We Have A Winner!

We have a winner!  In keeping with our usual method of doing everything in the most difficult way possible, we have come back to the brick house we were supposed to buy last Friday.  We went over it with the inspector yesterday, and he reiterated all his criticisms from his report, with lots of added drama (“Look at this porch railing!  The openings are just the size for your daughter’s head to get stuck!”).  After he left, the neighbors wandered over, and we got to talking about the house.  They told us that the inspector’s assertion that the well was shared was just wrong, that they had their own well, and the husband, Tony, went down to the basement with us and got the pump working in about two minutes.  They suggested that we meet with “their” fix-it guy later in the afternoon to see what he thought the necessary repairs might cost.  This sounded good, so we met with Wayne-the-fix-it-guy (hereafter to be referred to as Wayne) around 5:00.  Wayne, whose impressive workmanship we had seen when the neighbors showed us around their huge old Victorian, had a much higher opinion of the brick house than the inspector.  Some of the jobs that I had thought would be relatively minor, such as putting a shower in the downstairs tub, would, according to Wayne, be very expensive, but the really necessary repairs, like fixing the front porch so water wouldn’t pour into the basement, should cost much less than the inspector suggested.  Wayne didn’t think that the back of the house was about to fall off, or that the moisture in the basement meant that mold was growing behind every wall in the house.

There are enough things wrong with the house, including repairs to the three chimneys, furnace, air conditioner, well (probably), front porch, some broken windows, doors that need replacing, kitchen appliances, etc., that the cost will be pretty substantial, but the sellers have agreed to drop the price even more to allow for some of these repairs.  When we’ve fixed what needs fixing, I think we will have a very good house in a lovely location.  When we were there this afternoon, there were kids playing on the school playground across the street (recess, I guess), and we noticed a beautiful little river less than a mile down the road.  We are going to be pretty busy for a while, but I’m really excited about this house!

On a less cheerful note, the movers have turned evil and won’t bring us our stuff.  They were charming and agreeable about keeping our stuff on the moving truck for an extra week or so (ka-ching, ka-ching!), and told us that as soon as we found a house they would drive right up with our things.  We called them this morning, expecting that our stuff might arrive Sunday (when we were loading up the truck, the movers told us that they worked on Sundays), and were extremely disappointed when they told us that it might be another week before they could bestir themselves to move our possessions.  Aaack!  Ed explained in his sweet way (and I’m serious about this) how very unhappy this made us, but the most he was able to get was their agreement that they would stop adding to the daily storage charge.  Fortunately, our kindhearted neighbor offered to loan us a couple air mattresses, so we are planning to start camping in our new house (which won’t technically be ours until the closing next Wednesday, but the sellers said they were okay with us moving in early) tomorrow.  I figure we should be able to get the place cleaned up before the movers show up (well before they show up, unfortunately), and we need to get out of this motel before they put our name on the door.