House Hunting Stories

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

I squat on the Straight Dope board, and they recently had a house hunting horror stories post.  THis weekend we we telling our house hunting stories to friends, and it seems like a good time to bring the idea home, as it were.
When we were house hunting we where shown the following:
1) A 1925 "Prarie Box" farmhouse that has be COMPLETELY gutted in 1967, and done in orange, fake wood and orange shag partway up the wall. Nothing of the original house was left. Even the stairs had been repolaced with a nasty metal spiral.  Then the basement... the was a foundation crack I could put my hand through.

2) A lovely cute house, less than 1000 Sq Ft, nice garden.  And we almost made an offer.  Then my wife asked... "Where are the closets?" No room had closets. There was a phone-booth sized coat closet, but that was all.

and a house selling story...

1) We did a for sale by owner. A lady rides up on a three wheeled bike.  Spends and hour looking around, seems very interested. Then says "Well, theres no way I can fit 2 grand pianos in here. Will you take some off the price?" 
I asked "Will that make the room bigger?" and she stomped out.

-Ed

[The Burgomaster]

My wife was the "voice of reason" while we were house hunting.  I didn't care about much except that whatever house we bought had to have a large room with a bar in it (or where I could put a bar).  We looked at one house that had a huge, heavy, beautiful custom built bar in it (the size and type of bar you might find in an English pub).  I spent about 80% of the time admiring the bar and about 20% looking at the rest of the house.  My wife talked me out of buying the house for several reasons including: It was on a sort of "private" road that was not part of the town's snowplowing route.  I would have had to split the bill for private snowplowing with my neighbors.  Also, since it was not a public road, I would need to bring my trash barrels out to the main road every week for trash pick-up.  In addition, the walls in each room were painted in various gaudy colors . . . intense oranges, purples, greens, etc.  It looked sort of like a whore house.  There were also overhead high-tension lines very close to the house that probably would have messed up my radio reception (and maybe even fried me to a crisp someday).

We looked at another house that was huge and had a big "hobby room" that I could have put a large bar in.  All I cared about was that room.  After we left the house, my wife asked me if I had noticed all the things we would have needed to replace: carpets, bathroom tiles, plumbing fixtures, wallpaper.  I told her the house looked fine to me.  So a few days later we went back and looked at it again.  Sure enough, most of the carpeting was dirty and worn out, the bathroom tiles were old and cracked, the plumbing fixtures were ancient, the wallpaper was peeling away from the walls and curling up.  We didn't buy that house either.

We ended up with a brand new modern colonial with a huge family room.  I bought a "J"-shaped bar that comfortably seats 6 people.  My wife is happy.  I am happy.  The moral of the story is: men usually have their heads up their ass and women were put of this earth to do most of the thinking for us.

 

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

This put me in mind of one more..
1) We were helping friends house hunt one day.  They found a lovely house on property...however it earned the nickname "The Pee House". Sadly they ALMOST made an offer.

[FatFreddysCat]

My friend's Mom is a realtor and when you get her going she can tell you some horror stories, she's seen some crazy sh*t when showing houses to prospective buyers. My favorite was when she was showing a house to a nice young newlywed couple who seemed quite interested till they went upstairs and noticed a foul odor. In one of the upstairs bedrooms they found an inflatable kiddie pool with human feces in it. Apparently someone had been "squatting" (pun not intended) in the empty house and had been using that as a commode since the utiltiies were turned off.

My wife and I saw quite a few ramshackle places while we were house hunting. One place advertised as a "two bedroom" was just two beds in a room, another had a crack in a closet wall that you could see daylight through. One other house looked like it hadn't been updated since the 1940s, the fixtures, plumbing and electrical wiring were absolutely ancient and would've needed to be completely overhauled. Another one smelled strongly of dog urine.

When we did finally find a house we liked, we started on the process of buying it and then on the day we were supposed to do the closing, move out of our apartment and move into the new house, we got a phone call from our lawyer saying they'd found a problem with the title. The white trashy woman we were buying the house from had been married when she bought it, then she split with her husband and he apparently committed suicide sometime afterwards (not in the house, thankfully)... but she'd never taken his name off of the title. Therefore she was not considered the sole owner of the house and legally, she had no right to be selling it. Mind you, half of my sh*t is already on the moving truck by this time, the new renters were supposed to be coming in the next day, and now they're telling us we can't move in. I told the lawyer that if we were not in that house by the end of the day not only was the  deal off, but we were going to sue the owner, sue the realtor, and sue everybody in their families going all the way back to the F'ing Mayflower if necessary.

Long story short, our lawyer got us the certificate of occupancy that night and we were able to move in. The owner had to stay with her sister (who also happened to be her realtor, you'd have thought she would've noticed something was funky with the title!) till the title situation was resolved. She had to jump thru legal hoops and in the end what would've been her husband's half of the proceeds from the house sale went into a trust fund for their son, who was about twelve at the time. (AsI understand it, this also F'd her plans for buying her new place cuz the $$ she made from the sale wasn't enough to cover payments. Which sucks for her, of course, but at the time I was like "Boo F'ing Hoo.") This took about three months, and in that time since we technically weren't the "owners" yet we actually had to pay rent to this nimrod till she got the paperwork cleared up and we were able to do the closing. Yeah, that was an awkward couple of months. with this dipstick showing up every four weeks to collect "rent" and apologizing up and down, saying she'd "had no idea." Yeah, right. To this day I believe she tried to pull a fast one and she simply got caught.

[dean]

Burgo's house priorities are the only important features of a house worth worrying about.  The bar idea is similar to mine if/when I decide to start looking, just substitute 'bar' for an area large enough for a small green screen and to put recording gear. 

[Trevor]

I like to watch the program House Hunters on the Fine Living Network just to hear these would be home owners whinge and whine about the homes that they're shown by the realtors. Some whinging examples are

"OMG, the cupboards are too shiny!" [they were painted white]
"There's no yard, where's the grass?"
"Why no double sinks in the bathroom?"
"There's no place for mah grill!"
"Oy, why are there so many [expletive deleted] stairs in this house?" *
"The ceilings are too low!"
"There's no closet space!"
"The kitchen appliances are outdated!"
"WHHHHYYYYYYYYYY can't we have a house right on the beach? WHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYY?????"
"The neighbours are too close!"
"This area's too noisy!"

 

* My favourite.

[Flick James]

We ended up with a brand new modern colonial with a huge family room.  I bought a "J"-shaped bar that comfortably seats 6 people.  My wife is happy.  I am happy.  The moral of the story is: men usually have their heads up their ass and women were put of this earth to do most of the thinking for us.

 

Actually, my wife and I share the load of doing the "thinking," it's just that we are both gifted and cursed in different modes of thinking. My wife is more organized than me, handled finances better, etc. However, when it comes to areas of dealing with people and transactions, she let's me to the thinking. It works well for the most part. But I know what you mean.

Funny about the bar. The house we bought has a lovely add-on room that has always been earmarked for a bar someday, definitely my prerogative more than hers, but has become a playroom, and with one more little one on the way, I'm sure it will remain one for a few more years. But someday I'll have my bar. Someday.

[JayJayM12]

Not exactly a horror story, but definitely has horror vibes:

My wife got so PO'd at me when we sold our previous house before moving into the new one.  Whenever people would come look at our house, I couldn't help myself and it would go kinda like this:

Wife:  "This is the master bedroom here with a lovely..."
Me:  "Over there is where the incident took place."
Buyer:  "What?!?!?"
Me:  "I'm sorry, I've said too much already."
Buyer:  "What is he talking about?"
Wife:  "Please don't listen to him, he's a moron."
Me:  "She's right - they didn't actually die there.  That's just where it all began."
Buyer:  "You're kidding, right?
Me:  "Yes."

I find that most people have a decent sense of humor (most potential buyers were about our age) and the couple who ended up buying it from us still go to the montly Horror Remix with us at Alamo Drafthouse...

[Mr. DS]

A house we had checked out recently was a complete mess.  Outside it looked great, then on the inside was kind of a half assed renovation job.  Plus as a bonus the people left a bunch of their crap there.  I used to have a hard time believing people could just up and leave without their stuff.  Now I truly have no problem with that.

[Trevor]

Plus as a bonus the people left a bunch of their crap there. 

That was the house that I had before. 

[Newt]

Plus as a bonus the people left a bunch of their crap there. 

That was the house that I had before. 

When we bought our place, the seller was so peeved about the price she left bags of kitchen garbage in the attic.  Since the house was rented to a single man (who would not have generated that much trash in the time between when we saw it and when he moved out), and we were shown the house cleaned out (including the attic) she had to have brought the trash from home.  What a sweetheart!

The renter had used 4-inch spiral nails in most of the walls as hooks for hanging...things (I have to assume) - we collected enough removing them that we did not have to buy nails for some time.

Then there were the partial bottles of alcoholic beverages tucked into spaces in the walls in the barn...a couple of teenagers had been using the place for parties.  Peach Schnapps, CC, wine...

And the mummified cooked goose in the pump room...honestly: a complete cooked goose, all dried out and paper-light, with worm holes all over it, tucked under a derelict hide-a-bed.

Oh and imagine our surprise when we found ALL the storm windows (it is a 100-y-o house) stored in the barn, intact, when it was obvious the inhabitants of the house had been stapling plastic over all the windows for YEARS.   

[Trevor]

And the mummified cooked goose in the pump room...honestly: a complete cooked goose, all dried out and paper-light, with worm holes all over it, tucked under a derelict hide-a-bed.

  + 

Oy... it's 16h10 here and I was just about to go home and enjoy my dinner when I read that. 

[Newt]

And the mummified cooked goose in the pump room...honestly: a complete cooked goose, all dried out and paper-light, with worm holes all over it, tucked under a derelict hide-a-bed.

  + 

Oy... it's 16h10 here and I was just about to go home and enjoy my dinner when I read that. 

Sorry Trev!  Not that an additional twenty years would have affected that goose much in its state...but we didn't save you any!     Tell you what: you come visit and we'll cook you a fresh one...sans worms.   

[Jack]

This put me in mind of one more..
1) We were helping friends house hunt one day.  They found a lovely house on property...however it earned the nickname "The Pee House". Sadly they ALMOST made an offer.

That was our old house in Minneapolis.  Beware of places that smell like air freshener when you go through them.  Down at the bottom of the stairs where the German Shepherds apparently stayed when the previous owners were at work, I had to rip out the carpeting, then make a 4' X 6' sort of "swimming pool" thing out of aluminum flashing and caulking, and fill it with some urine remover enzyme stuff for days until it penetrated down into the concrete. 

[FatFreddysCat]

I got another one...

When my wife and I were house hunting we visited a log cabin in a lake community called "Shady Lake." Sounds peaceful doesn't it? We quickly learned that "Lake Community" is basically fancy realtor talk for "Trailer Park Without Wheels."

This place had been built in the 1950s as a development of summer cottages and cabins but over the years most of them were converted to full time year round homes....except, apparently, the one we looked at!! We had wondered why the price was so cheap when we saw the listing, till we got a look at the place. It would've cost a fortune to put up enough sheetrock walls and insulate it so that it would've been livable in the winter time.

...and as an added bonus, everywhere we went inside this house we were tripping over these little tin cans that were placed all over the floor. After we knocked over the fifth or sixth one my father in law sez "What the hell ARE these things, anyway?" and picked one up -- it was a can of "flea bomb" room fogger insecticide, and these things were in EVERY ROOM. We beat it the hell outta there and yeah, it was probably our imaginations but all of us felt itchy for the rest of the day...