House hunting, a home-sweet-home MMP

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

I used house in the generic sense in my title. We’ve all had to find a place to live at one time or another, whether buying or renting, house or condo or trailer or refrigerator box under an overpass. I, personally, have a few tales to share of some more memorable places we’ve seen. I hope you can share some, too.

The first one was in Feb or Mar 1984. FCD and I were newlyweds, looking for our first place together (the crappy triplex unit I was living in was, well, crappy.) We decided we wanted to live on Lake Asbury, which is a man-made spring-fed lake in Clay County, Florida. The first few houses we looked at were ranch style and OK, but not exciting. Our realtor told us of one that had a 2-car garage with a bonus room, so we were excited to see it.

I want to pause here and set the scene. You know how when a flight of stairs isn’t under another flight, you typically just have a wall facing you as you descend? It usually extends the ceiling height of the upper floor, so it’s a large blank space. Well, the stairs between the garage level and the bonus room had such a wall. And mounted on this wall was the taxidermied back end of a white tail deer with its tail up and its little butt hole right there for the world to see. Oh yeah, classy. To this day, we refer to it as the Deer Butt House. We didn’t buy that one, but not because of the ass…

Fast forward to late 1996/early 1997. FCD had just gotten a job in Fredericksburg, VA, and I was expecting an offer in Dahlgren, VA. We were house shopping in King George, which was pretty much in between the two. One of the houses we looked at was not staged very well. It was owned by a single man. There was a motorcycle in the dining room. In the kitchen was a Styrofoam head with a woman’s wig on it, and assorted styling tools on the table. We assumed at the time that the guy was studying to be a beautician, but maybe not. :eek:

A week or so later, we went to see a 2-story colonial on ¾ acre. Wonderful curb appeal, a circular driveway, lots of trees between the house and the road, a nice porch. The house was owned by the builder – he was building another house in a ritzier neighborhood, so he had this one on the market. He was a hunter.

Inside the house, we saw a bobcat, a fox, assorted fowl and fish, assorted deer parts (no butt, tho) and three, count ‘em, THREE BEARS!! One was standing on his hind legs with his forelegs in the air. One was on all fours, looking to the side as if to say “Don’t shoot me, bro!” The third was a rug. We called that the “Dead Animal House.”

I mentioned that the seller was the builder because in the dining room, there was a large water stain on the ceiling. The upstairs water heater had leaked. They had replaced it and had it sitting in an overflow tray, so that wasn’t a problem. But this guy was a builder. He had people working for him – like painters. And yet he couldn’t be bothered to slap a coat of white on the ceiling in the dining room!

We bought that house. We got a great deal because it had been on the market so long and he had to sell before his new place was finished. It took me a whole hour to paint the ceiling. :rolleyes: Had he removed the zoo and painted himself, I’m sure he’d have sold faster and at his price. What an idiot!

Maybe later on, I’ll tell you about some apartments I had… Your turn!

Happy Monday!!!

#2

Woot! First!

#3

Missed my edit window…

I lived in a lot of rented property so it was always a bit questionable, and you were pretty much at the mercy of hte landord if anything went wrong. Most of them didn’t mind if you wanted to do some decorating as long as it wasn’t anything too outlandish. When I came to actually buying a house, it took me a long while to find something that really suited me, a lot of the places I could afford where not where I wanted to live, and weren’t in particualrly good condition. Some of them had a fair amount of “original features” which in a 1930s house isn’t always a bonus!

Now I live with 'im indoors in the Fortress, it’s not a great place and it needs an awful lot of work on it. FCM, if you ever fancy a busman’s holiday, I can recommend an excellent remodelling project over here!

#4

I actually haven’t lived too many places. We lived in one house until I was 3 and then moved to where we are now. When I was 25 I moved out and bought my own place. Just like** BooFae**, I remember how tricky it was finding a place that was decent and in my price range. The first place that I absolutely fell in love with was quite a dump with ‘lots of potential.’ Well, there’s alot we missed when looking at that place. For instance, like the gigantic crack in the foundation where somebody had run into the house! But the house I ended up buying was very nice and very me. I’m sure I’d have stayed there awhile if not for my misguided desire to save the world. :smiley:

Ok, so I’ve got a couple of pictures of us in our Halloween gear. My apologies if you’ve already seen them on facebook and they’re old news. :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

Recovering from a hysterectomy. Today is D21. :stuck_out_tongue: Was able to shower myself last night. Feeling better everyday. I hope this finds all of you feeling great!!!:):p;)
d_l COFFEE!!

#6

W00T! First in! :D:D:D

Congrats on the shower, Java!

#7

OSIM. Blurf.

Durned time change really messed with my head last night. I woke at 3 AM today, which was 4AM yesterday, and 4:45 is my usual wake up time for work days.

Mooooooom, the Vunderlair is a former dead animal house. VWife’s whip cracking is in large part to get me to erase all remnants of The Former Denizen’s lingering testosterone and stuffed critters. The wall paneling with hunting scene prints on it was something to behold.

Even worse was the house in Indiannoplace, which was stuck in the 60s, and had metallic wallpaper with Albrecht Durer-esque woodcut prints of naked people on it. We were convinced the former owners were elderly swingers.

#8

Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and Caffienatin’.

Nice OP MOOOOOOM! I’ve lived in a few ummmm… interestin’ dwellings myself. One was a trailer in a rural area where I taught school for a year. I stayed there for six months. One night there was a horrible storm. Lots of rain, lightning and wind, as in tornado warnings. :eek: I left and went to this little all night diner place about a block away and spent the night. I did not spend another night in that trailer. It was rockin’ and swayin’ when I left. Just… :eek:

Then I rented a one bedroom house across the street from a railroad track. Trains are really noisy in the middle of the night. Did y’all know that?

I had one really cool one bedroom apartment in an old house. I liked that apartment. It had cable though I don’t think it was supposed to, bein’ as everyone else in the building had to pay for cable. Also, in the living room and bedroom, all the wall plugs were part of the common power for the building. I found that out just before I moved in. I had not had power switched from my old place to this one yet and was there figurin’ out how I was goin’ to arrange bedroom furniture and even though I knew there was no power yet, for some reason switched on a floor lamp that was in the bedroom. The place for reasons I never understood, came with three floor lamps, one in the bedroom and two in the livin’ room. Anyway, the lamp came on. Hmmmm… I thought. I checked out the lamps in the livin’ room and lo and behold there was light! The ceiling lights did not work though until I switched the power over. So, I had free power and cable cause, well, if one’s wall plugs work for free, why would one ever want to turn on a ceilin’ light, right? Oh and the stove was electric and worked for free too. I checked that out.

My first house was built in the 1940s and looked like it. A bedroom, bathroom and laundry were added on in the 60s. The bathroom was black and pink. Lovely! Plus central a/c was added in the 60s. The original unit was still there. The place needed work but I knew that when I bought it. I knew the roof would need replacing in a few years and I knew the furnace, hot water heater, stove and a/c unit were really old. I had an option to buy warranty insurance on all that stuff that covered the first eighteen months I owned the house. I took it. During that eighteen months, the stove, water heater and furnace were thoughtful enough to die so I got each one replaced for a hundred dollar deductible. The a/c decided not to die until two years after I bought the place. Oh and six months after I moved in there was a huuuuuuuuuuuuge hailstorm, so I got the roof replaced by homeowner’s insurance. All I paid for the new roof was a $250 deductible. That was luck! I also put in new flooring, remodeled the kitchen, totally repainted and recarpeted the place. The carpet was :eek: burnt orange shag :eek: throughout the place when I bought it.

Then I bought a brand new house which was a really nice small house. However, I really wanted to have a house built. Thus after three years, I sold it, moved into an apartment and had da cave built. Cave is now paid for, so here I remain for now.

CutiePie you devil you! :smiley:

#9

You would have been, if there wasn’t already an MMP here!

Come on over and join us, java! Glad to hear you’re feeling better and making good progress too.

#10

I wanna house with a deer butt! And then people could come in and say, “I love your deer butt!” and I’d say, “Thanks, my boyfriend thinks it’s pretty precious as well.” :smiley:

#11

Merged duplicate threads.

twickster, MPSIMS moderator

#12

'Sup Mumpers! I’m usually not up this early seeing as how I typically go to bed between 3 and 4 am these days. Lady wants to come see my washer/dryer that I’m selling. At 9 am. I’m getting pretty motivated to sell it as you can plainly see by my being up at the ungodly hour of 8:30. :smiley:

I’ve lived in some pretty questionable places, but I don’t think I can top the deer butthole. Except maybe that when my first husband and I were looking for houses, we went to an open house where the real estate agent was grilling on the back deck and the beer was flowing. The homeowners were drunk and wanted us to go skinny dipping with them in the pond out back. We ended up buying that house, (huge mistake) and when we moved in, we found used condoms all over the place where the real estate agent had continued to use the house for “private parties” after the homeowner had moved out. Heh, I think that might just top deer butt! :slight_smile:

#13

Ouch. Welcome back, Java.

#14

When The Boy and I were house-hunting two years ago, we saw our fair share of weird and ugly houses… my favourite has got to be the one we nicknamed “The Orange House”. It was pretty obvious that the owner had bought the house with the intent of flipping it, but was either horribly inexperienced or just lacking in taste.

So why “The Orange House”, you ask? Well, they had also painted the lower half of every single wall in the house orange. Just the bottom half. I’m guessing they grabbed paint from the mistint bin, too, because it wasn’t a consistent orange… one room was cantaloupe, another was mandarin, another was peach, and so on and so forth. It was like walking through a giant Creamsicle.

To add insult to injury, the bathroom fittings and light fixtures were all relics from the 1970s - I’m talking brass and beveled glass, everywhere you looked. shudder And speaking of bathrooms, the only shower in the house was located on the first floor (the upstairs bath was just a WC). Yup, nothing says convenience like being able to walk out of the shower and straight into the kitchen for your breakfast, right? :slight_smile:

And no, we didn’t buy it. You can fix a bad paint job, but moving a shower up a whole floor, not so much.

On the other hand, our house was pretty much perfect, aside from three very ugly cubist paintings of naked ladies next to the stairs. Thankfully, the owner kept those for himself when he moved out. :slight_smile:

#15

Blerfy McBlerfalot here.

We had a grand time at the concert, but didn’t get home until almost midnight. That’s WAAAY past my bedtime, and the alarm clock got smacked severely at 4:40 am. I got up at 5:05, and was only a few minutes late.

Houses? Oh my! I’ve lived in a few doozies! (All rentals.) There was the one with the leaky roof. We’re talking every pot and pan all around the room. There was the palmetto bug infested trailer with the “soft” floor in the hallway. We’re lucky we never fell through the floor! There was the one house we looked at before they had it ready to show. OMG! The owners had moved out, and there was a cleaning crew there. The owners had large dogs. There was an outdoor atrium that was a foot deep in dog shit! The carpets reeked of dog urine, and the drywall was filthy from the floor up about 2 feet. We passed on that house, even though it was absolutely wonderful (other than the damage!) Built-in bookcases, Mexican tile floor in the kitchen, and a little study on the landing of the stairs.

My current house is definitely a fixer upper, and we’re slowly getting it all fixed.

#16

Hello everybody! Long time no see… :o

When we were apartment-hunting back in '91, our major excitement was that, through a trick of fate, our rental contract was to be up 28 days after our wedding. And we needed to be married to get the best mortgage.
Going through all the hoops to get the mortgage signed and the money to the owners of the place we bought – all within 4 weeks – was fun.
Not.
We did pull it off, though!!!

(of course, the fact that we would have been able to get a short-term loan to cover the interim had we failed to secure the mortgage check on time – or rather, our parents could get one for us – and that getting the mortgage was a foregone conclusion, just the date it would be approved wasn’t, helped with the decision to go ahead. This way we just didn’t have to pay the usurious rate we would have had to pay on that 2-3 month “bridging” loan.)

We got lucky on the place we got though… we started looking in the winter of '91, pretty much while Iraq I was still being fought (and Tel Aviv was still getting occasionally hit by a Scud missile.) So the real-estate market was not only dead, it was buried, exhumed, cleaned to the bones, burned and the ashes cast out to sea…

And the owner of the place we bought was committed to paying his own new place, which he had signed for in the fall of '90, before all hell broke loose.

Needless to say, we got the place for about 75c on the $ relative to what it should have gone for :smiley:

Actually, no horror stories on the way there… Oh, quite a few owners and realtors trying to sell the property as something more than it was, but hey, that’s part of the game… :slight_smile:

#17

Hi everybody. Guess who’s back online? :smiley:

When I was apartment-hunting last month I was faced with a choice between two places that were pretty much across the street from each other. In one place I would have been sharing a place with a married couple, it wasn’t furnished, and I couldn’t have my cat. The other place was a university-style suite apartment with one other girl living there, the other three rooms were empty, it was furnished, and I could have my cat. Me and Petercat and Bobbyefroggye like our new place very much.

Life’s been nuts the last few weeks. I’m looking for a new job because the current one is run by a right bitch. Moody Friend and half of the old staff at Duckwood Suites has gone down to a new hotel downtown that opens tomorrow. Cute Coworker was forced out/quit last week and his roommate’s leaving too. I, however, cannot find a job in my @#@# field because of the budget cuts. I’m going to talk to some people at the library at ECU about how to go about finding a historically-oriented job because I’m not staying at Duckwood more than a year if I can help it. Having said that, I’m pretty well established there and the team’s starting to come together. It’s not my bag, though, man.

#18

Me?
You?
Both of us together…?

I like the last idea best! :slight_smile:

#19

Not a lot of different houses…first house a 70-year-old salt box Colonial in New England. It had a full cellar, remodeled attic and a two-story barn on a big fenced lot. The wiring was old and not up to par and the kitchen had four doors and three six-foot windows, making counter space a premium.

After that were rentals for a while, the most interesting of which was a log cabin in Wilson, Wyoming (Pop 300). I say it was a log cabin but the kitchen, bath, and second bedroom were part of a travel trailer that the cabin had been built around. Odd, to say the least.

My current abode, Rancho Anachi, was custom home built for a wheelchair bound control freak. He didn’t want to sell and made it very difficult for us to even see the inside. As a final insult, he made off with the garage door openers. We always say the house is a whore because it looks good but you end up paying through the nose. There’s not one home repair or remodel job that didn’t have at least one WTF aspect. But we do love it, warts and all.

hockey monkey :eek: ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!

#20

Flurb. Monday. Caffeinated. Woke up to the wife experiencing severe cramps because she got her first monthly cycle in almost a decade. (She has PCOS, and it appears the medications she’s taking for it are only just now starting to make a significant difference after almost a year of taking them.) She took some stuff for it and was feeling a little better when I left for work.

House/apartment hunting? Yeah, been there numerous times. No houses – never been able to afford one (at least not until recently, but we haven’t looked into a house yet.), so mine’s all been about apartments.

I’ve seen my share of apartments both hirise and basement which we didn’t take for a variety of reasons. There was one ground-level basement apartment that had a yuuuuuge living area and dining area, but it was at the expense of sleeping quarters, of which there were two, both about six feet wide and the largest about 15 feet long, both at the front of the house and had to be passed to reach the living room. Bad arrangement. There was the nice Italian-style ground-level basement we saw that was beautiful, with all new kitchen appliances and other accoutrements with a sunken living room and two bedrooms, but was a bit cramped. Then the hirise apartment which was up nice and high and had a lovely view but whose living room offered almost no wall space to put anything because there were exits off in 3 directions and the window at the back.

Anyway, the only even moderately interesting story of moving was my first move-out, the first time I left home to live somewhat on my own. I was actually moving in with a friend of mine and his parents, who had a house built in the flea-speck town of Seabright, ON, right on Lake Dalrymple (literally about 50 feet from the shore), about a half hour from the small town of Orillia and 15 minute drive from the nearest convenience store – which also happened to have the nearest streelights. This was a town with a three-digit population sign and a thousand trees per person. It was a stark contrast to another nearby spit of a town whose welcome sign defied conventional scientific wisdom by occupying the same spot in space as its farewell sign.

It was a lovely house though – very big and spacious, but only the top floor was done. The ground-level basement was largely bare concrete and exposed wiring. And I mean exposed. I was talking to my friend, K, once, not really paying attention as I wandered about the basement for the first time and brought my bare arm to rest on a protrusion from a load-bearing volume. I didn’t realize what the protrusion was until my entire arm started vibrating and getting warm, at which point I yelped and reflexively broke contact with the electrified metal place where the breakers were being installed. My arm still felt like it was vibrating.

“Yeah, you should watch out for that, there’s like a thousand volts going through it,” K said.
I knew jack about electricity but that sounded kind of bad. And late. “Thanks for the heads up.”

I joined a project called Futures, which at the time was a government-funded project younger folk could join to get paid job skills improvement and job placement assistance when they felt you were ready to work somewhere. It was only something like $400 a month but that covered my rent and got me some food and stuff, plus some books to read. (I was into Piers Anthony at the time.) Outside of that though there was very nearly sweet bugger all to do in Seabright. There was fishing, though we never caught anything. The mosquitoes, however, caught plenty of their preferred game. And you could go pick your own berries at a farm if you wanted. The trailer park lot next to where we lived sometimes had some lively entertainment going on that consisted largely of campfires and someone strumming a guitar.

We did have some fun up there though. There was a pretty good party we attended for someone’s birthday, a rather enjoyable dance that K had DJed, and the time he and I damn near broke our necks riding his 4 wheeled ATV through a field at night.

I only lived there some 3 months or so, and ended up moving back home late that summer. On my return trip (by bus) to Toronto, almost as if to say what Orillia thought of a city slicker like me, I was to find out as I got progressively worse throughout the course of that day, that the town had given me a parting gift consisting of chicken pox.

That’s a whole other story.