STUPID HOUSE BUYING TIPS
In the past few years, we've been real-estate crazy in
the USA. First, it was the low mortgage rates, and now the low prices. In both
cases, people have been buying houses virtually sight-unseen. Who cares as long as the
price is going to go up tomorrow . . . or if you're getting a bargain?
However, there are times it behooves one to do some caring. There
may indeed be some big problems. So, next time you go out and look for a house, be aware,
and follow these handy, helpful, reasonable tips from the new world of American
real-estate:
House Buyer's Tip #1: Check for rotting cow
carcasses in the back yard.
Cathie Kunkle moved into her "dream house" in Ontario,
California, without first asking herself this vital question: is my backyard-to-be filled
with rotting animal corpses? In her case, it would have been a good question, and the
answer would have been "yes." It started for her after she had purchased the
house; when she had contractor's dig a backyard garden pond, and they noticed a smell...
According to Mrs Kunkle, "At first we thought it was a dead chicken, but when they
dug deeper they found more down there. The smell was horrendous." After digging, they
found that "more" meant several enormous cow carcasses, all wrapped in plastic.
Apparently, Kunkle's new dream home was the site of an old dairy farm, and apparently, the
farmers had chosen to illegally bury the animals instead of sending them to a rendering
yard. The entire development area of the Kunkle's home might in fact have been a giant
illegal cow graveyard. According to Bob Feenstra, general manager of the Milk Producer's
Council, "It not the image dairyman want." It's also not the home the Kunkle's
want. They've stayed in a hotel while the dead cows are removed.
House Buyers Tip #2: Check out the attic for mounds of
raccoon dung
Scott and Marilee Suomela shelled out $600,000 for their house in
Bloomfield Hills, Detroit. Then they noticed a strange smell...It was coming from the
attic. They soon found the source of the smell -- a half a ton of raccoon droppings, over
1,000 pounds (if you've forgotten what a ton weighs). In addition, they found two dead
raccoons, and as well as several live ones wandering around. Their lawyer said,
"Initially, my clients were devastated. This was a house they had looked forward
to."
House Buyer's Tip #3: And how about bat guano?
Here's another one of those essential questions you sometimes just
forget to ask. But for a couple in the Southeastern US (they wish to remain anonymous)
this is one they should have remembered. It started for them after they had moved into
their house and they found the air-conditioning wasn't working too well. They called in an
ac repairman, who found that the central system wasn't venting properly. He went to the
attic, and there he found the reason: bats. Thousands upon thousands of were living, dying
-- and excreting -- up there. Their bat guano was clogging up the vents, and in fact, was
trickling down through the insulation and wood and penetrating the lower floors. Five 55
gallon containers of bat guano had to be removed from the house. The couple moved out of
the house, not before one of them developed a peripheral vision disorder that apparently
came from excessive exposure to bat guano, and not before the entire bathroom floor fell
in... but that's another story.
House Buyers Tip #4: Ask yourself: is there
anyone dead or mummified in my new home?
A man in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania region recently bought a
bargain house at a foreclosure sale. When he opened the door to his wonderful bargain
house, he discovered the reason the house had been seized and sold by the bank: the
previous owner hadn't paid his mortgage bills. The previous owner had not paid his
mortgage bills for a very good reason: he couldn't sign any checks. And he couldn't sign
checks because he was dead. How did the new owner discover all this? When he opened the
door, he found the previous owner's naturally mummified body with a pile of bills near the
front door mail slot. How the bank missed the body and the very good excuse for mortgage
delinquency is unknown.
House Buyer's Tip #5: Ask the owners: when you
say you're selling the house, just what exactly do you mean?
Here we get into those tricky definitional problems. And the answer
is Clintonesque: It depends on the what the meaning of the word "house" is. One
couple, buying their new home, found out the hard way. It seems the seller of their house
had a very strict sense of what a "house" is -- it means the house, period. Not:
the light-bulbs, cabinet knobs in the kitchen and shop, nor ANY electrical fixtures, and
no, not even the plastic switch covers in all the rooms, they're not part of the house,
either, and not any built in drawers, and not any stray pieces of wall to wall carpeting,
either (large chunks had been cut away) no curtain rods, and no, no appliances. (Here the
previous owner was a little generous. He REPLACED all of the appliances with old ones that
didn't work. But at least they filled the spaces.) The seller's family removed all of
these things just before the closing. In addition, the previous owner siphoned all of the
oil out of the fuel tank, after the gauge had been read for the closing adjustment. At
least there was no bat guano.
House Buyer's Tip #6: Ask: are the windows in
the right way? And: are the floorboards nailed down?
Here's some home-contracting wisdom: the basic idea of a window is
to keep things like rain out. Windows put in backwards tend not to do that too well. And
don't forget: when using wood -- also use nails. Karen Groceman learned the hard way that
the developers who built her house had kind of slacked off a bit on these finer points of
home-building. First, she noticed her cats licking the window joints in her new Lee's
Summit home near Kansas City on a rainy day. She was puzzled. Then she realized: water was
pouring in through the windows because the ace contractors who built the house had put
them in backwards. Her problems didn't stop there: when she called to complain, the
developers sent a crew to fix things. But the crew didn't have any tools. They asked if
they could borrow hers. As she told the Kansas City Star, they proceeded to bang the
windows up, only making the problems worse. Then she noticed that the floors weren't
nailed down -- and the roof was sagging too, more than 3 inches, because there weren't
enough braces. The Groceman's went to a county arbitrator, who said that the developer
hadn't supervised the building subcontractor very well. One thing, though, they made the
house look good. As Karen Groceman put it, "The house was beautiful. We walked in and
said, "Wow." Then, in one of the understatements of the year, she added,
"It just wasn't built very well."
House Buyer's Tip #7: OK, we've asked about the
guano and the buried cows, but what about decomposing animals in the foundation? Huh?
Good question. And one that one owner forgot to ask. But the
question found him, so to speak, when after a few days of living in his brand new
developer home he noticed a particular smell. Not a very good smell; in fact, it smelled
like something dead. He called in inspectors from the Department of Environmental Quality
who sunk probes into the slab foundation and finally found the problem: a decomposing
animal cutely built in with the house. One of those little extras free from the developer.
Instead of removing it when they were building the house, the developers had done the next
best thing: they poured concrete over it. But small cracks had developed and now the
smells were seeping into the house. There was a solution however: Rip up the slab, remove
the animal, and rebuild the slap foundation. And, oh, yeah, to get to the slab, first you
have to rip up the floor. Just minor repairs.
House Buyer's Tip #8: See how many jet-fighters
maneuver after midnight near your house.
It's one of those things you sometimes just forget. And one
"smart" home buyer didn't bother asking. He was house-hunting, and he noticed
that a new home had been on the market for over a year. Cleverly, he thought he'd go
directly to the builder, bypassing the greedy real-estate agents, and get a real bargain.
He did. He got a real bargain. And one of his first nights, he was awakened by a deafening
roar. He leaped out of bed, and went outside and looked up. He then saw not one, but an
entire squadron of jet fighters streaking across the sky. His sky; the sky above his home.
His bargain house was located right beneath a jet-fighter flight training area. The next
night, the same thing happened, but now he knew. And it wasn't so bad. The military only
practiced 15 nights a month. And for only $70 a night, he could spend those nights at a
nearby motel.
excerpted from Unusually
Stupid Americans  |
