigslist listings or anything else, you need to make sure that a person you hire happens to be in possession of a valid license to practice the trade, that he has a few years of experience in the business, and who seems to not be a one-man show. You also want to look for someone who offers a reasonable warranty on any work done. Starting off, you can usually tell that a contractor is a serious businessman by the way he offers free on-site inspection and estimates.

While you may be completely used to clicking “I agree“and “Next” when you are faced with a user agreement or contract when you install a piece of software and computer, you can't let that influence how you trust contracts in general. In the computer world, contracts are pretty much for the protection of the companies that make software. In the real world, you need to look at contracts more carefully than that because those contracts are meant for your protection. Make sure that the contract clearly refers to you by name and address and that there is information that clearly identifies the contractor in question. It needs to make valid statements about the quality of work promised, what your rights are if you aren't satisfied, and when you can expect to see the job completed.

When you're presented with a bill, carefully look through every line to make sure that you understand where all the charges come from. Most air-conditioning contractors ask for a small deposit ahead of getting started with any actual work. If yours asks for one, you probably need to get a receipt for it. Usually, companies asked for full payment in advance are to be avoided. Should you not be satisfied with the quality of work done, you'll have nothing to hold them to their word with.

Make sure that the contractor you hire comes with a few good references. Every reputable contractor in the country has a membership with the BBB. Going with a contractor like this, you get to take a look at their complaint records. If there is a contractor who seems to be receiving quite a high number of complaints, that could set you thinking.

What You Learn When You Adopt a Virtual Baby

Before my son was born, my wife and I decided that we would try to adopt a virtual baby, just to get an idea of how much responsibility it would be. What we soon discovered is that it was a lot more responsibility than we thought it would be, and the virtual baby did not even compare to what is required to raise a real child.

It seemed kind of silly, really. The idea was that we would adopt a virtual baby that would cry, need changing, and need to be fed and put to bed and so forth. I felt a little odd doing those things to something that only existed online, and I was not really on board until my wife made it abundantly clear to me that it was very important to her.

At first, I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake. I was prepared for it, and even though it did take up a good amount of my time, I wanted to impress my wife with my patience, and I would very calmly get up and attend to our virtual baby like it was our own when it was my turn.

What we did not take into a account when we decided to adopt a virtual baby was all of the crying in the middle of the night that it did, and how sometimes it would continue to cry after we fed him or changed him, just like real babies do. It was hard to get used to, and at one point, I actually went over to the computer while we were sleeping when it started to cry and turned it off. My wife was thrilled!

Even though it did become quite burdensome when my wife and I decided to adopt a virtual baby, it was also a great learning experience. We finally got an idea of how much work went into taking care of an infant, and in spite of that, we decided to have children of our own!

It is kind of funny when I think about it. I love my children to death, and I have a virtual baby to thank for helping my wife and I to adjust to the idea of having a child. We never realized when we made the decision to adopt a virtual child just how much it is like having a child of your own, although it still is not as much work.

Looking back, I really believe that adopting a virtual baby was the right decision to make. My wife and I are both very patient with our children and really always have been. We got an idea about when they cry and what it is usually for, depending on the time of day, and even though I never addressed our virtual child by the name my wife came up with for it, I still felt a little sad when we decided to end our experiment in virtual child-rearing.