I haven’t posted about it lately but we have been continuing with the house hunt. For the past month we’ve been going out every weekend, sometimes more often, looking at houses with a realtor. Usually we do a drive-by ahead of time to make sure it’s something we really want to see (and in a lot of cases that’s exactly what it has been — just drive by and keep going!) and there have been only a handful of really good prospects. Prices just haven’t come down in WNC as much as in other areas. It’s also amounted to a crash course in the many ways creative photography and some, uh, interesting remodeling have been be employed.

Yes, we’ve learned that “new metal roof” sometimes means the old rotten roof is still there underneath. What do you call that, a roofover? And if there are any real estate listing agents reading this, I have a bit of advice: buyers who do not want to buy a trailer are not going to change their mind if you try and trick them by calling it a ‘ranch-style,’ ‘one story,’ ‘one level living, ‘or ‘cottage style’ house. Nor will taking the photo from the bottom of a hill below it, or (my personal favorite) hiding the trailer behind a tree in the photos, change this fact. It’s just annoying. Do you really think someone is going to say, “oh, we didn’t realize this was a doublewide. But since we already drove all the way out here to see it, let’s go ahead and buy it anyway!”

Some very creative wording is also employed. Maybe we should create a dictionary for navigating the real estate listings. Here are a few sample entries we could add:

• secluded – hope you have a four wheel drive vehicle.
• cozy – really, really tiny
• country living – enjoy the view of the trailer park next door!
• lots of potential – plan on replacing everything from the ground up
• charming – see ‘cozy’, above.

There was one house we were seriously considering that wound up — once we really looked at it — being a potential disaster waiting to happen. It was a very sound-looking brick house with nearly two thirds of an acre fully fenced, a full basement, and a deck. The first time we looked at it there was a problem with the lockbox code and the realtor couldn’t get us in. Then there was some confusion as to who had changed the locks, and why. The seller claimed no knowledge of it and apparently was behind on payments, but not foreclosed.  When we finally got inside, we thought “this is really dated but with some work it could be great,” however, we had a laundry list of potential repair issues and worried we’d be getting in over our heads. In the end, we decided regretfully to pass on it but came back one last time with our real estate agent a week later, just to be sure we weren’t making a mistake.

It had rained since we were there the last time. The house now had a definite mold smell and a chunk of the ceiling, where it had been previously patched, had fallen on the floor. In the basement bits of paneling had fallen down from the dampness as well. And we discovered, through the rep from the listing agent’s office that had come to let us in, that apparently there was a grave in the yard! We hadn’t noticed the gravestone that said “Father” prior to this.

She said that the sellers really needed to get the house sold and had lowered the price again, and would be willing to do some repairs but what those repairs sounded like were just re-hiding the problems, like patching the hole in the ceiling again (um, but where is the water coming from in the first place?) and the spin she put on the unexpected discovery in the backyard was, “in New Orleans people would pay extra for that.” Uh, no thanks.

I hadn’t realized until recently it was legal to bury someone in your yard, and I don’t necessarily have anything against that idea in principle. It’s not like I think something would rise up at night and attack us in our sleep. It’s just sad and disturbing to contemplate having someone else’s abandoned relative under your backyard. How do you landscape around that? How weird would it be to be doing yard work and having to step around “Father” as you raked? And this was not in some remote corner, it was smack-dab in the middle of the lawn.

We quickly moved on.