So, yes, seriously, we are venturing into the Star Wars definition of ‘trilogy’ here, with this real estate series, but … blogging every day! Lots of real estate feels. It feels right.
After we saw the disastrous house by the lake, the one my realtor calls ‘the pee house’, we saw lots of other houses. We saw a house that smelled so strongly of smoke that I had to exit the house and wait for my husband on the porch. When I mentioned the weird ombre paint job to the realtor, she pointed out that it wasn’t ombre at all – the walls were white at the bottom, brown on the top, with nicotine stains. As smoke had drifted up the wall, it had left marks that, over time and millions of cigarettes, had left a sort of faux paint effect. This was a house that had kids in it, a baby, and a very depressed bunny in the basement, a bunny I had to restrain my husband from liberating under his jacket.
We saw houses marketed by liars (fourth ‘bedroom’ is the walk in closet off the master, fourth ‘bedroom’ is the pull out couch in the basement rumpus room, second bathroom is the toilet jammed next to the washer in the laundry room, ‘eat-in kitchen’ is any kitchen you can wedge a chair and bistro table into, etc), and we saw a lot of real estate collapse detritus. I would love to be a realtor, except for the selling part – all the going into people’s homes, seeing how they live. Fascinating. I went through 3 bottles of Purell. The houses we saw were all so dirty, and often dirty with people still living in them.
During our entire 3 month house hunt, I only saw one staged, clean home. One. Also, it was perfect in every way in terms of staging. Immaculate, smelled like lemons, obviously cleared of personal items, nothing on the kitchen counters. It was too small and just not laid out well for our needs, but I wanted to leave those people a note, telling them how much we appreciated their beautiful home. I said a little prayer for them. “Quick sale. Over asking. Please.”
And then a beauty of a fixer-upper popped up on the MLS.
Weird, how normal it looks in this picture.
Dream town, dream location, right next to a park, the playscape maybe 20 yards from the driveway. 5 bedrooms, home office, garage, a deck out back, on a very private cul-de-sac street with only 2 other neighbours. Front and back staircases, a personal dream of mine. A classic colonial, with a big front porch. Oh, how we dreamed over it. While we waited for our realtor to set it up, I drove by it, saw workmen pulling junk out of the garage, and finagled my way into seeing it with the foreman. Empty. Dirty. But such a diamond in the rough, with the right kind of work.
You know how you can fall dreamy in love with someone even though your practical brain is making reasonable lists for you of why this guy is wrong for you on every level? That is what this house was like, for me. For example, it had been an illegal two-flat, and the flippers who bought it at a foreclosure auction had torn the kitchen out of the upstairs to make it a legal house again. But the front stairs had been removed when the upstairs was converted to an apartment, which made the first floor kind of awkward. Easy fix, right? The flippers just drilled a giant hole in the middle of the living room ceiling and installed a beige metal circular staircase.
Make sure you instal it right in front of the picture window, for maximum stupidness. These house flippers did.
A hundred warning signs popped up, telling us not to buy this house. a hundred warning signs, and a hundred thousand cockroaches. But I couldn’t see them, because I was so busy remaking this house in my head into my Ultimate Dream Home. After we toured it, we visited the playscape next to it in the park, and met our potential new neighbours, who welcomed us with open arms, invited us to be part of their neighbourhood association, told us about outdoor movie nights, and picnics, and barbeques they had, and … oh, suburban people, you have no idea. No idea! To go from living in a place where nobody talks to anyone else, ever, to the welcoming arms of real neighbours, a real neighbourhood. I was in love with these people.
So, we made an offer, then we danced with the seller for a bit, and then …. the heavens parted, the angels sang …. they accepted our offer.
The picture doesn’t do it justice, how big this house is. How spacious. How much it is the opposite of living in an apartment with two kids and no lawn. To celebrate our good fortune, we packed the kids in the car and drove over to the house. We parked in the driveway (our driveway, soon!) and headed back over to the playscape to let the kids romp around while we toasted our good fortune with coffees. While we were there, though, we watched the vacant lot that sits 2 houses up from our soon-to-be new home. Cars started stopping, and passengers disembarking. Coolers arrived. Cigarettes lit. Music blaring out of the car windows. It was a party. And we looked at each other, a little stunned. Is this how it is done, in the ‘burbs? People drive around until they find a vacant, but immaculately mowed lot, then party down?
Eventually, the police arrived, and as they did, the party drifted into the park, and the playscape, where grown men smoked cigarettes and dropped the f-bomb in front of my kids, while we walked back to our car. Was this the norm, next to the house our offer had just been accepted on? What had just happened, exactly? Suddenly, we were second-guessing the whole thing. But there was earnest money in, and we were committed.
And then came the home inspection. An inspection that took 4+ hours. At one point, the inspector took a break and told us he wished he could bring his trainees to see this house, because it wasn’t that there was a lot wrong with it so much as there wasn’t one thing right with it. The back deck? Being held up with car jacks. The basement? Filled with rat poison and evidence of rodents. The kitchen? Cockroach heaven. The foundation? Oh, the foundation. It turns out, the house, which we were told was built in the1950s, was actually a remodel of an earlier home built in the 19th century. Given its location, probably some sort of cabin, maybe just a few rooms, one story. When the 1950s owners built on, they added a second story, and built the house out in front, and added an attached garage on one side. But, and this is the crucial part – they didn’t extend the foundation of the home in any way. So basically, the front 10 feet of the house is unsupported in any way by foundation, and is sitting on sandy riverbank. And what was supported by foundation was actually being supported mostly by the 19th century foundation, which wasn’t meant to hold up a second story, since it was built to hold up a little shack.
It is probably bad news when you walk in the door and realize that the front 6 feet of your living room slope in an opposite direction as the back 14 feet, and that the clearly visible line of demarcation runs like a small mountain range from one side of the house to the other. Like a badly iced cake, the second story was slowly sliding off of the first floor, and the first floor of the building was slowly breaking in two, each half going in a different direction.
So, we cancelled the deal. Fixer upper, we wanted, but this was a tear-down. We went back to the seller with our inspection results, but they held firm on their price, and we walked away.
At this point, I was mentally done. We had seen nearly 30 homes, scattered across 5 different towns, each filthier and more structurally unsound than the last. We had waded through other people’s filth, smelled things that made me wish I had a portable gas mask, seen things in the privacy of other people’s homes that we wished we could unsee [ed. note: don't keep your fetish porn on a shelf in your kitchen pantry if you mean for that fetish to remain a secret]. We were demoralized, and a little broken by the process, and frustrated that we were going to be stuck in our apartment forever.
{to be continued}