We're very lucky.
Jack is the sort of child
we all assume we'll have
when we decide to have children,
and the sort of child
less experienced parents
congratulate themselves for.January and February 2004
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2006-01-05 - 17:01
The Mad House Hunt
I had intended to tell you all about the Mad House Hunt yesterday, but I ran out of time!
I know Rod has also written, but I have no idea what he's written yet. I guess I'll read it along with you!
Anyway, back in late October (Samhain, if you're updating your score card) Rod announced that we are going to delay our return to Australia indefinitely. The obvious next step was to look into buying a house.
The first house I saw seemed at the beginning, like a real keeper. It certainly seemed to have everything on our short list and many things on our long list -- but it takes us a long way from our home stomping grounds and would pretty much require that our friends drive a long way to see us, and that we completely rearrange our lives. Then they raised the price way higher than we want to go. I considered that a sign that we were to keep looking because something better was out there.
So began the Mad House Hunt. After all, the first place makes an excellent gauge against which to measure other places, but it's not the only place in town.
One of the most memorable houses was the huge 5 bedroom house on two acres of land, for only 60,000! (If it was habitable, it should have been priced between 140,000 and 180,000 in this market.) Now having been through this house buying business before (and having watched Green Acres as a kid, I was aware that when you find a place that sounds too good to be true...it is! But Rod thought it might just be the neighborhood -- and those are gentrifying these days, so we went to have a look.
As we drove past, it looked as good from the outside as it had on the web. The for sale sign was still there. And there was another couple there already. It really did look like it had possibility.
We drove around the neighborhood looking around. It was not our first choice of places for Jack to grow up ... but the house seemed pretty tempting. So, we went back and started looking around. The other couple was still there, and they filled us in on some of the details they'd discovered. A goat barn out behind the garage, that no doubt predated the subdivision that had grown up around the house. A good view of the inside from that window, if you just stand on these bricks. You know, neighborly stuff. We wandered around. The lot may well have been two acres, but if so it was two acres of urban 'abandoned lot'. Hard packed dirt, little tufts of sad but determined grass, and broken toys, glass, and building material everywhere. Green Acres was looking pretty good! It at least had Petticoat Junction for a neighborhood!
While we were there, several other couples turned up to have a look. At one point, someone shouted, "Hey! The back door's unlocked!" A couple of the braver guys went through the back door and unlocked the front, and all of us headed in for a better look. (Ok, so technically that's probably breaking and entering ... but we were potential buyers!)
A few feet inside the door, our "potential buyer" status evaporated! No one had loved that house for a very long time. There was filth and garbage in every room, more broken toys, and the overwhelming smell of decay! A few more steps and it became clear that no maintenance had been done in years! There were holes in the ceiling that were rotting through enough to allow a really good view of the room upstairs! The floor underfoot felt "squishy". That was all I needed to see.
As we left, the original couple were still there, discussing selling the larger part of the land for money to fix up the house, which would give them room for all 25 grandkids to visit in summer and over Christmas. More power to them! I wish them well. It was once a lovely place, but Rod and I can't always keep up with getting the dishes done. That was certainly a lot more "project" than we need.
Last night we visited another place that looked great on paper. (Well, OK, electrons. I love realtor.com. A lot of the houses are already sold, but it's a decent source for addresses to drive by. If you know how, you can even find the addresses they don't list.)
This place was priced quite a bit higher than "The Money Pit", so it seemed like it might be worth a look. We know the neighborhood and it's not a bad one. In fact, most of the houses there are either way too small or way too expensive for us. We had driven by, and it was quite an attractive place from the outside. Brick, tidy and just the right "shape". It had been owned by a church and seemed to have been well-maintained. So, we went to check out the inside.
Our first "bad sign" came as the realtor unlocked the door. The smell of gas swept out to meet us! Then we noticed several doors leaning against the wall right at the front door.
Oh my. Not an appealing "first glance, but on we went, intrepid explorers that we are. The next thing we saw was the much vaunted "huge addition". It was huge, all right. And dank. And somehow, in spite of its large square footage, it managed to make me feel cramped and trapped anyway. It was above ground, but has the feel of a bad refinished basement.
Up the stairs to the main house, which we knew had some truly charming rooms! And charming they were, too. If, that is, you could overlook the cheap carpets bought and laid circa 1964 and not vacuumed since. We checked. The floors underneath seemed to be plywood, so it wouldn't be as simple as tearing them out. But the main part of the house was very pretty in that "aging movie star" kind of way. One could see that it had once been gorgeous and the features that had made it so were still there, under years of neglect. But the more we looked, the more we realized that there was some pretty basic structural trouble with the place. It smelled damp and moldy. The ceilings looked like they'd suffered water damage, yet there was no indication that the roof or plumbing had been repaired recently. That indicated that either the damage was old and had never been repaired -- and long years of mold growth don't do anything for a house's livability -- or they were recent and the damage was continuing.
It was a very appealing house in some ways, but sadly, we decided that it was simply too big a job for us. Not outrageous -- but more than we can take on.
There has also been some indication that not all realtors are entirely honest. Sad, isn't it?
Another house we visited was marketed as a 1.5 story bungalow. It, too, was run down and filthy, but the far bigger problem was that someone had carpeted the attic, and it was being "sold" as an upstairs playroom. But the stairs were narrow and stopped well short of the top, and there was no railing either on the stairs or around the opening to the stairs. And yet it is obvious from the number of broken toys and cookie crumbs that someone had indeed let children play up there! Yeesh!
I think I startled our long suffering agent when I announced somewhat crankily that this was no "upstairs", this was an attic! Rod said "That would make this a ranch." It did indeed. Since ranches are on my list of "ain't gonna happen", off we went.
Oh, we have seen some quite lovely places, and there are even a couple we're considering. But those aren't nearly as much fun to tell stories about. Not until they're mine, anyway!
Time to go! I'll try to check in tomorrow, if work hasn't reached full tilt, yet -- and watch this space for Rod's take on The Mad House Hunt!
