glo76

You can go here: www.fbcad.org and search for your home either by name or address. It will list the current "appraised value" being used by the appraisal district, plus all the individual taxing entities i.e. school district, drainage, LID, MUD etc. Also somewhere on the website should be a table of all the tax rates used by each entity. If your house is $234k, minus the $15k HS exemption, your appraised value is $219k. Depending on where you live in Richmond your overall taxes could be around 3%, which works out to be about $6k, so it sounds about right. Once you file homestead exemption once, you should not need to re-file. The website will tell you if they have applied your HS exemption. Note that some entities don't allow for a HS Exemption, so they use the full $234k value not the reduced $219k. Hope that helps.

Ours wasn't an enclosure, just a door opening (one fixed panel and one door panel), and cost around $850. All other quotes were north of $1000. PS Flipper - thanks also for the granite recommendation. Maicol did a decent job at a very decent price. Now if only I'd asked you for a tile guy....

He installed our shower door last weekend. Again, did a great job and was substantially cheaper than anyone else we called. Thanks for recommendation flipper....

We also contracted with M&M. So far, a painless and positive experience. Signed contract on Monday, were told it could take 2-3 weeks to start. Supplies arrived in our driveway Wednesday. Thursday got a call saying they had a crew that could start Friday morning. New roof complete Saturday afternoon. 5 days from contract to job complete - very impressed. New roof looks great. Crew were efficient, pretty neat (still finding some small debris laying around - no big deal after such a big job), courteous and respectful. They even helped my pregnant wife unload groceries. Our price was also right on with the insurance estimate.

In the last 18 mths I've installed a Dension Ice-Link into our Audi A4 and a USA Spec into our Honda Pilot. The Pilot has satnav, XM, and an in-dash CD changer. All those functions still remain and the USA Spec adds two inputs - one for the ipod and one for an external source (satellite radio tuner, DVD player etc). With this unit, I'd say you do get a bit more functionality - you have full ipod control, and you can use the head unit / steering wheel controls to skip tracks and playlists. Some unit / vehicle combinations will display the song title on the head unit as well, not sure about an Element. USA Spec was $125 from River Oaks Car Stereo on Richmond, and it took about 30 minutes to install. Biggest hassle was removing the first two trim pieces - after that, all I needed was a screwdriver. I installed it in the glovebox for now, although there were options to route the cable out under the dash so the ipod would be more accessible. I'd find a Element-specific forum and research those options. In both the Audi and the Honda forums, there was one device that was clearly favored over others, and also a wealth of how-to and how-not-to-do information when it comes to installing it. BTW, the Honda-branded music link is supposed to be junk.

There's one in Needville on a Thursday http://www.creeksidefarmersmarket.com/

Switched 3 weeks ago from TW digital cable to Dish Network, bundled with DSL and phone service. In 3 yrs with digital cable we got reasonable reception on the digital channels but poor reception on the analog channels. We had problems I'd equate to using an old over-the-air roof antenna (ghosting, moving lines on the screen), not just on the local channels but regular cable channels as well. TWC reps came out dozens of times but couldn't fix the problem. Might just be the area, a friend of ours in the same neighborhood couldn't even get digital cable because the signal wasn't strong enough on his street. So far no problems whatsoever with Dish. We have 2 SD TVs, and picture quality is much much better than TWC on all channels. No noticeable signal dropouts yet, though no major storms have come through. For our packages, Dish is quite a bit cheaper than TWC. Digital cable on one TV (regular cable only on 2nd TV), with DVR and HBO came to over $70/mth. For us, that was just way too much money considering our picture quality problems. Dish Network 120 with DVR and HBO is about $10 cheaper, I think (we save more because of the bundle). To get digital cable (definitely) and Direct TV (I think) you need a receiver per TV. Dish Network have a dual tuner receiver so 1 box (and so only 1 fee) for 2 TVs.

The ones I know of: West of 99: Thompson's Landing Meadow Crest Brandon's Pointe Crescent Ridge East of 99: Robinson's Landing Sterling Chase Stonehaven Walker's Station Clayton's Bend Foster's Green Wilkin's Crossing Hope this helps....

Chuckie, if you look on Google Earth (or Google satellite maps) you can see an access road that runs directly north from the old prison farm admin buildings to the intersection of SH-6 and 90-A. Follow that about 3/4 of the way up, just over the second creek, you can see a small plot on the left with a white-roofed hut. I believe that is the grave site. Before the construction started you used to be able to see a large white cross from 90-A. Anyway the grave is in the tract of land north of the re-routed New Territory Blvd. I don't think they've released those plots for sale yet (at least, they haven't even laid out the roads in that area yet).

I can see your point on the quality of some homes in NT. My particular neighborhood is 11 years old and some of the residents just don't seem to have the time, inclination or whatever to do the required maintenance. And some of those that do, do the job badly. We have personal experience of that, but that's a whole other story. You may experience the same problems in Greatwood in a few years once the houses reach the 10 yr range when larger repairs / maintenance are needed. As someone who appreciates well-kept homes wherever they may be, I hope not, but I think the target markets for both communities were similar and attracted the same kind of people. I think both communities are significantly ahead of River Park. Some of the homes that are visible from SH-99 look terrible already. Quick websearch indicates that you are right - Greatwood rezoning to FBISD is just a rumor.

UrbaNerd gave a pretty comprehensive explanation of the retail in NT. The furthest we go for grocery and household items is down to the HEB at River Park, less than 10 minutes. For anything bigger, First Colony is only 10 minutes away for regular mall stuff, Lowes, Best Buy etc. I'd point out here that doing a search on HAR for "New Territory" doesn't give the full selection of available properties. For some reason (is New Territory worse for this than other communities? Seems like it) a lot of realtors list the neighborhood name rather than the community name. To do a comprehensive HAR search, dig out all the neighborhood names and run those through the search as well. Or you can search by keymap zone, but then you are relying on slim chance that the realtor got it right. Energyman, we also looked at Greatwood and really liked it. Two things counted against Greatwood in our minds - the traffic at that time (summer 2003) looked terrible since the only way into the neighborhood was over the Crabb River Rd bridge. I think it's been reconfigured since then and I presume it is better now (honestly, I haven't paid attention to it). Second thing was that we believed a lot if not all of Greatwood was zoned to Lamar CISD instead of Fort Bend ISD. We heard rumors it was going to be rezoned to FBISD but, rightly or wrongly, that combined with the traffic issues put us off.

sjetexas, As someone who lives in New Territory, I can offer the following advice. You may not know that New Territory is split into two sections either side of 99, the side to the east is generally more expensive (bigger houses) than the side to the west. If you look at the west side you should be able to find plenty of houses for under 200k. One across the street from me (2300 sq ft 1-storey if I remember right) is listed at $170k. Prices in the area do seem to have gone up a fair bit in the last year. As for the commute, the previous poster is probably correct in that you are looking at about 20 minutes to the Galleria from SH-6 and 59 (depending on when you leave for work obviously). I used to work at Hillcroft / 59 and it was 20-25 minutes to get there from my house in NT, leaving around 6:45 am. Coming home, the traffic is pretty bad on 59 from Williams Trace to 99. The alternatives (90-alt, SH-6) all get backed up as well and your 25 minute commute goes to 40-50 minutes at night. West Airport isn't a bad option athough for my commute, all routes seem to work out to be about the same amount of time. I know that there is a park-and-ride option to the Galleria from the UH Sugar Land campus if that interests you. For what it's worth, we love New Territory. We looked in several neighborhoods but few had the established landscaping of NT. I would say that it are less amenities (both for kids and adults) than newer subdivisions though. There's no giant water park like Cinco Ranch or Sienna Plantation, for instance, although there are several neighborhood pools. Depends on what you consider to be important, we didn't think they were and we've been very happy here.