Most Recent Personal Growth Experience

We went to look at the Cape Cod house last night.  It was a very funny experience.  The realtor didn't show up (see sidenote).

We took along my father-in-law, Rick, because he knows a little more about houses than we do.  Things like the amount of money it costs to replace a cedar shingle roof with a 12 foot pitch down to the rafters.  You know, common knowledge stuff (I hope y'all heard that sarcasm over the interwebs).  Oh...and the amount of money it costs to replace a cedar shingle roof with a 12 foot pitch down to the rafters is over 10 grand.  Yeah.

Okay, so if we got the house for dirt cheap and had to put 10 grand into the roof, it wouldn't be so bad.  Or if the roof was the only thing we had to replace.  But that was NOT the case.  We could have easily put $70,000.00 into this house to make it liveable. 

The smell of the house alone would have caused us to remove all floors, including the subfloor and some drywall.  I think there were 10 dogs living in the house who never got put outside.  There was water damage to the upstairs ceiling...almost the entire ceiling would have to be replaced.  All of the bathrooms were unusable.  The downstairs bathroom seemed to have been a mud room before it was a bathroom.  It had a door at both ends...one connecting into the house and another connecting into the garage.  There was what seemed to be a closet in the living room, but when we opened the doors there was a spiral staircase.  Can you say Rose Red??  Yikes!!  The entire house was like a maze.  There was doorway after doorway after doorway.

Upon entering the kitchen, we all noticed immediately that the entire downstairs floor slants to the middle of the house.  Foundation issue, I'm sure.  The kitchen would need to be completely torn down and redone.  After the foundation was fixed, of course.  There was a refrigerator in the kitchen that I didn't have the guts to look in.

We went upstairs only to find that all of the floating floor had lifted off of the floor.  Water damage out the wazoo!!!  Almost the entire ceiling had water damage.  One of the bedrooms had wood paneling on the walls and the paneling was wavy from being so wet.  There were 4 rooms up there, but one room had to be entered through one of the other bedrooms.  Hence the spiral staircase in the closet downstairs.  They didn't have access to that room without going through another room, so they just put in that weird staircase to solve that problem.  Weirdos.

The bathrooms were ridiculous.  They all needed to be completely gutted and redone.  We didn't even go into the garage and look at the furnace and stuff.  We had already seen enough.  Rick said to me, "Well, where would you start?"  To which I replied, "By walking out the front door and driving away."

And here is my problem with all of this.  This house has only been vacant for about 18 months.  It had been winterized.  Being vacant for 18 months would explain why some of the flooring had popped up, a little bit of a musty smell and some bugs.  It does NOT explain why the house smelled like 10 dogs lived there and peed on every surface of the house.  It did NOT explain why there was years of baked on food on the cook top.  It did NOT explain why the bathrooms were completely unusable.  And it did NOT explain why no one had done anything even remotely CLOSE to cleaning the house for what looked like atleast 5 years before the 18 month vacancy.

When do you finally decide that your house is dirty enough to clean??  Or that maybe you have too many dogs?  Or that maybe if you have that many dogs (or ANY DOGS) that they should pee outdoors?  I mean, the house has a big yard.  And what makes you decided to put in a damn freaky spiral staircase in a CLOSET??  I'm just saying.

This house had potential at one time.  And if I ever meet the former owners, someone is getting punched.  I know foreclosure is difficult, but not so difficult that your dogs can't go outside to pee.

And so my most recent personal growth experience was an interesting one.  I suppose I'll keep trying and continue to grow.

Sidenote:  The realtor also had another family come look at the house last night.  I made a joke about how they were a "planted" family because I thought the realtor was trying to get over on me.  I mean, what am I supposed to think since this house has been for sale for 18 months and then 2 people want to see it on the same day??  Sure.  The realtor called me about 5 minutes before he was scheduled to be there and told me he had a flat tire at an intersection near my house and that he'd give me the code to get in the house.  I did NOT believe him.  I thought he just wanted the other family and us to be there at the same time to cause some competition or that he knew we weren't going to buy the house and didn't want to waste his time.  After leaving the house, my curiosity got the best of me and I drove to the intersection where he said he had a flat.  And there he was.  Oops.