Welcome to home ownership.

January 28th, 2008 § 9 comments

I’ve men­tioned this before — on Jan 4th, I ended up clos­ing on my first house. The pri­mary dri­ving force of course being my now nearly seven month old daugh­ter, the sec­ondary dri­ving force is well — own­ing a house.

Both my wife and I were excited, ecsta­tic even. I mean, it’s not a pala­tial man­sion by any stretch — but it was ours.

Then, things went side­ways. After clos­ing, after we start paint­ing — we find a prob­lem. A big, glar­ing prob­lem. That prob­lem hap­pens to be a leak­ing toi­let — that has appar­ently been leak­ing for some time (mea­sured in poten­tially years) into the sub floor­ing. This means all the wood beneath the tile floor under the toi­let it rot­ten and moldy, and that damp­ness and mold may have spread to the rest of the floor­ing and areas.

We found this pulling the toi­let to put in a new one — now, instead of a cheap plop-in-a-new-toilet, we’re star­ing down the bar­rel of a much larger “strip to the walls due to rot and mold” deal. We can’t move in, and we didn’t even imag­ine this would happen.

Rot­ten wood, mold. The works. And no, it’s not cov­ered, and it is no ones respon­si­bil­ity (or rather, no one is liable). Nope, we just get left hold­ing the bag. The inspec­tor found a tan­gen­tal issue: but not the pri­mary issue, so no one was tech­ni­cally the wiser.

Stu­pid toi­lets. From now on I’m only buy­ing houses with­out run­ning water, in non-flood plains in areas with no ter­mites. Also the house will be made of stone.

  • http://pyblog.drbrett.ca Brett

    Sorry to hear about the trou­bles, Jesse. Both my par­ents have done exten­sive work on their respec­tive houses and had sur­prises hit them in the process, so I can relate. Hope­fully the costs won’t get out of line and the place will be bet­ter for it.

    And yes, an out­house is much simpler. =)

  • jnoller

    I was think­ing some­thing more akin to a fort. A big stone fort.

  • Longabow

    Three weeks ago I wrote a com­ment to a post in which you spoke about your home. I said:

    “”“
    As my thir­teen year old put it:

    Own­ing a home has its highs and has its Lowes.
    ”””

    For our friends liv­ing out­side the US Lowes is a home improve­ment store that one vis­its quite frequently.

    Today I checked that post and I was most sur­prised to see that you said:

    “”“
    That’s awful
    ”””

    Now I don’t really know how to read this … do you really think so? By the way, I’d say he was right, no?

    Any­way sorry to hear about the prob­lem. Buy­ing a home is indeed a risk, home inspec­tors are worth­less, the most use­less $600 I ever spent, for our home the first big rain got water in the basement.

    It is very depress­ing to get such a nasty sur­prise, but lok at the bright side, this is how expe­ri­ence grows, twenty years from now this will be story passed down to the next generations.

  • jnoller

    I meant more “that’s awful” in the ironic sense — it’s so very true. Since buy­ing the house I’ve spent more time at Lowes than I have at any other retail store, ever. I never though lightbulbs/fixtures and home appli­ances could be so fascinating.

    I don’t think our inspec­tor was use­less — he did catch some things we did have the own­ers fix — it’s just rough deal­ing with some­thing like this when it comes from left field. When my wife and I started look­ing I insisted on new con­struc­tion, but given this is the Boston area, and new con­struc­tion is still smok­ing the high price pipe, we went for a house built some­times in the last 100 years, hop­ing we’d avoid a cer­tain amount of “cre­ative engi­neer­ing” you get with older homes.

    Yeah. We didn’t avoid any of it.

  • Count0

    So, mov­ing to Scotland?

  • jnoller

    I should, but I’d prob­a­bly end up buy­ing a cas­tle with a flooded basement.

  • http://jessenoller.com jnoller

    I meant more “that’s awful” in the ironic sense — it’s so very true. Since buy­ing the house I’ve spent more time at Lowes than I have at any other retail store, ever. I never though lightbulbs/fixtures and home appli­ances could be so fascinating.

    I don’t think our inspec­tor was use­less — he did catch some things we did have the own­ers fix — it’s just rough deal­ing with some­thing like this when it comes from left field. When my wife and I started look­ing I insisted on new con­struc­tion, but given this is the Boston area, and new con­struc­tion is still smok­ing the high price pipe, we went for a house built some­times in the last 100 years, hop­ing we’d avoid a cer­tain amount of “cre­ative engi­neer­ing” you get with older homes.

    Yeah. We didn’t avoid any of it.

  • Count0

    So, mov­ing to Scotland?

  • http://jessenoller.com jnoller

    I should, but I’d prob­a­bly end up buy­ing a cas­tle with a flooded basement.

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