House maundering, part 2

It's really remarkable how time keeps passing, whether you pay attention it or not.

Our last thrilling installment was posted September 8, almost two weeks ago. I hadn't caught the story up to date, and there's been new story since then. But onward. This doesn't quite bring me up to date, either, but that's because things keep happening.

Last I wrote, I'd been considering that adding $30,000 worth of improvements to a $70,000 house might not be the smartest idea. Even if it was now a $125,000 house, which is what the last assessment pegged it at, best I could recall.

So I'd called Bob Williams for the third time. He'd been recommended to me in the mid-1980s, probably from Pamela and DD-B, though I'm not sure. He was a Carleton alumnus (as am I), so there was that point of connection. The first time around, I was looking for a condo or townhouse. I ended up with a place at 26th and Pleasant that was definitely a mixed blessing. I paid too much for it, though it took me rather a while to figure that out. On the other hand, it was an 8% assumable mortgage at a time when that was a good deal. I took about an $18,000 loss on the place when I finally sold it in 1995. But Bob did find me a buyer (even though I had to write a check at the closing) in a tough market.

The second time, when I decided to sell the condo, I was looking for a three-bedroom townhouse. I wanted my own entrance, and to feel that the space was my own. On the other hand, I wasn't ready to take care of my own grounds and roof and external repairs yet. On the gripping hand, I'd been involved with the condo association, and that was no fun either, with association fees and extra assessments and lack of participant and delinquent renters. Bob took me to look at a bunch of townhouses, and the price range kept creeping up and the distance kept getting farther and farther out. And I kept saying "What I really want is something like Pamela and DD-B's place that has three bedrooms plus some extra space." And finally Bob said, "Well, you do know Pamela and DD-B are selling their place, don't you?" I had, but I'd also assumed that it would be way out of my price range, even if I did want to take on the burden of a house. But Bob told me to let him see what he could do, and I did. The offer came back to me a day or so later -- $69,900, done as a for-sale-by-owner with Bob forgoing his commission since it hadn't been listed yet. That was actually less than I'd been contemplating for a townhouse, which made me much more sanguine about moving from a condo owner to really truly homeowner. Pamela and DD-B had been planning to do quite a bit of (mostly cosmetic) renovations and upkeep items, and selling the place to me meant that they could skip all that. It was a bad time for them, since Pamela's mother had just been diagnosed (incorrectly, it turned out) with cancer of a particularly vicious sort. So Bob got a minimal commission on the sale of my condo, no commission on the sale of Pamela and DD-B's house, and (presumably) a nice buyer's commission on the purchase of Pamela and DD-B's new place. Everyone happy, I think.

Fast-forward seven-and-a-half years, and Bob is the obvious person to call. He'd just handled Pat's recent house purchase (the one she bought instead of doing major construction on her existing house -- which is why this is all her fault), and Lois Bujold's a few years ago.

So I did, and explained the situation to him. He asked me how much I wanted to spend, and I told him about the $30,000 estimate for improvements, and how I wanted to consider how much my current equity plus the additional $30,000 would buy me. And that my house was assessed at $125K as of a couple of years ago. He said that that number was way off, and that I could probably expect to get $150,000 out of the house. That's not the sale price, that's the total amount of equity -- sale price estimated at around $200,000. There was a long pause at my end -- I needed to pick my jaw off the ground. I'd known that real estate prices had been going up over the last several years, but I hadn't realized that my place had almost tripled in price -- even if you did take into account the fact that I'd got a bargain at the time.

This led to a certain amount of sticker shock. If my place was worth $200,000, then I was looking to buy a place that would cost rather more than that. I almost said to forget the whole thing, since that put rather a different face on the $30,000 estimate for contemplated improvements, but having brought Bob into it, it seemed only reasonable (and polite) to look at houses.

Bob said that the first step was getting pre-approved for a loan. He gave me the names of three loan officers. I hated the Web site of the first one, even though I liked the fact that (in theory) you could get pre-approved via the Web. I called the second one, and everything went swimmingly. I was pre-approved for enough to cover houses in the price range I was contemplating -- $225,000 to $250,000.

On Tuesday, August 5, I went out with Bob. He had had arranged showings seven houses, and we looked at all of them. The first place caused a bit of an epiphany. It didn't have much more room than my place (maybe an extra 200 feet), but I liked the downstairs much better than my current place. It had an open plan living room, with the living room, front area, and dining room all part of one big funny-shaped room. Which was exactly what I liked so much about minnehaha's main floor, now that I thought about it. This place probably wasn't suitable, but I kept the knowledge that I liked open-plan spaces.

The other five houses were nothing special -- or at least, not right for me. But the last house was something different. I'd been put off by one item -- the four-car garage -- but intrigued by some of the other items in the description. And the space numbers were nice -- either 2000 or 2200 square feet, I can't remember for sure. It was at 69th and 10th Avenue South, in Richfield. I liked the look of the outside right off when we drove up to it. This is unusual for me; usually I'm very bad at relating the outside of a house to the inside, so outsides are just a null. But this one was a nice slate blue, with cedar siding (shakes?) and the kind of roofing that's uneven rather than smooth (intentionally, I mean). The landscaping wasn't fancy, but it was well-kept.

So I was already feeling positive about the place when I went inside. The layout was a bit odd, actually. We went in by the side door, the one closest too the garage, since that's where the lockbox was. That door led into the kitchen area. The realtor's description called it the dining room, but it was actually a smallish area just off the kitchen. I'd call it a breakfast nook, or just part of the kitchen. The kitchen was galley style, rather smaller than the one in my current place, but probably adequate for my needs.

There were two bedrooms on the main floor, both a bit on the small side, plus a nice-sized linen closet and a laundry chute in the hallway. And a bathroom, of course. A perfectly adequate living room with nice closet space. A wide hallway leading from the kitchen to the back room, with a pantry off the hallway. And it was the back room that really impressed me. It was an addition to the house at some point, and it was more or less square, about 20 by 20 feet, at a guess. It had a fireplace on one side, and french doors leading to a wooden deck (unenclosed) in the back yard on another. It had a high arched (is that the right term? --like an upside-down V) ceiling with heavy wooden beams going across at what would be normal ceiling height.

There was a finished attic rather like the one in my own house, but all one room instead of divided into bedroom and office. They were clearly using it as the master bedroom, but since there was no bathroom up there, that was right out. One of the reasons I was looking at places, after all, was so I wouldn't have to go downstairs when I woke up in the middle of the night to pee -- something I have to do all too often, alas. It had a walk-in closet plus an additional smaller closet and crawl space storage area.

Downstairs there were two finished rooms, both the size of generous bedrooms, though one was currently being used as an office. Neither one would be technically legal as a bedroom, since the egress window wasn't large enough (though I think I could have got myself out with a stepstool and sufficient motivation). There was a good-sized utility room with the usual washer and dryer. There was also a large clean but unfinished space beneath where the addition was. The current owners were using it for storage, but it was mostly empty.

I was decidedly interested. The bedroom and office space (the two main floor bedrooms) were a bit on the small side, but the upstairs should work as a library, even though it would be rather a challenge to arrange bookshelves in that odd-shaped space. And the big room downstairs would be the literal livng room -- my entertainment center when I was alone, and the core area of a party when I was entertaining. This place was much more conducive to entertaining than my current place, though in some ways that isn't a fair comparison, because I never bought new furniture for the living room. There's currently just one couch (half a set, but the other half is in the den) and a few lamps. I've been meaning to do something about that, well, since I moved in almost eight years ago.

The place was listed at $249,900, which was at the very top of the range I was contemplating. Also, it had a lot of personality, and I wasn't quite sure what I thought of that person. Of course, much of that was the decor. The entire place was decorated in, well, antique junkstore is the best description of can come up with. Stuff all over the place, on the walls, on every surface. Signs, jars, barrels, dolls, tchatchkes of just about every sort. Shelves at head level in most of the rooms with more stuff on them. Just an amazing amount of stuff.

At the end of the evening, Bob and I agreed to look at another bunch of houses three days later, on Friday, August 8. I asked if he could add the last house we'd looked at to the list as well so I could take another look. He said sure.

On Thursday, I got a call from Bob. The owners had just dropped the price on the Richfield house by $10,000, so it was now at $239,900. Bob expected that it would sell quickly at that price, which meant that if I was interested, I'd probably have to make decide quickly. I don't usually make decisions like that. I think and think and think (and dither), and then when I finally make the decision I'm ready to stick with it. I've made a few incorrect major life decisions, but at least I've thought them through. I wouldn't have a lot of time to dither about this one.

So I called for a second opinion, and asked Pat to meet me to look at the house when I went through the second time. Pat was very impressed with the storage space and the big room, and thought that it would suit me very well. She also pointed out some practical downsides, most of which I'd already thought of for myself, but which were encouraging because it meant that I probably hadn't missed anything obvious. She did point out that I'd be giving up my nice wood floor and my built-ins (this place had wall-to-wall carpeting, mostly cream-colored, though a rather ugly brown-and-cream in the basement). On the other hand, the people who lived there had obviously put a lot of work into the place, mostly with good materials.

At the end of the walkthrough I took a deep breath, turned to Bob and said "Okay. I think I want to do it."

"Make an offer, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Congratulations."

"I think I'm going to throw up."

I didn't, but I did feel decidedly queasy for a while. I don't make life-changing decisions in three days' time. But I just had.

I thanked Pat, and Bob and I went off to his office to do the paperwork and write a check for $2500 earnest money. It took an hour and a half, and by the time we were done, I wasn't queasy anymore; instead, I was starving. Somehow it had gone from 5:30 to 9:00 without my noticing, and I'd missed dinner.

On Saturday, I heard from Bob that the owners had accepted my offer. This was unsurprising, since I'd made it for the amount they were asking. Since they'd just dropped the price $10,000, it seemed both foolhardy and a bit churlish to offer a lower amount than the asking price. The sellers' agent faxed the signed agreement to Bob, Bob faxed the signed agreement to me, and I signed it and faxed it back to him. The print quality must have been awful by the time we were done, but it satisfied the legalities. The owners suggested a closing date of September 26, but that was Erev Rosh Hashanah and I'd be in Chicago visiting family. After planning on September 25 for a while, we eventually settled on September 30, with the final walk-through on September 29. Apparently there are advantages to closing late in the month.

So I'd bought a house. I was on the hook for almost a quarter of a million dollars. And I still owned the house I was living in, the house that was full of stuff, the house that I could never get completely neat because too much stuff just didn't have a place to be put. It wasn't terribly messy, but it was decidedly cluttered. At first Bob said that he thought my best bet was to move to the new place first and then list the house once it was empty. I soon balked at that, because looking at both occupied and unoccupied houses, the occupied places seemed realer, somehow. (Then there was the place that was clearly unoccupied but had furniture and props. It worked for giving the right feel, but was still silly-looking.)

Back when we'd been looking at houses, Bob asked how long I thought it would take for me to get my place ready to show, and I rashly said I thought two weeks should do it. That meant, he pointed out after the purchase agreement was signed, that it should be ready to list on August 25. Eep!

Bob suggested that I should have the trim on the house painted. While I don't pay much attention to such things, I had to agree he had a point. It hadn't been painted all the time I'd owned it, and was probably overdue. He also suggested that I paint the walls of the basement. I thought this was rather silly, but was willing to follow his advice. He recommended a painter named Tom Bell, who said he could do the job for $1400, or $1600 with primer. The former would be more of a cosmetic job, the latter would be doing the job properly. I opted for that, since it seemed unreasonable to be that dishonorable for only $200. My soul may be for sale, but I want a much better price than that.

In the meantime, I decided that the only way to get the house ready to show was to get most of the clutter out of there. I rented a storage locker from the place just around the corner from my house -- very convenient. I packed somewhere around 100 boxes of books, clothes, records, and videotapes, and miscellaneous. (One of Pat's "organize your house" books talks about a woman who had 50 boxes in storage, all labeled "miscellaneous.")

Pat came over a couple of times to help with packing, and was exceedingly helpful. She didn't pack all that many boxes herself, but she provided a great deal of useful direction. The one thing that kept me going through the packing process was the knowledge that while I pretty much had to do the packing myself, I could outsource the cleaning that needed to follow. Over a period of several weekday evenings and weekend days, daedala swept and washed floors, cleaned the refrigerator, washed windows, dusted, and generally made the place presentable.

(to be continued)