A former GF and I were looking at buying a house that had been used for growing pot. Turns out the house was owned by the proverbial little old lady who was the last of her family, and rented out rooms to college students (this was in a huge college town). The basement had things like a ruined pipe organ as well as the former hydroponic setup.
The GF and I decided not to buy because it was overpriced and the previous owner was a cat lady - the attic had shredded paper insulation that had a pervasive smell of cat pee. Not that we have anything against cats - between us, we had three.
Anyway, that’s the back story. A year or so later we were driving by and saw one of the new owners working in the yard. We stopped by to chat and found that they’d spent something like $200K fixing it up, including mitigating a major asbestos problem they didn’t know about when they bought (funny, I saw it when i looked at the basement).
I asked them what their biggest renovation headache was. Turns out it was people pounding on the doors and windows at all hours looking to buy drugs. :smack:
Pot isn’t like meth, where many chemicals may or may not have been used in it’s manufacture by people that have been up for weeks at a time. It’s just a plant. The same chemicals used in pot growing are used in the manner consistent with its labeling. (i.e. plant fertilizer is used as… plant fertilizer) This is why a house used as a methlab is bad. Meth cooks will use them in the kitchen, or living room, or basement, or wherever. The residue is actually quite difficult to remove without it being a health hazard. Whereas this is what a serious pot grow room looks like.
If the previous owner were running a serious grow operation they would be veryleery of mold, as the slightest bit could ruin a crop. Electrical work would be the worse offender, but it wouldn’t be hidden behind walls; the wiring would be all over the place and quite obvious.
Myself, I would get the inspection done like everyone else said and buy with confidence when/if no problems are found. I would also thank my lucky stars on finding a house with a discount for nothing and no one had to be murdered in it.
:rolleyes: Have you ever smelled pot before? It reeks. A lot.
Yeah, on second thought, a grow house doesn’t sound so good. When we think ‘grow house’ most of us first imagine people living in a house with marijuana in neat little flower pots on the windowsill, but that isn’t really how it is. Grow houses are usually uninhabited. People care for long-term human living space in very different ways than they do a plant growing space that is expected to be used by amateurs and busted within 3-5 years. Serious maintenance issues wouldn’t be fixed. Small roof leaks would be ignored. The temperature and heat would have been kept at levels ideal for not only plants but also mold and insects. The floors and walls would possibly moldy and soiled. Water problems in the basement, ignored. People would make holes wherever they wish for wiring and piping and ducts.
Mold and electrical problems would be my concern. An inspection would certainly be called for, and it could be made a condition of sale.
Having sold one house in the relatively recent past, I did notice that more than a few prospective buyers wanted some kind of assurance that the house we were selling had never been used for growing marijuana. Our realtor explained that requiring this disclosure was growing (pardon the pun) increasingly common in Canada. She went on to say that if it ever had been used for such purposes, we could still sell it, but we had to disclose the information.
Sounds like this is what is happening here: the seller may or may not have been growing the stuff, but since the house was used for that purpose at some point, he has to say so. A good home inspection should answer a lot of questions about the shape of the house now, regardless of what it was used for in the past.
I’m not up on this stuff, but aren’t there small-scale growers that aren’t as into it as all that? People who grow where they live? Like the hydroponic basement setup mentioned above? I mean, many serious maintenance issues and holes in the walls such as you describe would be visible to a casual observer, and it doesn’t sound like that’s the case with this house in Toronto.
On the other hand, I actually think professional mold tests are a good idea for any prospective house with relative humidity above 40%, but then I’m very very allergic to mold. When we were house-shopping in New England, it turned out that two of the three houses on our short list had such bad mold issues in the basement or crawl space that the first floors’ air quality was also affected – but there was just a faint musty smell in some rooms, nothing obvious. I actually didn’t notice the musty smell in one house until I opened a utility closet, since the place had been freshly painted. The crawl space there was a horror show: thousands of huge moldy dead spiders on their huge moldy spiderwebs. There hadn’t been any grow operation – the large yard bordered a marshy area, and even though the house was sensibly situated on the site at the highest point etc., well, it wasn’t enough. (shudder)
Sure there are; it might be completely innocuous. Especially in the US, every drug operation has to be exaggerated to sound like a serious menace to the neighborhood, whether it was a windowsill pot plant or an industrial meth lab. That’s just the political climate. Going into the situation blind, you don’t know. Forewarned is forearmed.
This is the first potential issue with the “grow house” that comes to mind. A good inspection should turn up any problems related to electrical wiring and mold. Heat damage might be another consideration.
While the pot growing wouldn’t necessarily dissuade me from making a (probably low) offer on a house, I wouldn’t go near any property ever used for meth manufacture, no matter what assurances there were that all the toxic waste had been removed…
I think disclosure of a grow op is something mandated by law in Ontario now.
Yes, small flowerpots are innocuous. There’s a large industry in Canada (don’t know about the USA) of buying/renting a house, and basically sealing it up and using it as a greenhouse. The humidity an temperature are set to high to aid in the gowing (like 85F to 100F).
They set up tube ducting by cutting 18-inch holes between the floors, and of course installed high-power sun-lamps everywhere with jury-rigged electricty. The exhaust was vented into the attic so there was no obvious plume of steam coming from the house. In worst case, grow-ops have such extensive mold problems that clean-up is not possible.
Usually the Hydro company is looking for grow-op patterns in electrical consumption, so the perps bypass the meter - in the Holmes episode, they chopped an 8-inch hole in the foundation, reached through that to connect to live wires on the house feed. While they were at it, they knocked down the brick wall between the basement and garage (fire/CO safety wall) to load in private. Of course, they have no qualms about taking out drywall to opn the place up, exposing more wood to mold.
So you may need professional work to remove the mold; in one case I read about, the police would not let anyone into the house except in a moon suit, the mold spores were so bad. Also, as mentioned above, no matter how confident he is that the problem is dealt with, the next buyer may not have his confidence - it will probably always sell at below market value unless there is an audio-visual presentation of the repairs done and certified tests by professional labs that it is clean… (under the new rules that mandatory disclosure will probably follow the hosue forever).
My suggestion is to skip this, leave the headache for someone else, unless the seller is prepared to present iron-clad documentation what has been done to repair the house or that the damage was minimal.
Damn irresponsible pot growers. You don’t need 100% humidity and you definitely don’t need 100F temps. Indoors you do need excellent air circulation and ventilation. Mold is death to most plants, pot included and it’s just amateur allowing mold anywhere near the growing area.
