House Hunt Recap

During our search for a new home I have become more familiar than I care to be about the different neighborhoods in the area.  They all seem to have some highfalutin titles that make everywhere sound like the names were grabbed from particularly uninspired 2-word Mad Libs responses.  My wife seems to have mastered them, but they all just blur together for me. 

So, instead of trying to remember if the last house we saw was in Shady Pines, Sheetrock Hills, Rock Ridge, or Radiator Springs, we decided to give nicknames to the houses themselves.  Here are a few:

Squirrel House - This house was a sample model on the fourth fairway of a local golf course.  As attractive as it was picturing myself screaming “Hey, you old people, get out of my yard!” for eight hours a day, there was another problem.  As we were leaving I heard a scrabbling up near the roofline that was coming from at least two squirrels darting in and out of a slightly-larger-than-squirrel-sized hole in one of the gables.  Fun!  But wait... Near the hole... Is that bat guano?  Yup, looks like it... Next.

Showcase Showdown House - My wife calls this one “Ravine House” because of the alarming, toddler-enticing 45-degree drop-off in the backyard that led down to a swampy inlet (Hey, dad, my soccer ball went down the hill of poison ivy and into the water moccasin farm again... Can you go get it?). I called it “Rotten Tree House” because of the two near-death 60-foot poplar trees leaning in the most expensive direction possible.  Since the sellers were throwing in a pool table, three flat screen televisions,  a desk, a set of lawn furniture, and, believe it or not, a 2004 Volvo, we decided that “Showcase Showdown” was a much better name.  

If you think about it, these are not the actions of someone selling a house.  These are the actions of someone fleeing something.  Whether it is “the long arm of the law” or “Tony ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’ Masconi” remains to be seen, but not by us.

Swamp House - An otherwise perfect house with yet another 45-degree drop-off near a swamp, this one straight off the back porch.  Look, realtor people, stop calling it a “marsh”.  Here’s how you can tell the difference between a “marsh” and a “swamp”.  It’s a “marsh” if it is in a romantically desolate watercolor painting.  It is a “swamp” if you are actually in or near it. 

Olive Garden House - Horrifyingly realistic Mediterranean-themed tromp-l’oeil murals upstairs and down shot “OMG, Hire Painters, For The Love of All That Is Holy, Hire Painters Now” to the top of the “to do list” with a bullet.  This house would have been fine, but there were other... complications... aside from rotten window frames and an unexplained craving for breadsticks after we left the place.  Let’s just say there was some unpleasantness.  Let’s also say our lawyer advised us not to write anything more about it.  Period.

Power Line House - We didn’t even go in here.  The place had a really nice back yard and was about 200 feet from a huge set of high tension line towers.  No.  No.  No.

1313 Mockingbird Lane - We did go in here.  A bank-owned property.  We were put off by the ant-farm-like floor plan, the huge cracks all throughout the brickwork, the laughably high price tag, and the boxes of “Squatter-B-Gone” peppered throughout the place by whatever poor slob got stuck with the job of trying to make this structure even remotely sellable.  We would say the bank would be lucky to get half of what they are asking for it.

Colonel Expletive Deleted House - We wanted this house.  It was a fine house.  The guy living in it, though, was unwilling to move out before “the end of July... maybe later”.  See, he is waiting for his final military orders to come through.  He is getting a $50,000 moving allowance and doesn’t want to risk losing the money by leaving the place early.  Go ahead and read those last two sentences as many times as you need to to get them to make sense to you, cuz I am at a total loss.  Fifty grand?!?! Where the hell is he being stationed? Low Earth Orbit?  A palace under the sea?  A magnificently appointed Zeppelin permanently parked over the Grand Canyon?  

After we balked at the idea of living in this single bedroom efficiency for two months (probably more) and walked away, their realtor sent the second-most-condescending letter I have ever read to our realtor. It informed us that by walking away now we risk (get this) “losing the house of your dreams because you are not willing to wait a few extra weeks.  Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and we (the sellers) may still be here if things don't work out for us elsewhere”.   

I’m like, look, I don’t know what kind of crummy dreams you have, but a house possessing a room which, with a lot of work, could make for a cool TV room someday does not constitute a “dream house”.  It is an adequate house.  My “dream house” is 10,000 square feet, has an Olympic-sized swimming pool, dual matching glass and bronze elevators, an observatory, a helipad, and sits square in the middle of a hundred-acre vineyard.  In my dream I would fly the house you are trying to sell in on weekends to use as my servants’ temporary guest quarters.  You need better dreams.

Home Freaking Sweet Home - Hopefully we close on this one at the end of the month, but we have been down that path before (see Olive Garden House above), so we will see... Stay tuned.