11.01.2008

The House, Part 2

We were under contract on a quaint and charming 1895 house. Woo hoo! Things were moving along and then the appraisal came back. $5,000 short. By now, I was so set on this house, I was willing to go to some pretty foolish lengths.

We made a tidy profit from the house we'd just sold due the incredible increases in the market, along with assuming the loan (which meant we assumed all the equity as well). We came to an agreement with the sellers where we would split the $5,000 shortage. Yep, we would pay an EXTRA $2,500 out of our proceeds. CASH.

So we made it to closing, bought our 99 year old house, moved in, and began to get settled.

Remember the "not-on-paper list?" Well, it turned out that this house didn't really match up very well with the long-forgotten list. Let's see how much of the list I can recall for you:

  • Flat piece of property

  • Plenty of kitchen cabinets and counters

  • Something about stairs, like maybe not having many

  • Seems like we wanted a couple of bathrooms

  • While not on the list, somewhat child-friendly. We had a baby, after all.

  • I also think that hubby wanted a garage

I'm sure there were other things on the list, but I no longer know what they were.

Let's just say that this house was the antithesis of the list. Well, we did have a garage. Built into the side of a miniature mountain hill that was being shoved over by said hill. So two months after moving into our house, we gave our realtor a call to see if we could sell it. A market analysis indicated that it wasn't doable.

So we did nothing. Except live in the house and grumble and complain. Oh yeah, and call our realtor every so often to see if we could sell it. Nope. Every time, the market analysis came back indicating that we could only sell for what we owed. No money left to move somewhere else. Phooey.

About a year later, we woke up one morning to a crash underneath the house. Hubby went down in the crawl space (emphasis on the "crawl") to unearth our mystery. Turns out there had been an old retaining wall around the furnace which collapsed due to the excessive rain we had that spring. Rain that brought our first experience with the need for a sump pump. Oh joy.

Little did we know, this was just the beginning.



1 comment:

Phyllis@Aimless Conversation said...

Maybe it's good I'm reading this now...We are thinking of buying our rental, which had tons of character, but is almost 100 yrs old.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...