House hunting, a home-sweet-home MMP

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Heh we gave nicknames to the various housing horrors we saw during our extensive house-hunting search.

There was the “House of Horror” - that one had a mostly unfurnished basement of the bare-concrete-and-stone kind, with for some reason a fully-furnished bedroom tucked in the back - with bars over the only window and a hasp for a padlock on the OUTSIDE. WTF? Did Boo Radley live there?

There was “the Cliff Dwelling” - had about a 50’ drop from the backyard to the neighbours’. The garage was slowly being undermined by erosion and was held in place by a couple of unconvincing bricks. The neigbours to each side had concrete revetments worthy of Normandy defences on D-Day.

There was “Cigarette House” - owned by that statistical anomaly: a 90 year old woman who smoked three packs a day and lived to tell the tale. Left some 60 years’ worth of tar on the walls, which were positively sticky with carcenogens. The stink was enough to be physically unpleasant - as was the thought of how much you’d have to rip out to get rid of it (I was thinking a paint job wouldn’t have been enough).

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Hi folks!

We bought our first house together in Summer 2000. We had been living here in CT for a year and were ready to buy. We fell in love with a colonial on an acre of land surrounded by wetlands and open space, in a nice neighborhood. I knew I wanted this house when we drove down the driveway! We walked away when the owners were being unreasonable, but they came back to us. We got the house and have been there almost 10 years.

Longest I’ve ever lived anywhere.

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Oh, Noonie, I have missed you.

Somebody cheer me up. This lack of jobs thing is depressing me. I’d work in healthcare if I could (like all of my other friends), but I don’t think I could handle the backs of my hands twitching all the time. (Thanks IV drugs that saved my life despite my needlephobia!)

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I think Puck wins the house horror contest hands down. :eek:

Howdy Java! Glad the recovery is goin’ well.

Welcome back Spaz! Now that you are all settled, will Agony Aunt Ryl be in bidness again? :smiley:

Special1 I actually hid out of town to avoid signing a mortgage on a house I had found out was about to be repoed by the VA. Turns out due to some quirk in the law (at least at that time) the people I bought from could have reclaimed the house in a year and I’d have been just sol about it. Literally, my realtor paid for me to go hide in a hotel out of town. We concocted a story about an emergency to put off the signing and then just sort of, ummm… never did reschedule. Your story made me think of that, though I don’t know why cause the two stories are not exactly related. That’s why it’s so much fun inside my haid!

Ok, takin’ off to go meet OYKW for N.O.L..

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Hm. We haven’t bought yet, but our first apartment was a studio (called a bachelor apartment here), and while we were living there the very sweet superintendent was replaced by this scary Middle European guy with an apparent allergy to fixing anything.

We had a romantic candlelit bathroom for three months because he wouldn’t fix where the bulb had shorted and somehow fused itself into the socket.

It was a moment of sweet revenge when he was showing our place to someone, just before we moved out, and he said, (Heavy accent)" And thees iss the closet" (Opens closet, door falls off on him). Hee!
Nat has not adjusted to the time change, I have been up since five. Am not enjoying that.

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Hi all. Long time gone.
When Hubby and I were looking for a house the realtor showed us one that had 106 stairs to get to it. No garage, just a parking spot at the bottom by the stairs. The “yard” was four feet deep in english ivy and rats.
Once up the 106 stairs, there was another flight of stairs to get into the house; it was on stilts. Inside there was a kitchen and one huge room with a metal fireplace (orange) in a sea of (orange) shag.
At the back, in the center of the big room was a box. It couldn’t really be called a room, because the walls didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. It was the bathroom. No bedrooms.
There was a (?!?) garage under the back half of the basement, but no driveway.
The floor sloped toward the street, waaay down the hill.
The price was at the tippy top of our range. The realtor kept saying “But the view is worth it!”

We didn’t buy it. We’ve been by since then. Some one tore it down and built a real house.

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But of course! It’s a seven-day week of AAR if you ignore the fact that going out Halloween night took priority over snarkin’.

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Hey, it’s like Homecoming Week in the MMP! :slight_smile: Welcome back, long-lost Mumpers.

Malthus, you should see the house a friend of a friend used to live in. It was a huge old Victorian in Parkdale, complete with cold cellar and slaughter room in the basement. Creeeeeepy.

Hockey Monkey, I have nothing to say except EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

OK, off I go in search of edible gold flakes for Shopaholic Friend’s bachelorette. There’s only one store in the whole bloody city that sells them, and they’re only open from 10am-5pm during the week. Joy. I will be sooo glad when this is all done… I’m exhausted from all this wedding crap, and it’s not even my wedding! There’s been a full-day bridal shower already, and still to go are the bachelorette party plus girlie sleepover, the “official” City Hall wedding and post-wedding dinner, the mani-pedi party, the week-long destination wedding, and last (but not least) a full-blown reception at home for everyone who couldn’t make it out to the wedding.

Ugh.

I think I might just sneak off to City Hall when it’s my turn, and take everyone out for pints and wings at the local pub to celebrate afterwards… no muss, no fuss.

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Only here to say I’m here. That’s pretty much the extent of what’s new with me.

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Could you post the link one more time for those of us who keep forgetting to book mark it? Pretty please? :smiley:

Really bad start to the day here at work. I’m about two hours behind because things are running so badly and I had to go kick someone else out of the database in order to get my stuff done, which I feel really bad about 'cause they have work to do too. But we’ve got an EOD deadline and being two hours behind just isn’t helping at all. So I’m grouchy now. We really need our own database so we don’t interfere with anyone else and we don’t have to wait for everyone else in order to get our stuff done. But that’s not a priority for anyone other than us.

No real house horror stories. The ones we looked at for my senior year of college were cheap and not really great, but not horrific either. The one we ended up with didn’t have insulation under the floor so the wind just blew through in the winter and it was really cold. Oh and the hot water heater broke, which they replaced, which was good, but they used bread in sweating the pipes (which I guess is a common thing to do… I dunno anything about that), and some of it got in to the pipes right before I went away for xmas break so the bread was in the hot water for a couple weeks before I got bad. It smelled really bad by the time I got back. They had to come back and drain the hot water heater and refill before I could use it. But that was really just inconvenient and a bit amusing, not terrible. The pipes burst there that winter too. (The lack of insulation probably didn’t help!) Just a cheap, poorly-cared-for place, but the maintenance guy was good about coming out when we needed things fixed.

Since then, it’s been much better, and each place has been an improvement over the last. Parking is just an example. That place had street parking. My next two had lot parking. Our first apartment after we moved out here had a detached garage. Now we had an attached garage. But both KT and I remember our past living arrangements well enough that we really appreciate what we have now!

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See? I told you he was alive!

Welcome back, all you people who’ve been away.

I’ve seen my share of interesting places.

I lived for a year in Castellón, which is on the mediterranean coast of Spain. The town itself and the people who live in the area are definitely NOT among my favorites, but let’s limit ourselves to housing issues, shall we? First, most of the people putting rentals up wanted to charge for the year the kind of prices one can get during the first two weeks of August. 2000€/month for 600sq ft… yeah riiiite. Hon, for that monthly payment you can buy a freaking house; you know, over 1500 sq ft in two levels, with a garage and a garden and all-new appliances? That kind of thing. The ones I saw which were in less-unbelievable price ranges were in totally-unbelievable states. There was one where I actually asked the realtor whether it didn’t make her feel even a little bit of shame to be showing a place where the single bathroom was so tiny you would hit the washbasin when coming out of the shower, which would be of great interest to a biologist… although not as much as the fridge. I hadn’t know you could get half a dozen different species of mould in the same fridge, but apparently you can.

The place I ended up renting was in a very small town. During the visit I learned a lot of things about the owners’ lifes that I couldn’t have cared less about. There were some things that needed fixing; they promised they’d get fixed by April 1st (which in Spain is not April’s Fools) and we signed. On April 1st nothing had been fixed. I called the agent and established that I would fix it myself and transfer the costs (an option preestablished in Spain’s Rental Law). At that point I’d been living in hotels since November and I would have applied a flamethrower to anybody who dared suggest spending one more night in one. There were problems with the cost transfer, and with getting the gas set up (the “old” situation was illegal - and the look in the face of the inspector when he realized it was so for the whole building was, ah, interesting), and then when the first year was up they informed me that I had to leave as they wanted to sell and I said “oh, I see” and left. But I left because I was going to leave anyway: according to Spanish law telling me they intended to sell was a mistake on the lines of walking into a police station and asking for weapons training because you’re planning on shooting at the King. “We want to sell” is not an acceptable reason to evict a tenant within the first five years plus according to the law, if you want to sell a tenanted place you have to offer it to the tenant first (and you can do this only after the first five years and/or if there has been a change in ownership due to something like an inheritance - “my sister who ran away with a truck driver is finding out how much a divorce costs so we want to sell” doesn’t cut it).

When I was looking for a place to buy for myself, I saw things like a 5th-floor flat “with lift” where the lift had clearly been an add-on and wasn’t large enough for a shopping trolley, much less a baby’s trolley or a wheelchair.
And then there was that one in Miami where you had to be a vegetarian (so why didn’t you put that in the ad?) but evidently there was no drug-free policy. Or that one time when I got transferred to Philadelphia; both the agent and the company employee who in theory was in charge of “helping people move” were angry that I’d foung my own place (885$/month, 550sq ft, loftish ground floor apartment, 6 blocks away from the office) rather than renting a “luxury apartment” the same size which would have cost upwards of 2K/month and been much farther… and by the way, later I saw one of the “luxury” apartments (a coworker who’d rented one gave a party) and it had the same shitty one-hand of white paint, the same horrid nylon-6,6 carpeting, a worse bathroom and a worse kitchen than mine.
Oh, and since I have the pictures and for those who didn’t enjoy them the first time, there was the bastard child of a XVII-century palace and a chinese dollar shop… This one is owned by my agent, I only spent a week there but in that week I got them to put internet up (I mean, seriously, how can you have a flat that’s used by computer geeks exclusively and not have internet there?) and to take several stunning pictures.

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When we were looking for a house in the heyday of Vegas Real Estate - there were lots and lots of new homes for very good prices. However, our real estate agent also wanted to show us a few older homes, just to let us see what is out there.

So we went to a home that was owned for many years by a Filipino nurse whom we met briefly on her way out of the house (that becomes relevant in a few minutes). I knew as we drove up that we would never consider the house; it had a HUGE front yard with a lawn. Having grown up in Illinois, I knew what that meant - lots of work mowing and trimming and watering and fertilizing for basically a piece of land you can never use, just for the benefit of neighbors and people driving by to see.
The house was a bit cramped with crap from over the years, and the dining room had three full walls of mirror! I felt like I was in a bizarre fun house.
But back to the Filipino nurse aspect. Looking out back, we could see the large, if outdated, swimming pool And the owner had installed a covered deck from the back door, running the entire length of the pool.
Now that sounds good - covered deck along side pool.
The Filipino nurse was probably about 4’5" tall and, I kid you not, the covered deck was only about 5 and 1/2 feet high! The entire length of the pool! I am over 6 feet tall and could not get out to the pool without having to bend down. When I finally got to the pool and turned around, my head was literally above the entire covered deck. It was as if the deck had been designed and built by Munchkins.
The real estate agent giggled and said, “I’m sure you could probably raise the deck a bit…”
The house was not even in the running - but if we had been interested, that would have been a huge problem and expense - most likely would have had to tear the entire deck down and start over.

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Hee! DMark that was funny! I have a good mental image of you and that covered deck.

I remember one house I looked at. I was supposed to look at it on a Firday afternoon but the owner called the realtor and asked if it could be Sunday afternoon so she could clean the place up a bit. I had no problem with that and appreciated the fact that she wanted the place to look decent. So, off realtor and I go on Sunday afternoon to see the house. The living room had folded laundry all over the sofa, love seat and two chairs. The dining room table had folded laundry all over it. There were cans of food sittin’ all over the counters in the kitchen. The bathroom, ummmm… looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months. I shudder to think what it looked like before she cleaned up. :eek: When we left, we drove down the street out of sight and the realtor pulled her car over. We looked at each other and cracked up for a good ten minutes wondering what the place had looked like two days ago. This is the same realtor who hid me out of town for three days. I really liked her.

LiLi I called you the MMP Domestic Goddess over in the frugality thread. :smiley:

I think I need a nappy poo.

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I love you too, Spaz :slight_smile:

Huh; while I’ve lived in (counts… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) different places in my life, most of these were one-year rentals. I’ve really spent most of my life in my parents’ apartment (where my father still lives) and in our own apartment (see story above) – in which I have now been for over 18 years (:eek::eek:!!)

ETA: I am floored when I think about the fact that my father has now been living in the same place (minus a few one-year Sabbaticals) for over 40 years now!!
Also, I find it amusing that after flopping around the country for a few years, I ended up a 5 minutes’ walk from where I grew up.

**Swampy **-- some people have all the fun… :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley:

Work is a lot more relaxed this week – we are up and running in the field since last Thursday with the two projects I was working on, with only unimportant to minor hitches, so I’ve actually worked 9* hours both days this week so far! :slight_smile:

  • Which is the norm here, rather than 8 hours a day like in the US.
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Like a good Lutheran, somewhere near the back of the church and a little late.

I have an excuse though - I was near Purdue U for Halloween and lost my glasses. And my “fall-backs” never got moved to our new car from our old car when we traded it in. Which means I’m typing this in my basement cave at work wearing sunglasses. And trying to convince my boss it isn’t because my pupils are blown or anything. Had a fantastic weekend all around the Lafayette area so even with $400 for new specs, its worth the cost.

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Forgot to say, Howdy Picu! Long time no see! BTW, I stil have that picture you painted for swampfest. It’s in the study (where I am now!) so I can see it whenever I’m on the 'puter.

I made N.O.T. salad. Dindin tonight is chili and cornbread. N.O.T. sallit does not go with that at all. Thus, tomorrow night’s dindin shall be burgers and N.O.T. sallit so I can justify the fact that I made it. Well, that and those few N.O.T. that looked like they were goin’ bad soon. I will not have miscreant N.O.T. in da cave!

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The verdict is in!

I have Shingles.

oh frackin yea.

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I know most of you have seen the photosof the place where we live now - before, in progress, and after. It was built and decorated in 1975, and pretty much stayed there. We’ve brought it at least into the late 90s. :smiley:

My very first apartment was in Coronado, CA, in (coincidentally) 1975. It was a studio apartment with a Murphy bed, and the entirety inside was 14’ X 24’. But I owned nothing, so it worked. The bathroom floor was a bit spongy around the toilet, but there was a lemon tree outside the window, which I thought was way cool! The highlight, tho, was the kitchen. The walls were paneled (so 70s!!) the countertops and backsplash were in pale yellow and pale green tile, and the fridge was pink. I called it my after dinner mint kitchen! It was cheap - $150 per month, furnished, utilities included. It was only a couple of miles from work, and it was perfect for a first apartment.

A friend of mine was in Coronado a few years ago, and she said the building had been torn down. Ah well.

The most, um, interesting apartment I’d ever had was the bottom floor of an old house in Lafayette, Indiana. The second unit was upstairs, and there was a third off the back of the house. It was very old, and I discovered when the landlord left the basement light on, I could see down there through a gap between the floor and the wall. :eek: My bathroom was built on what used to be the stairway landing, so I had 2 or 3 steps next to the tub where I could store stuff. The worst day there was when the folks in the back apartment moved out and the landlord sprayed for roaches. They fled that unit and filled mine… I literally had them crawling over me as I slept. MEGA-ICK!!!

Still not adjusted to the time change. I woke up at 3 this morning, and dozed on and off till my alarm went off at 5. Stoopit time change!

Daughter is in Virginia - she could be home within the hour, depending upon traffic. I guess they had a good time, but driving to Orlando for a weekend? Insanity.

Happy Monday!!!

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It’s not even 5pm and it’s already starting to get dark outside. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! Do Not Want!

Waking up to sunshine this morning was lovely, but I’m not enjoying this trade-off.