I Need a Drink

Inspirational song: Hasa Diga Eebowai (Book of Mormon)

Two days ago, Mister Smith-Park said, "I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop." As I told him on the way back to the brick oven this afternoon, it didn't just drop. It fell through the ceiling, through the floor, through the center of the earth, where it rocketed out the other side, launching into space, and it is halfway to Pluto now. To say the inspection didn't go well is an understatement. By the end of it, I was wishing we had all been wearing protective gear, particularly hard hats, as we traipsed around that house. Or perhaps, the correct way to frame it is that it did go well, and between Mr S-P and the inspector, they found all the things we couldn't see at the open house, armed only with a cell phone flashlight. This is looking like a lot of deal-breakers, all piled up on top of each other. This is what is wrong with a stupidly booming real estate market. Houses that are falling in on themselves are offered for sale, and people like me are so frantic to buy and so worried about the meteoric rise of prices that we jump on the first pretty picture we see that we think we can afford.

Where do I start with the inspection results? Let's see. Firstly, the home was presented to me as a two-owner house. The current seller bought from the widow of the builder who kept it exactly as it was since it was built in 59. There was no mention that it was a rental house, which we figured out quickly, and had confirmed by the neighbors who we met once before at open house. We knew the slab for the back patio was subsiding, and that it was angled toward the house. The water and foundation damage was so much worse than that. There were stairstep cracks in the brick on almost every side. In the crawlspace under the bedrooms, accessible from the one unheated basement bedroom, we found that someone had dug out a trench shoring up a bearing wall, causing doorway cracks above. There was evidence of water damage all around. Most of the glass block details that look cool were either leaking around dried up caulking or has stress cracks from the settling foundation. Some of the electrical outlets were upgraded to grounded plugs, some were not. When we finally got out to the electrical panel in the garage, even my untrained eye knew it was going to fail before the cover came off. It was tiny, far too small for the size house it was. But that was only the first obvious flaw for a novice like me. The inspector noted there was no main breaker, which was a big code violation, and then he took the cover off. Wow. When the inspector says it's one of the worst panels he has seen in a few years, you can only cry as you watch your dream of a forever home slip away.

And I really don't know how to talk about the ant colony war happening up front that may be related to the mud tunnels under the house indicative of termites or carpenter ants, or the crawlspace access from the basement bathroom into what we could only guess was a rape dungeon, based on its level of creepiness and camouflage. I don't know whether I dare research police records.

But perhaps best of all was the roof. At open house, my man peeked in and shone his cell phone light around the attic access to see the decking under the roof seemed a bit thin, like 3/8 inch plywood instead of half. If his light had been just a wee bit brighter, he would have seen the roof trusses that were cracked almost through. We would never have offered on this house. Once the inspector was on the roof (brave, brave man), we could see how spongy it was, and the big dip where I suppose a meteor fell from the sky, or maybe one really clumsy roofer, and destroyed the thick support beams.

By the fourth hour, all I wanted to do was go drown my sorrows in booze and to eat my weight in gluten. So we grabbed our daughter and went to the Biergarten in Boulder, and a Jaegerschnitzel and two old fashioneds later, I felt a little less freaked out. So, now we present the inspection report to the seller and wait for him to say no way, he will not drop $50,000 on repairs, and then we walk away. Say goodbye to the dream, Annie.