2 posts tagged “house hunting”

'Cause I know you all have been dying to hear more about my house-hunting saga.

It turns out I'm a wheeler and dealer, because I stood by my low offer and didn't budge.  I win at real estate chicken.  Here is the house I am planning to buy, assuming all the inspections and stuff come out okay. This is the view from the south, at the attached garage and breezeway porch.

The good news: I like the house and the neighborhood (it's the same neighborhood I live in now)

The bad news: the house is being sold "as is," so whatever wrong with it, I'll have to fix. (Hence the low offer.)

All of this morning was taken up with inspections: the regular inspector, the termite inspector, the sewer inspector, and the structural engineer consultant.  Among the things to be fixed: a steadily bowing foundation wall on the north side that'll have to be braced with I-beams and possibly a deadman anchor.  Awaiting bids on that little project. Many thousand dollars, which is why I'm paying $25K less than the seller originally asked, which is also $25K less than he bought it for.  (Maybe he didn't get a good inspection beforehand.)

Among the cheaper fixes: termite treatment for a small porch off the kitchen.  Somehow, I feel like it's a bargain, because the termite inspector uses a doggy!!!!  It's true!  This is Crocket, the specially trained termite sniffing dog.

Sadly, this particular pose of Crocket's means there are termites under where she's sitting.  I lof her.  She has beautiful floppy ears and a curly tail and spotty toes.  *kisskiss*  Oh, right, and I'll have to have the termites treated.  Look, people, if you have to have a termite inspection, hire an inspector with a sniffing dog.  It totally takes away the sting of finding out you have termites, because after she told me about the termites, she kissed my hands and let me skritch her soft ears.  Try that with a regular termite inspector.

The house had previously been a rental and one gets the sense that the owner got in over his head and just gave up.  The house has been unrented most of this year and maybe here's why:

Nice new faucet...oh, wait.  Except under the sink, the water lines are still attached to the old faucet.  Huh?

The bathroom also has about three inches of layer underlayment and linoleum, which is particularly interesting since the doorway to the bathroom is all of about 5'8" high.  I can barely go through the door without ducking.  Part of the problem is the layers of flooring, but the door is just short.  Not even 6' tall.  Thankfully, the bathroom is NOT built for gnomes and it's about twice the size of my current bathroom.

Let's see, there also a creepy basement, complete with creepy shower.  Looks like a nice place to scrub up, right? Also, ancient phone wiring still in place.

Oh, right, you probably want to know what I like about the house.  Well, it's got some lovely space, including a huge kitchen with a breezeway porch that connects to the garage and houses the laundry.  Whew!  Would not want to do laundry in that creeptastic basement.

Oh darn.  I was also going to show you the 30+ year-old air conditioner, but that must be on the inspector's camera.  At any rate, it works.  It's huge and ancient and it fired right up and started cooling the house.  Unexpected to say the least.

Yesterday, while the inspector was at our house with the buyer, I went out with our real estate agent to look at houses.  Wowie.  A couple of cute little prospects, and some seriously scary ones, too.

We're looking to really take a step down on our mortgage and get some of our equity out of our current house, so most of the houses I looked at yesterday are currently rental properties. Most of the renters are college students, although one house was occupied by a family of hippies.
 

I've lived in rental properties before.  I was prepared for things to be rough around the edges and that was certainly the case. What I wasn't truly prepared for was the piggery.  Of the five houses I saw, four were occupied by people who weren't using a dresser or a closet to store their clothes, but were simply stockpiling them in one giant mound of wrinkled, festering fabric, wedged between bed and wall.  Was there, I wondered, a system?  Clean clothes go in one side, dirty clothes in the other?  Was there a continuum?  Like a Kinsey scale of cleanliness.

(The fifth house?  It was EMPTY.)

And the hippie house?  Oh lord.  In addition to Peasant Skirt Mountain and the Birkenstock Valley, there was The Bedroom That Could Not Be Entered.  Full to the ceiling with crap.  Look, you wanna call your second bedroom a "recording studio" and sit around smoking pot in it and burning incense until the pores of the walls are infused with Patchouli, fine.  Whatev.  But when your three kids have to sleep in the same bedroom with you and your partner, because the third bedroom is full of dirty clothes, broken toys, old magazines, and boxes of unknown crap, you have a problem.

Similarly, slacker college boys, when you've let the kitchen get so dirty that the only way to properly clean it is with two gallons of gasoline and a Zippo, it's time to get a fucking grip on yourselves.

So, can you guess which house I'm considering?