First of all, I swear and promise to have content tomorrow that isn’t real estate focused. It is just that the process of buying a house was so stressful that I have a lot of feels about it, and isn’t that what having a blog is all about?
So, we didn’t buy the farmhouse. But not buying that house got us more serious about looking, and coupling my long-time insomnia with my OCD-like obsession with local real estate listings, off we went with our long-suffering Realtor to view more houses. She took our requests to live on or near water very seriously, which is how, a week later, we regrouped in a delightful lake town about 90 minutes north of the city, at a house whose front porch afforded this view:
From the outside, the house was a little bit cookie-cutter, but the neighbourhood was full of adorable winterized cottages mixed with spectacular second-builds, and we were in love with the town, which is the kind of place in which you could run into the Sheriff, the guy who cuts your grass, and the wealthiest guy in town all sharing a booth at the local (non-Starbucks) coffee shop. I could see re-siding the house, taking its clapboard lines and re-doing it in white, with black shutters and robin’s egg blue front door. Silver doorhandle and knocker. I am good at seeing beyond what is there, to what could be.
Our realtor had a number of houses to show us that day, but this one, with this view, was the only one we cared about. But the longer we stood there, in the driveway, waiting for the listings agent, the more it seemed clear this wasn’t happening. “The owner is sick,” she said. “He won’t show the house today.” Even with my best ‘velvet over iron’ approach, “…he doesn’t have to leave the house. Maybe just sit at the kitchen table? We will be quick. Let him know we won’t judge the state of the house. We have ALL been sick. I don’t care if it is a mess,” he wouldn’t budge. Finally, we brought out the big guns. “We have guaranteed funding, and want to close ASAP.” But to no avail.
After that, nothing we saw got us going like the house on the lake that we couldn’t see. And nothing got me angrier than wasting a work day driving up there and back for nothing. But I guess the listing agent, desperate to sell this house, convinced the guy that we were serious, and got him out of the house for a second showing, a week later.
So off we drove, again, and this time, the listing agent called and told us she wouldn’t be there, but someone would be there to let us in the house. Foolish me, I assumed that meant her assistant, but in fact, it meant the 14 year old daughter, home on a school day (??), who let us in while we apologized, and then went and sat outside with her phone, texting furiously.
The thing about the internet and real estate is, if you are smart, you can find out everything about a house. We knew the sad story of this house: a wife who died in her late 30s, of cancer, a husband whose career was home renovation, and who probably got caught short in the real estate crisis. A home in pre-foreclosure. Two young teenagers, and a little girl in single digits. So, so heartbreaking. But not as heartbreaking as what we found in that house.
First, some judging. Well, to be honest, lots of judging. This house was the first we saw like this, but we saw plenty more: short sales and foreclosures, but filled with expensive toys. This one had full scuba gear for 4, a huge flatscreen in the den, flatscreens in every bedroom, Macbooks in two bedrooms, some authentic Louis Vuitton hanging in a closet, a late-model truck in the driveway, archery equipment, 2 ATVs parked in the garage, a boat tow in the back yard, etc. And I get that maybe it was all purchased when they were flush, but now they aren’t, and man, Craigslist that stuff before you lose your home. I saw that, and I kept seeing it as we house-hunted, and I got angry and angrier about it. All that conspicuous consumption, to look like a social class that doesn’t buy that crap anyway.
And the home. Oh, lord. There were two big dogs, in crates, in the dining room. Very sweet, and very big, and jammed into crates that were jammed into piles of half-filled boxes of … stuff. Random papers, dirty laundry, odd knicknacks. The house was not just messy, it was dirty. Filthy in a way that made it obvious that nobody cared to make it a home, and the amount of dishes in the kids’ rooms suggested they were eating on their beds every night, watching TV. There was no family dining table, or kitchen table, and when I realized that my Realtor had just stepped into a giant puddle of dog urine in the middle of the den, and hadn’t realized it yet, I discovered that even my obsessive reading of Emily Post’s Blue Book as a child hadn’t fully prepared me for remedying this situation gracefully.
It got worse. Worse than a giant puddle of dog urine, worse than a living room that looked like an episode of hoarders. Worse than the giant splashes of dog diarrhea that decorated the entire basement and the smell that ensued. It was the kids’ rooms. It wasn’t just the mess, or the dirt, that broke my heart. It was how obvious it was to me that these kids didn’t have a mother to love on them and that hometraining stopped, if it had ever started, with her passing. It was the displays. In the 14 year old’s room, empty bottles of Malibu Coconut Rum, the patron saint drink of underage girls, adorned the shelves, mixed in with cheerleading trophies and ribbons. And not just one bottle – lots of bottles. The son’s room, which was in the basement, past the dog excrement, was decorated in a style I think is called, “Early Michigan Militia.” Lots of empty alcohol bottles, shotgun shells, ninja-style weapons, and fake Nazi paraphernalia, a nice complement to the collection of Mammy and Moses collectibles we saw in the kitchen. A bit of a tell, really, about the family values, that collection.
There wasn’t enough Pine Sol in the world to clean this house of the dog poop, and not enough sage to get rid of the sadness. I know that kids get into all kinds of shenanigans, underage, but I don’t understand how a parent could let their underage kids display the results as trophies, as bragging rights to their alcohol consumption. These are not college freshmen, either – these are little kids, really. I left that house angry; angry at the man who put his grief first, maybe, and let his kids go unchecked, angry at the parent who kept his ATV but lost his house, who didn’t seem to see the anger emanating from the walls of his son’s bedroom, couldn’t see the dangers inherent in a little girl drinking underage, how vulnerable and exposed that could make her. I couldn’t imagine being in a position to lose my house, and making my little girl be the one to show it to strangers. I couldn’t imagine how you could live like that and ever open your front door to people. It was a complete absence of shame that floored me.
We didn’t buy this house, either, even though the location was amazing and price was excellent. I couldn’t live in that house without thinking of how bereft of adult responsibility it was, and I couldn’t stop the voice in my head from saying, on repeat, “Come ON, man – you HAVE KIDS. Get over yourself and step up your game, here.” I couldn’t make my family home rise from the detritus of this house.
We kept looking.