2003-07-11 10:33 p.m.
Bad Homes I Have Toured
So my preapproval is almost done, and I'm seriously looking for some housing. One thing a lot of the real estate books suggest is making up a list of "must have" features, "like to have" features and "dealbreakers." I've been touring houses, condos and lofts for over a year and my list is directly inspired by some of the horrors I've seen:
- The House With The Toilet Closet.
This house had a couple of steps down off the kitchen into an enclosed porch
in the back. If you walked to the end of the porch and turned to your right,
there were two stairs up to a toilet. There was no door on this little closet,
so the toilet overlooked the house's garden.
- The House With The Weird Condensation on the Windows.
The yard on this place was completely stripped of greenery. The house was
a dingy white; it smelled musty and had clearly been shut up for a long time.
The worst part, though, was that the windows were practically dripping
with condensation. And it only needed $40,000 in foundation work. Wonder
why they were having a hard time selling it?
- The Lofts of Disorientation and Foot Torture. A
self-consciously industrial-chic loft building with three features that completely
ruled out my living there.
One, the metal spiral stairs that most units had, all of which seemed to be winding around in the wrong direction no matter which way they went. TheCat, who is a neurotic, demanding little dowager, would not be able to cope with these stairs. She might try them once, but from then on, she'd sit at the bottom (or top) of them, crying insistently until she was picked up. The next ten years would be spent carrying my cat up and down those stairs, because I'm such a softie that I'd actually cave to her tyrannical little demands.
Two, the best unit available had a loft that went along the side of the unit. The weird thing was that half of this was a catwalk between the bedroom part of the loft and a tiny, pointless little platform next to the kitchen. The catwalk was made of cool-looking metal grating that was incredibly uncomfortable to walk across even in shoes. I don't wear shoes much at home, so this is a problem.
Three, the little patios... right next to an elevated freeway. - The Extreme Fixer-Upper. This house had "good bones" and was
in a relatively nice neighborhood. Problem is, it was, to understate in the way
of realtors, "in need of TLC." "TLC" involved replastering every wall in the house
(pulling out lots of rusty nails along the way), repairing chunks of floor that had
been ripped up when cute architectural features had been removed (probably casualties of
the Great 1970s War on Good Taste) and updating a kitchen and a bathroom that hadn't had a
thing changed about them in at least 30 years.
TheBoy figured, though, that the cosmetic problems weren't fixed in an attempt to distract potential buyers from the structural problems. It needed a new roof, new toilet plumbing down to the sewer and $30,000 in foundation work. It also had termite problems which, the pest report said, could not be treated in the usual way because the ground underneath the house was water saturated. You could almost hear the inspector screaming, "RUN AWAY! DON'T BUY THIS DUMP NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO!". - The House of Useless Corners. This house was a Craftsman cottage
built in 1910 by a founding father of my city who clearly wished he could afford to build
a monster Victorian. Consequently, it had fripperies completely out of scale with
the size of the house and lots of weird, quasi-Victorian roomlets designed to be
separated from each other as much as possible. Like many houses in the Bay Area,
it had a back porch that had been enclosed to add more space to the house. These
porches are invariably drafty and very cold in the winter. This one was staged
to look like a baby's room. Brr. Kidsicle!
- Little Crackhouse on the Prairie. There are many of these in my
price range, most sagging in weird places and/or with bars on the windows. I don't
know what any of these looked like on the inside because I wasn't willing to stop
my car long enough to find out.