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Argh, fortunately I hadn't gotten very far when this thing crashed messily, the bastard.
This is the Story Of The House Hunt Stuff.
So.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teinedreugan and I had been intending to move last year, and never got around to doing the work, and this year I shook off enough depression to throw a howling fit about it, so we started actually getting our asses in gear. This led to a variety of packing as previously documented, and a variety of other stresses and insanities. We contacted the buyer's agent who worked with arawen and whispercricket worked with to buy their house and decided we would work with him (with some bemusement about his, ah, quirks, including his brief rant about the guy who was selling the house in question).
Paul (the agent) gave us a packet of Useful Information and access to an online directory of MLS listings for the area in which we were looking. After confirming our opinions of which houses we were going to drop from consideration outright, I started sorting the survivors into a spreadsheet with a variety of information (piles of vital stats, a few comment blocks, whether or not the house had gas, a basement, and a fireplace, and finally a rating of how I evaluated it from those stats).
We pulled a list of favored houses off the spreadsheet, sent them to Paul to get more information, evaluated the received information, and requested some showings. And after sorting out the weird communications problem (in which he was not aware that when we said 'showing requested' we meant 'showing requested', because we had not specifically said we were interested in showings -- this still confuses the hell out of me) we started looking at the damn things.
Our first list of houses, about a half-dozen, included the survivors of our top ratings and one put on at near-whim -- it came on the market about a week before we were planning on doing our first showings, and happens to be across the street fromarawen and whispercricket.
In the interim, we went poking about doing drive-bys of various things, scowling at neighborhoods, and discovering another house on the market around the corner from TI, which we wandered over to peer at during an open house withwhispercricket one day. (Very small, somewhat oddly furnished basement, but pleasantly decorated with Hindu icons.) We also did drive-bys and found another one (fairly high on our list) was open and peered at it. It had slightly small upstairs rooms and a really peculiar layout.
Then we went to look at houses with Paul. And we pottered about looking at houses, starting with one that was one ofteinedreugan's favorites because of its large, open living room with a fieldstone column fireplace in the centre. That one was quite a nice house for someone else, alas.
So we looked at other houses. Many of which were ... scary. At least one of which was scary in the 'this is not constructed well enough for us to be certain it won't fall down in a heavy storm' sort of sense. Others were scary in the 'mediocre construction and parrot-coloured shag carpet' sense.
By the time we got to the one across the street from TI, we were sort of cranky and discouraged and well and thoroughly of the opinion that we were going to have to cast a far wider net than the ones with the nice stats on the MLS. We peered at the one across the street from TI, which is in ... well, frankly, it's in terrible condition (and my sort of animistic sense of the place is that it's aware its siding is coming off and its windowsills are rotted and it's terribly, terribly sorry), and then we went inside, and started looking around, and it's ... actually quite a nice house. With a walk-up attic in excellent condition. The wiring is knob and tube and the chimney needs reconstructing, but the rest of it is sound. The land is excellent. And the location is pretty damn good for our desires.
It was sort of startling, really.
So we went and thought things over, and made lists of more houses to look at, and we looked at more houses.
teinedreugan loved Carter Street. And I will admit that the front room of the house on Carter Street was utterly fucking gorgeous. It was a big, open room, probably formerly two rooms, with the walls done in a knotty pine that had been polished to look like liquid ruddy gold done in woodwork. There was a wall sort of making a doorway into the leftmost chunk of room, with basically columns of that same red-golden wood and empty space there. Utterly fucking gorgeous.
The house is a ranch, and the image is a sketch of its floor plan. It also has a basement (the stairs back in the corner go down there from the kitchen), which appeared to be constructed almost entirely out of linoleum. Basically, my sense of the house was that what there was of it that was house was all squished into the same space, and there was no separation between the private areas and the public areas, and I was not at all happy with that. Also, the impression that it had enough space to live in effectively was mostly based on the semi-finished basement rooms, see also 'made of linoleum', so ...
It went off the market pretty soon after we saw it -- there was an offer in, apparently, but not an accepted one, and they finalised it when we didn't make an offer immediately, I think.
We looked at other houses. Some of which had nice ... bits. If I could have taken all the features of houses we saw that I liked and cobbled them together into another house, that would have been quite nice. Like the one with the nice kitchen with the skylights and the stone-floored breakfast room which had no insulation and in some of the upstairs rooms things like the light fixtures swinging from wires hanging from the ceiling. I might nick the kitchen (with added insulation, at least) but definitely the breakfast room, that was a nice ... hundred square feet or so.
Then there was the one that was apparently constructed entirely out of smoke and laid out by someone on a particularly interesting hallucinogen. The image here is of the upstairs. The back stairs (at the top) go up from the kitchen; the front stairs from near the front door.
Note the lack of bedrooms that are, y'know, private and not throughways to the other room.
Also, the blue-tinted room?
Is the bathroom.
Amazingly enough, this was our second-choice house for a while.
The yard was covered in wild strawberries. It was a fairly limited yard, but all strawberries.
Meanwhile, through all of this, we are trying to sell our extant house. We talked to one realtor, who basically shot down our hopes for selling it as high as we were wanting to, but was generally cynical about selling it at all. So we talked to a second one, who was much more cheerful and optimistic about the matter, and who was willing to shoot for what we needed on the thing.
We put it up for sale, and got no response for a week or two, by which point we were neurotic. Then we had people who wanted to see it, then more people, then a gap of a week, then third people.
We put in an offer on the house across the street from TI. This was an interesting thing. The house needs probably $40-50K of work done on it promptly -- not just the 'wiring so old it's uninsurable' problem, but the siding and the masonry and all that stuff. It was also, for the current state of the market, $40K overpriced or so. So we put in an offer for what the house would be worth in good condition less the amount of work it needed, and figured we'd see if the owners showed any signs of reality.
A reported conversation between our agent and the sellers' agent went something like:
Paul: You are aware that the house is overpriced, yes?
Agent: I didn't have anything to do with the price. The sellers set it.
Paul: Okay. I have clients who may be interested in it, but the offer will be low. It will be what it's worth, okay?
Agent: Understood.
Paul: Are you willing to talk sense into your clients?
Agent: I understand that will be necessary.
(This is not the first funny conversation they had, the first one went something like, "So, this house was on the market a year ago. Have the sellers done any work on it in the time it was off the market?" "*nervous giggle* No.")
Response from the owners: We won't even consider an offer less than {what the house would be work if it were in good condition}.
Our response: Well, hell. That level of crazy isn't worth arguing with.
(That house has since come down in price? $5K down. No acquaintance with reality whatsoever.)
Somewhere around here we expanded the area we were looking in, because we'd looked at most of the houses available to us that were even remotely tolerable, and been sort of frustrated by that. So we started looking in Billerica, and found a rather nice house that we liked a good deal, which is laid out almost exactly like my mother-in-law's house, which was kind of disturbing. It had a few drawbacks -- including being further away from people than we really wanted to be looking, being on well and septic, and the road it was on -- but generally a nice house.
After the offer on the one house fell through, we scraped together an offer for this one, got it in, and found that they'd accepted an offer a day and a half or so before we got our act together.
We spent a while staring into space in a sort of depressed, frustrated way, in between packing up all our stuff and moving it into storage in Stoneham because we'd sold the house and were needing to vacate the premises. The prospect of starting over on the whole thing with fewer prospects (because we'd been through everything) was really, really damn depressing.
So we moved into TI witharawen and whispercricket at the end of September, with most of our stuff in storage.
teinedreugan's car needed a checkup, so we arranged to have Paul meet us at the dealership and take us around to look at houses. And we puttered around and looked at houses, mostly in Billerica, with a few in Woburn and miscellany.
We found a new house and new backup house or two. There was some drama and sorting out about bus access, but we discovered a bus line that would be usable for me, thereby rendering it not horrible social isolation worse than Lynn. The one we liked best was a bit out of our range of affordability, but we were willing to give it a go and offer at what we thought we could afford with a little negotiation space.
Counteroffer: 5K price drop.
Counter-counter: 7.5K raise.
Response: No.
We said, "Argh."
We scraped together our best of all worlds final offer and submitted that.
Phone call from Paul a bit later began, "People are assholes." Which says a lot about working with Paul, really. They counter-countered our final offer.
We stared at it.
We said, "Fuck it." And countered.
They accepted.
So there was thrashing about. And then the inspection. We climbed on rocks to look at the roof, we puttered about, we found mold in the attic, the upper bathroom fan vents into the attic, not outside, there is vanishingly minor termite damage in the basement, two cracks in the foundation, the electrical box had no cover, and the furnace is twenty-three years old and a piece of crap with ducts that haven't been cleaned since probably the first Bush administration. Also, radon levels in the house high. (teinedreugan suggests the foundation cracks are relevant to this.)
We wrote a little, "Dudes, fix this stuff or we won't buy the house!" letter.
After some argument, we settled on what they would do (get termite treatment done, fix the electrical box, service and repair but not replace the furnace). Also, if radon was confirmed with a second test, some money back at closing towards amelioration. The argument included a great deal of detail about the furnace that Paul wrote, which was taken out, which was put back in, which was taken out, which the sellers' lawyer agreed to put back in, which was finally settled as 'we know they're not doing all this, but it's in writing anyway'.
Inspection to confirm they'd done the necessary stuff was scheduled for last Saturday. We got a call saying, "No, no, wait, we're not done yet! Come look on Tuesday!" We said mutter mutter, whatever, yeah, sure. On Monday, a "No, no, wait, we're not done yet! Come look on Thursday!" Which provoked me making the following post to rasfc:
So on Thursday we went to look at the work, confirmed that things had been done -- including replacing some of the ductwork from the furnace, which was, frankly, kind of frightening before.
And we checked which side the washing machine was on, because I ranted about that a bit when we were looking at washers and dryers in the store.
So it looks like it'll be okay, and we'll close next Friday.
The new house has a partially wooded lot, including a gi-fucking-gantic oak tree next to the driveway, but with open clear space on the south side where I will have space to garden. It's a split-entry gambrel. Two bathroom, three bedroom, giant room in the basement that screams out "Game in me!" The living room has a big black beam running across its ceiling. Various of the interior fiddly bits are in weird condition, but easy enough to repair or replace.
There's space for me to set up a studio.
It's further away from people than I wanted, but I'll do my best to deal with that.
Aspameladean said when we got the last one, "Houuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse!"
This is the Story Of The House Hunt Stuff.
So.
teinedreugan and I had been intending to move last year, and never got around to doing the work, and this year I shook off enough depression to throw a howling fit about it, so we started actually getting our asses in gear. This led to a variety of packing as previously documented, and a variety of other stresses and insanities. We contacted the buyer's agent who worked with arawen and whispercricket worked with to buy their house and decided we would work with him (with some bemusement about his, ah, quirks, including his brief rant about the guy who was selling the house in question).Paul (the agent) gave us a packet of Useful Information and access to an online directory of MLS listings for the area in which we were looking. After confirming our opinions of which houses we were going to drop from consideration outright, I started sorting the survivors into a spreadsheet with a variety of information (piles of vital stats, a few comment blocks, whether or not the house had gas, a basement, and a fireplace, and finally a rating of how I evaluated it from those stats).
We pulled a list of favored houses off the spreadsheet, sent them to Paul to get more information, evaluated the received information, and requested some showings. And after sorting out the weird communications problem (in which he was not aware that when we said 'showing requested' we meant 'showing requested', because we had not specifically said we were interested in showings -- this still confuses the hell out of me) we started looking at the damn things.
Our first list of houses, about a half-dozen, included the survivors of our top ratings and one put on at near-whim -- it came on the market about a week before we were planning on doing our first showings, and happens to be across the street from
arawen and whispercricket.In the interim, we went poking about doing drive-bys of various things, scowling at neighborhoods, and discovering another house on the market around the corner from TI, which we wandered over to peer at during an open house with
whispercricket one day. (Very small, somewhat oddly furnished basement, but pleasantly decorated with Hindu icons.) We also did drive-bys and found another one (fairly high on our list) was open and peered at it. It had slightly small upstairs rooms and a really peculiar layout.Then we went to look at houses with Paul. And we pottered about looking at houses, starting with one that was one of
teinedreugan's favorites because of its large, open living room with a fieldstone column fireplace in the centre. That one was quite a nice house for someone else, alas.So we looked at other houses. Many of which were ... scary. At least one of which was scary in the 'this is not constructed well enough for us to be certain it won't fall down in a heavy storm' sort of sense. Others were scary in the 'mediocre construction and parrot-coloured shag carpet' sense.
By the time we got to the one across the street from TI, we were sort of cranky and discouraged and well and thoroughly of the opinion that we were going to have to cast a far wider net than the ones with the nice stats on the MLS. We peered at the one across the street from TI, which is in ... well, frankly, it's in terrible condition (and my sort of animistic sense of the place is that it's aware its siding is coming off and its windowsills are rotted and it's terribly, terribly sorry), and then we went inside, and started looking around, and it's ... actually quite a nice house. With a walk-up attic in excellent condition. The wiring is knob and tube and the chimney needs reconstructing, but the rest of it is sound. The land is excellent. And the location is pretty damn good for our desires.
It was sort of startling, really.
So we went and thought things over, and made lists of more houses to look at, and we looked at more houses.
teinedreugan loved Carter Street. And I will admit that the front room of the house on Carter Street was utterly fucking gorgeous. It was a big, open room, probably formerly two rooms, with the walls done in a knotty pine that had been polished to look like liquid ruddy gold done in woodwork. There was a wall sort of making a doorway into the leftmost chunk of room, with basically columns of that same red-golden wood and empty space there. Utterly fucking gorgeous.The house is a ranch, and the image is a sketch of its floor plan. It also has a basement (the stairs back in the corner go down there from the kitchen), which appeared to be constructed almost entirely out of linoleum. Basically, my sense of the house was that what there was of it that was house was all squished into the same space, and there was no separation between the private areas and the public areas, and I was not at all happy with that. Also, the impression that it had enough space to live in effectively was mostly based on the semi-finished basement rooms, see also 'made of linoleum', so ...
It went off the market pretty soon after we saw it -- there was an offer in, apparently, but not an accepted one, and they finalised it when we didn't make an offer immediately, I think.
We looked at other houses. Some of which had nice ... bits. If I could have taken all the features of houses we saw that I liked and cobbled them together into another house, that would have been quite nice. Like the one with the nice kitchen with the skylights and the stone-floored breakfast room which had no insulation and in some of the upstairs rooms things like the light fixtures swinging from wires hanging from the ceiling. I might nick the kitchen (with added insulation, at least) but definitely the breakfast room, that was a nice ... hundred square feet or so.
Then there was the one that was apparently constructed entirely out of smoke and laid out by someone on a particularly interesting hallucinogen. The image here is of the upstairs. The back stairs (at the top) go up from the kitchen; the front stairs from near the front door.Note the lack of bedrooms that are, y'know, private and not throughways to the other room.
Also, the blue-tinted room?
Is the bathroom.
Amazingly enough, this was our second-choice house for a while.
The yard was covered in wild strawberries. It was a fairly limited yard, but all strawberries.
Meanwhile, through all of this, we are trying to sell our extant house. We talked to one realtor, who basically shot down our hopes for selling it as high as we were wanting to, but was generally cynical about selling it at all. So we talked to a second one, who was much more cheerful and optimistic about the matter, and who was willing to shoot for what we needed on the thing.
We put it up for sale, and got no response for a week or two, by which point we were neurotic. Then we had people who wanted to see it, then more people, then a gap of a week, then third people.
We put in an offer on the house across the street from TI. This was an interesting thing. The house needs probably $40-50K of work done on it promptly -- not just the 'wiring so old it's uninsurable' problem, but the siding and the masonry and all that stuff. It was also, for the current state of the market, $40K overpriced or so. So we put in an offer for what the house would be worth in good condition less the amount of work it needed, and figured we'd see if the owners showed any signs of reality.
A reported conversation between our agent and the sellers' agent went something like:
Paul: You are aware that the house is overpriced, yes?
Agent: I didn't have anything to do with the price. The sellers set it.
Paul: Okay. I have clients who may be interested in it, but the offer will be low. It will be what it's worth, okay?
Agent: Understood.
Paul: Are you willing to talk sense into your clients?
Agent: I understand that will be necessary.
(This is not the first funny conversation they had, the first one went something like, "So, this house was on the market a year ago. Have the sellers done any work on it in the time it was off the market?" "*nervous giggle* No.")
Response from the owners: We won't even consider an offer less than {what the house would be work if it were in good condition}.
Our response: Well, hell. That level of crazy isn't worth arguing with.
(That house has since come down in price? $5K down. No acquaintance with reality whatsoever.)
Somewhere around here we expanded the area we were looking in, because we'd looked at most of the houses available to us that were even remotely tolerable, and been sort of frustrated by that. So we started looking in Billerica, and found a rather nice house that we liked a good deal, which is laid out almost exactly like my mother-in-law's house, which was kind of disturbing. It had a few drawbacks -- including being further away from people than we really wanted to be looking, being on well and septic, and the road it was on -- but generally a nice house.
After the offer on the one house fell through, we scraped together an offer for this one, got it in, and found that they'd accepted an offer a day and a half or so before we got our act together.
We spent a while staring into space in a sort of depressed, frustrated way, in between packing up all our stuff and moving it into storage in Stoneham because we'd sold the house and were needing to vacate the premises. The prospect of starting over on the whole thing with fewer prospects (because we'd been through everything) was really, really damn depressing.
So we moved into TI with
arawen and whispercricket at the end of September, with most of our stuff in storage.teinedreugan's car needed a checkup, so we arranged to have Paul meet us at the dealership and take us around to look at houses. And we puttered around and looked at houses, mostly in Billerica, with a few in Woburn and miscellany.We found a new house and new backup house or two. There was some drama and sorting out about bus access, but we discovered a bus line that would be usable for me, thereby rendering it not horrible social isolation worse than Lynn. The one we liked best was a bit out of our range of affordability, but we were willing to give it a go and offer at what we thought we could afford with a little negotiation space.
Counteroffer: 5K price drop.
Counter-counter: 7.5K raise.
Response: No.
We said, "Argh."
We scraped together our best of all worlds final offer and submitted that.
Phone call from Paul a bit later began, "People are assholes." Which says a lot about working with Paul, really. They counter-countered our final offer.
We stared at it.
We said, "Fuck it." And countered.
They accepted.
So there was thrashing about. And then the inspection. We climbed on rocks to look at the roof, we puttered about, we found mold in the attic, the upper bathroom fan vents into the attic, not outside, there is vanishingly minor termite damage in the basement, two cracks in the foundation, the electrical box had no cover, and the furnace is twenty-three years old and a piece of crap with ducts that haven't been cleaned since probably the first Bush administration. Also, radon levels in the house high. (
teinedreugan suggests the foundation cracks are relevant to this.)We wrote a little, "Dudes, fix this stuff or we won't buy the house!" letter.
After some argument, we settled on what they would do (get termite treatment done, fix the electrical box, service and repair but not replace the furnace). Also, if radon was confirmed with a second test, some money back at closing towards amelioration. The argument included a great deal of detail about the furnace that Paul wrote, which was taken out, which was put back in, which was taken out, which the sellers' lawyer agreed to put back in, which was finally settled as 'we know they're not doing all this, but it's in writing anyway'.
Inspection to confirm they'd done the necessary stuff was scheduled for last Saturday. We got a call saying, "No, no, wait, we're not done yet! Come look on Tuesday!" We said mutter mutter, whatever, yeah, sure. On Monday, a "No, no, wait, we're not done yet! Come look on Thursday!" Which provoked me making the following post to rasfc:
- <hairpulling neurosis mode>
And now the inspection has been rescheduled until *Thursday*.
Because they haven't gotten the ducts cleaned.
How can they have mysteriously not gotten the ducts cleaned? They gave
all indication that they were going to have someone in to do it today?
Did that person bliv on the scheduled appointment or something? Are
these people lying to us about their willingness to clean the damn
ducts? Has there been a sudden alien abduction of chimneysweeps,
presumably because the intergalactic war needs more luck?
Auuugh!
</neurosis>
Okay, no time to be crazy, must wash more towels.
So on Thursday we went to look at the work, confirmed that things had been done -- including replacing some of the ductwork from the furnace, which was, frankly, kind of frightening before.
And we checked which side the washing machine was on, because I ranted about that a bit when we were looking at washers and dryers in the store.
So it looks like it'll be okay, and we'll close next Friday.
The new house has a partially wooded lot, including a gi-fucking-gantic oak tree next to the driveway, but with open clear space on the south side where I will have space to garden. It's a split-entry gambrel. Two bathroom, three bedroom, giant room in the basement that screams out "Game in me!" The living room has a big black beam running across its ceiling. Various of the interior fiddly bits are in weird condition, but easy enough to repair or replace.
There's space for me to set up a studio.
It's further away from people than I wanted, but I'll do my best to deal with that.
As
pameladean said when we got the last one, "Houuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse!"
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Congratulations.
P.