(no subject)

[bzarcher]

Well, 2 more houses looked at, one rather promising (though it's near the highway, and we're trying to decide how much the noise would bother us), the other rather not.

This is the story of the rather not one, for it is a WARNING TO OTHERS.

The house we decided to check out was, as mentioned, on the same street as the first, though farther up and away from the highway, making us think it might be a bit easier to live with. Our first warning sign was that it was a foreclosure (not neccesarily bad, but usually means the house was stripped of everything of value). When we entered, Harvey's first words were "All the carpet needs to come out."

Aside from being dysentery green shag, it looks like the previous owners hadn't cleaned up after their pets. Very stained, very smelly. The kitchen was a title floor, but had lots of claw damage, spilled food and cat/dog food all over, and lots of nasty marks on the walls. As we expected, all the appliances had been stripped out, except for the microwave that appeared bolted into the cupboards and wall. Deciding it was safer not to look in the basement, we started to venture upstairs. About halfway up, we noticed a very nasty smell. By the top of the steps, I had started to choke. Not from the smell, though - I simply couldn't breathe. Harvey told us to get down as quick as we could, then went about half way up, said "Mold!" and then turned around to look at us as he came down. "As a father, and not as your realtor: Get out. Get out, and don't even think about this one."

We turned around and left, and ran into some Asian men in the driveway.

"You looking?"

"Yeah, we were just inside. You?"

"Yeah, we might buy."

"Don't!"

We tried to warn them, but they went in with their realtor once he arrived.

I wish them luck, if they wanted to clean the place up, and perhaps to re-sell it, but I wouldn't have gone back in if they'd paid me.

Comments

[las.livejournal.com]

Yow.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was just a bit of a disaster.

[demeterschild.livejournal.com]

Your realtor is now my hero for the day. *grin* I don't think that house can be saved outside of a fixer-upper show (Flip This House, for example) coming in and virtually gutting the place. The mold problem would, in fact, be the greatest one. Carpet is easily replaced, and so is kitchen tile. To get rid of the mold? Taking out everything down to the bare bones and putting in new insulation, drywall, etc, might be the only solution.

Also, depending on what's between you and the highway, you might not notice at all. The apartment's not five minutes (on a traffic-free moment) from 74 and we don't hear a damned thing outside of nutjobs with firecrackers (at least I hope they're firecrackers) somewhere else in the complex. Not a single whoosh of highway noise. Not even at rush hour.

My parents' place is also close to a highway (76) and there is a faint whoosing now and again that is clearly just traffic on the highway or SR 18. Or both. Most of the time you can't really hear it either. Especially in the summer when there's lots of green leafy trees between the highway and the house.

So...to test it, you might want to head out there at a time when the attendant highway is particularly busy and just hang around the neighborhood. If you can hear the highway, determine how loud it is on your scale of annoying sounds.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Harvey is totally the hero of the day. He's the Mr. Wolf of real estate, I'm convinced.

We went at rush hour on Wednesday - it's definently noticable from the back yard. Not sure just how much it'd get to us over time, but inside of the house is very quiet. It was built in 2000, and they built it with the highway in mind.

[dasubergeek.livejournal.com]

Speaking as One Who Has Gone Through This: if you go in the house and the windows block the noise, it's probably fine -- in the winter you'll have the windows shut because it's cold, in the summer because it's hot and the AC is on, and that leaves spring, which in Maine is one day in June.

Seriously, I live in the landing path for the Burbank Bob Hope Airport and when the house is closed up you cannot hear the planes at all.

Also, you can plant tall evergreens and they block noise remarkably well. (In our case, the evergreens are bottlebrush trees and the neighbour's ridiculously large citrus trees, but the idea is the same.)

You can get mould out -- my sister-in-law is a mould inspector -- but it will cost you tens of thousands of dollars, which is not reasonable, especially since you can't live in the house when there's mould in it.

One final word of (free-and-feel-free-to-ignore-it) advice : it is ridiculously easy to rip out carpet or tile, it is ridiculously easy to paint, and the change it can make is stunning. Either one is a weekend's hard work. (Well, tile is longer than that, depending on the size of your tiles.) Imagine the bones of the house, not how it looks now. You'd be surprised how many people can't do that and thus miss out on some wonderful bargains that can be made nearly perfect with $1000 of carpet or $300 worth of paint.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

That generally lines up with what I've been thinking. (Though the AC at the house I'm increasingly liking was having problems, but that's easily fixable as part of the possession agreement.)

The house was very nicely quiet while closed up, and I think we'd probably go the evergreen route - just a shame that until those came in well, we'd not be able to use the (very large) backyard as much as we'd probably like.

The moulded house is off the table - it's certainly fixuppable, but honestly we've neither the time or inclination (and even if we made them bring the sell price down to accomodate the repairs, why pay less for a house we're dumping money into, when we can just buy a house that we like (and can live in!) the day we sign the papers?

Painting and carpet I'm used to doing from my Mom's occasional home improvement sprees, and having several friends who work as general contractors should help with that. (In fact, I'm debating one of the houses with the plan that we could convert part of the basement into a nice finished area rather easily...)