Thread by @UrsulaV

WHO WANTS TO HEAR THE SAGA OF ME ATTEMPTING TO ARRANGE A REAL ESTATE TRANSACTION DURING AN PANDEMIC?

Of course you do. Buckle up.

So my mom is getting up there in years and will eventually want to move to be closer to me. She was thinking that she’d like to move sometime after my kid brother finishes college.

Great, we can do that. I contact my local real estate agent and am like “we have a couple years, this is NOT urgent, this is what I’m looking for, if something happens to cross your desk, let me know.”

This was back in…oh, December of 2019? Ish?

Now, housing is very, very cheap in Chatham County at the moment, at least if you go west instead of in the direction of Chapel Hill. And my mom is currently living in an elderly mobile home in Oregon, which I bought for 18K. And Oregon is in an absolutely deranged market boom.

Like, the place across the street from her had just gone for nearly 90K when this story starts. I was reasonably certain that selling that place, when she was ready to move, would more than pay off anything I laid out for a place locally. Great!

Now, I don’t know Jack about real estate. If I get a big advance or if a book does well, I panic and want to sink that into something that CANNOT BREAK OR BE TAKEN AWAY which was why I bought Dogskull initially. I don’t assume I will make money from it, I just want it to be real.

Also, y’know, it’s my mom. So, armed with this theoretical budget, I have a real estate agent out looking. She turns up a couple places that are…uh…well…things, all right. Yup. Definitely housing. Of a sort.

The poor agent was doing well until she walked into one and discovered a gigantic shed snakeskin and a mangled baby doll in the middle of the floor. I could have told her that shopping with me was going to be fraught.

And then, like a bolt from the blue, we found it. 1950s farmhouse. Interior is immaculate. On a dead end street with a couple churches, fifteen minutes from my house. Needs a new roof and some foundation repair, but just in great shape. Comes with an acre and some change, $75K.

(Friends in other areas may assume that such a price tag means the house is actually a photo of a house on a stick, and the stick is currently on fire. No. Like I said, property is cheap out here.)

This is perfect. This is…okay, admittedly the interior is a little weird, in the way that weird 1950s farmhouses often are, but Mom is an artist. I send her photos. She approves. I make the offer.

This is now March of 2020.

Negotiations proceed…slowly. The owner is an elderly woman who does not own a cell phone or a computer. We eventually compromise at 70k because I refuse to play hardball with elderly technophobes because I’m not a dick.

And then Late March 2020 hits.

Elderly homeowner decides that she is not moving in mid-pandemic. She refuses the offer. And as they say, I ain’t even mad. Mom isn’t gonna move in mid-pandemic either. She takes the home off the market. I say “Call me as soon as you want to sell.”

Time passes. It’s a pandemic. Classes are canceled so my kid brother is graduating late anyway. No rush.

And now you, too, have to wait, because my Chinese takeout order is ready and I’m gonna drive home.

Okay. So, TIME PASSES. The agent turns up a couple more places, mostly in the fixer-upper range. I do not want my mom living in a faller-downer. We put a pin in this for awhile.

More time passes.

Sixteen months after canceling, Elderly Homeowner put the house back on the market. Except now it’s 99K, because Chatham has also had a housing boom and properties up by Chapel Hill are selling sight unseen, an hour after they hit the market.

(I realize this still sounds laughable to people in large cities, who are now buying the photo on a burning stick sight unseen.)

Fine. We negotiate, I order inspections, we negotiate more. I slog out one day with the agent and a very nice man who goes over the place with a fine-toothed comb.

“This is…interesting,” he says.

It is, as I said, a quirky little house. It is basically a C-shape around a central bathroom, divided into small rooms, with a much later addition that added two rooms on one side. They do not have closets, though, because then they’d be bedrooms and those cost more to permit,

The original bedroom is, therefore, the only room with closets. It has three.

QUIRKY.

Also the living room…? Maybe? has two large doors in what you’d think would be open door frames, but the doors have no knobs or handles.

There is another, similar door in the bedroom. It appears to be a closet, but has no knob or handle.

It does have a small bolt.

QUIRKY, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Listen, I found a nice goddamn house with an interior so spotless you could eat off the floors, AND got the buyer down to $89K, at the perfect distance to house a relative who I love but who does not want to see me daily, you think a little thing like that is stopping me?

I AM A HORROR AUTHOR, IF THIS TURNS OUT TO BE SOME HOUSE OF LEAVES SHIT, I AM WRITING THE PURCHASE PRICE OFF AS A BUSINESS EXPENSE

Anyway, by using the bolt as a handle, the agent and I manage to pull the door open, which is stuck because the house has totally settled in the last 70 years. It leads to a…err…utility space? Let’s go with that. The sort of place you store the water heater.

Unfinished, narrow, absolutely free of dead bodies. No one has been murdered in there, and I can be sure of that because Elderly Homeowner had pale cream carpeting that is STILL pale cream, which honestly does border on the supernatural.

After scouting the entire house, we determine that this is the only possible access to the attic.

We look up.

There is a gap between rafters the size of a large waffle.

The agent and I then look to our home inspector, a young man I would classify as “stocky” and that is not a euphemism for fat, he’s genuinely just sturdily built.

We look back to the waffle.

“I do not expect you to get up there,” I said.

Friends, this home inspector was a dedicated man. For every horror story you hear about inspectors missing things like all of @KBSpangler’s house, somewhere there is a man like this.

Somehow, in a move that would not have shamed a Cirque di Soleil acrobat, this man folded himself into the waffle-sized hole. (The real estate agent and I had stepped away to give him privacy and also because we were scared he’d get stuck and we’d have to get a hacksaw.)

He emerged some time later, shaking his head.

Do you know what the next stage after “Interesting” is? It’s “Never seen that before.”

“It’s fine,” he said, seeing the mounting panic in my eyes. “No leaks. Good insulation. Only…”

Agent and I both leaned in.

“When they added the addition, you see how they raised the roofline?”

Yes?

“Well, they just…left the old roof. In the attic.”

He eventually brought out photos, indicating that yes, extending halfway through the attic is a perfectly ordinary shingled roof.

“Huh,” we said, gazing at the photos. “Is that bad?”
“No reason it should be.”
“Did you find out where the chimney went?” I asked.
“Nope.”

There are two chimneys. There are no fireplaces.

QUIRKY DAMMIT

Home inspector then shrugged into a full body plastic suit that resembled a Hazmat suit and went under the house, after we assured him that the gigantic fire ant nest next to the crawlspace was definitely dead, nothing still in there, no signs of life, sand kings, what sand kings

He came out confirming my belief that yes, the house is settling and I need a structural engineer to sketch out how to fix it (nobody panic in the comments, it’s not a huge fix, already got the quotes, costs under 5K) and observed that old houses like these will last forever.

“They just need upkeep,” he added, “and if people can’t afford to drop a few thousand when the roof goes or whatever, that’s when they start to fall apart.” He patted the porch pillar affectionately.

Despite the weirdness, the house was exactly what it looked like, a sturdy old house owned by a woman who couldn’t afford to fix things like an old roof or the foundation crack. We assembled quotes, I did math in my head, and yes, I could do it. We’d got the price down to 89K.

Elderly Homeowner asked to extend closing an extra month because she needed time to move. Fine! Great! No problem! It’d take me that long to get on the contractor’s schedules anyway.

The day before closing, the lawyer calls me.

Rather, his secretary calls me and schedules for him to call the next morning. There has been a slight problem with the title.

I put my head in my hands and asked Kevin to reassure me that I was not out of my goddamn mind to try to buy this place for Mom.

I finally get in touch with the lawyer, who explains that no, everything is fine…mostly…ish…just, ah, see, in NC, we don’t do escrow, but you do want title insurance, and to get that you need a clear thirty-year chain of ownership, and boy, we do not have that.

“There’s lots of things like that in Chatham,” he said musingly. “It’s all oral tradition, really. Everybody knows who got the house when the property was divided up, but nobody filed at the courthouse.”

SWEET JESUS AM I CURSED OR SOMETHING, I said, but pronounced it as “I see.”

“Anyway, we’ve almost got it now,” he added. “We’ve got the chain from A to B and from C to D, if we can just get proof of inheritance from B to C, we’ll be good.”

“Yay,” I said, wondering if 10 am was too early for tequila. “Keep me posted.”

Now, I had already arranged to switch over power and water, set up homeowners insurance, etc. I called everybody with a stake in closing, informed them of delay, gazed at the ceiling for a bit, shook my fist at the heavens, etc.

I am told that a great deal happened behind the scenes, including Elderly Homeowner retaining a lawyer to sort things, made more difficult by the bit where she had no internet and relied on her daughter to come visit with a cellphone, but at last, all was in readiness.

I signed a stack of thigh-high paperwork, took the keys, went back to the house, checked that the weird door was still closed, and collapsed in a heap. Done. Right? This was it! Smooth sailing! Just had to wait for the contractors to have openings, and we’re golden!

I had a pleasant weekend and then State Farm cut me a check and informed me that they were canceling my policy because I hadn’t done sufficient upkeep on the property. I explained that I had owned the house for roughly five minutes. They explained that I should have worked faster

My mother informed me that she had fallen madly in love with a man named Oscar and would perhaps be staying in Oregon awhile longer than anticipated.

My buddy Carlota, however, was looking for a place to crash. I flung keys in her direction. “Show her the murder closet!” Kevin yelled helpfully as we drove away.

I have solved the problem. It’s fine. The house is useful for a friend and it’s there when Mom needs it. And any money I put in the house is at least buying a real thing that cannot be taken away by fluctuations in the economy.

AND IT IS QUIRKY, DAMMIT.

You’ll be fine. It’s probably not a murder closet.

https://twitter.com/carlotasage/status/1436117053803479042