THE SAGA OF REAL ESTATE WOE
[PART THREE]
Late last night, after posting yesterday’s segment of this Saga of Real Estate Woe, the wife informed me that I am getting a few of the dates and detail a bit off. It is not that events are fabricated, but, perhaps, the sequence is not as strictly accurate as one would hope for in an ideal historical model. This is how chaotic those first few days following that fateful Friday really were. Activities, problems, decisions, and pretty much everything else were a gigantic blur even as we were living them. There are even chunks of activity one or the other of us simply do not recall.
Thus, dear reader, I present this disclaimer: although the absolute veracity of this history is not necessarily precise, it does, I hope, capture essential events and relationships as well as the sense of the emotional state in which the wife and I were existing while the Saga was unfolding around us.
I have also somehow failed to mention the fact that during these early stages of the Saga of Real Estate Woe the wife and I were being visited by my mother and my new stepfather – a man I was meeting for the first time. They were originally expecting to stay with us in our new home – as was the soon to be arriving Houseguest – but they instead stayed in their RV at a campground forty-five minutes away.
Thus, for the four days the mother and the new stepfather were with us they spent most of their time stuffed into the backseat of my car as the wife and I drove from appointment to appointment, house to house, crisis to crisis. Much to their credit, they were exceptionally understanding – they even departed a day early to make more room for our efforts. But, it must be said, it was certainly a bit of an odd circumstance leading to rather unique phrases like “Pardon me, would you, new step-daddy, I have to talk to this lawyer a moment about suing a Douche-Nozzle in Syracuse.”
That said, I move onward to what I think of now as Stage Two of the Saga: the Houseguest and the new house. In many ways this period moved far more smoothly than we could have expected based on the previous week. Stage Two of the Saga essentially covers the second week of the story – in fact it is rather impressive how closely this Saga traces calendric cycles.
Part two of the Saga begins with us, on the morning of Friday June 30th, in our realtor’s office looking at the prices of houses comparable to the “perfect house.” After about a half an hour of this we settled on what we thought was a reasonable offer to make – though, since it was well below the asking price, we did not particularly expect the seller to accept it. But, since the whole real estate buying process is a bit on the odd side, the only way we could find out how serious the seller was about his highly inflated price was to actually write up a contract, this time with an oddly convoluted contingency clause engineered to protect us in some way from vague possibilities of impending legal doom resulting from the contract with the Douche-Nozzle.
That accomplished, there was very little to do other than wait. Much of that weekend was comprised of email and voicemail checks to see if there was any contact from the realtor. By Sunday the seller had made a counter-offer that indicated he was indeed ready to wait perhaps forever for someone to match his asking price, an event that shall probably never happen, but one he is sentimentally tied to in the extreme. [We have it on inside information that there has been a series of offers on that house, most of them probably not too far from our offer, all of which have been rejected.]
Anyway, that taken care of, we were left to prepare for the Houseguest’s arrive – essentially we thought it appropriate to shove some of the boxes into the corners of the apartment so he could have a place to sleep until the move actually began. On Tuesday, the Houseguest arrived, fresh from his own housing woes since he was searching for an apartment in the city he will be moving to shortly. There was a modicum of celebrating, but mostly exhausted falling to sleep that evening.
The next day was a bit of an enforced pause – it was the Fourth of July. Seeing as no one was in their office, there was little that could be done about any of the outstanding issues – i.e. we still wanted to buy a house, and the Douche-Nozzle was still out there somewhere refusing to release us from the now dead contract and thus threatening to interfere with the forward progress of our lives. I am not sure if I am doing a terribly good job in conveying the rather elevated level of background anxiety the Douche-Nozzle situation was causing for the wife and me. Yes, it was in the lawyers’ hands – both the friendly original lawyer and now the Litigator – and there really wasn’t anything in particular the wife and I could do anymore, but it was an omnipresent disturbance. Think of the grimace on Yoda’s face when he senses that some planet or another has exploded, causing a disturbance in the Force.
Anyway, on the Fourth we took the Houseguest to the quaint local fireworks display. As evidence of this pause I offer you these pictures taken that evening.
The next day, with the Houseguest in tow, the wife and I returned once more to the real estate agency to write up yet another purchase offer – this time for the house on Genessee, hopefully the last real estate contract we would be dealing with for quite a while. At this point the whole paperwork process was old hat to us, so we flew through all the signings and initialings, occasionally having to correct or prompt the perhaps less than brilliant realtor.
This contract took on a double bit of intrigue. You see, on top of our needing to make our offer contingent upon successfully getting out of the unresolved contract with the Douche-Nozzle, this seller – Ms. Unrealisitc – did not want to close until two weeks after the still uncertain closing date of the house she was buying. Thus, at the end of this contract session we were armed with a many layered contract which demanded a closing date on or before the first day of October. And this closing-date clause, since we had to be out of the new, temporary two-room apartment we were moving into the next day by mid-October, was a deal-breaker.
That afternoon and evening were spent boxing up possessions with the exceptional assistance of the kind, understanding, and emotionally supportive Houseguest. After a less than adequate night of sleep, early the next morning the wife and I went off to pick up the moving van and began the move. Over the course of the day great progress was made (thanks, again, to said Houseguest and a particularly helpful classicist) and the whole moving into a small two-room apartment thing seemed far from unimaginable – in fact, once all of the furniture was in place, it became evident that the new abode might be quite lovely, even if it did require a bit of a stripped down existence.
About mid-afternoon, though, we received a call from our realtor. Ms. Unrealistic was unwilling to accept the firm closing date clause. She was still insisting on being able to simply sell the house sometime later. When? Sometime between September and January. I, both physically and emotional exhausted, informed the realtor that this was insane, I was sick of the whole process of dealing with Douche-Nozzles and unrealistic twits, and that no, we were not flexible about this need for an actual closing date. I furthermore hinted that the wife and I would be walking away from her services as a real estate agent to find someone I felt to be, well, competent.
The realtor quickly back-pedaled and vowed to work on it and see if anything could be done. Calls would be made, faxes would be checked, perhaps even a church bell or two would be rung in case the Red Coats were coming. I then indulged myself in a bit of a rant in the company of the wife, the Houseguest, and the helpful classicist.
By then end of the day we had essentially moved. There were still a whole lot of things to deal with, mostly boxes and boxes of things – not yet boxed up – to put into storage. But the core of the move was complete and, along with the Houseguest, the wife and I had moved across the street to the new apartment. At midnight that night I gently kissed the wife once and said “Happy Anniversary.” It was now the seventh day of July and it was the fifth anniversary of our wedding. Perhaps this was not how we expected to spend our anniversary, but we were together. Thus, despite all of the complications, there was happiness. Huzzah for the wife!!!
The next morning we awoke late, wished each other happy anniversary again, and headed off to have breakfast in town with the Houseguest. Just after breakfast, as we were perusing the annual book sale on the village green, the realtor called and informed us that the seller had changed her mind and we had a house – assuming that none of the myriad complications reared their ugly heads along the way. But, perhaps, we were getting an anniversary present: a house to buy.
Unfortunately, the seller – Ms. No-Longer-Unrealistic – did not like the us getting out of the other contract clause – who can blame her – thus the wife and I decided to attempt to make contact with the Douche-Nozzle’s realtor to see if there was a way to resolve this without going to court. We stopped by his office; he wasn’t there, so we left a message.
A few hours later he called us back. Let’s just shorthand this since the call, essentially, went to crap. He was an Ass – and I do mean a capital-A Ass, an unremitting Ass – I got pissed, I informed him that we would be filing a grievance with the Board of Realtors against him [we had already contacted them and they felt we definitely had cause for grievance] as well as probably suing him, he call me an imbecile and hung up on me. I ranted and raved again, and then we got back to a bit more work. The wife called the Litigator to get his advice on the problematic safety clause and to update him on my rantings. He was not pleased with my conversation with the Ass – I didn’t particularly care – and he advised us to go ahead and drop the clause from the contract. While this was theoretically dangerous, for all practical purposes the contract with the Douche-Nozzle was dead. So, the wife called our realtor, dropped the offending clause, and we went forward with buying the new house.
Since it was our fifth anniversary, the wife and I called it an early evening and went out for a nice dinner with the Houseguest and celebrated. Thus Stage Two drew to a close. The next day promised a small amount of finishing up in the old apartment, but for all serious purposes we were safely ensconced in the new apartment, and we had entered into an agreement to purchase another house – one that was rather lovely. All that remained to be dealt with was the Douche-Nozzle.
Damn you Douche-Nozzle! Damn you to Hell!
[To be continued…]
Thus, dear reader, I present this disclaimer: although the absolute veracity of this history is not necessarily precise, it does, I hope, capture essential events and relationships as well as the sense of the emotional state in which the wife and I were existing while the Saga was unfolding around us.
I have also somehow failed to mention the fact that during these early stages of the Saga of Real Estate Woe the wife and I were being visited by my mother and my new stepfather – a man I was meeting for the first time. They were originally expecting to stay with us in our new home – as was the soon to be arriving Houseguest – but they instead stayed in their RV at a campground forty-five minutes away.
Thus, for the four days the mother and the new stepfather were with us they spent most of their time stuffed into the backseat of my car as the wife and I drove from appointment to appointment, house to house, crisis to crisis. Much to their credit, they were exceptionally understanding – they even departed a day early to make more room for our efforts. But, it must be said, it was certainly a bit of an odd circumstance leading to rather unique phrases like “Pardon me, would you, new step-daddy, I have to talk to this lawyer a moment about suing a Douche-Nozzle in Syracuse.”
That said, I move onward to what I think of now as Stage Two of the Saga: the Houseguest and the new house. In many ways this period moved far more smoothly than we could have expected based on the previous week. Stage Two of the Saga essentially covers the second week of the story – in fact it is rather impressive how closely this Saga traces calendric cycles.
Part two of the Saga begins with us, on the morning of Friday June 30th, in our realtor’s office looking at the prices of houses comparable to the “perfect house.” After about a half an hour of this we settled on what we thought was a reasonable offer to make – though, since it was well below the asking price, we did not particularly expect the seller to accept it. But, since the whole real estate buying process is a bit on the odd side, the only way we could find out how serious the seller was about his highly inflated price was to actually write up a contract, this time with an oddly convoluted contingency clause engineered to protect us in some way from vague possibilities of impending legal doom resulting from the contract with the Douche-Nozzle.
That accomplished, there was very little to do other than wait. Much of that weekend was comprised of email and voicemail checks to see if there was any contact from the realtor. By Sunday the seller had made a counter-offer that indicated he was indeed ready to wait perhaps forever for someone to match his asking price, an event that shall probably never happen, but one he is sentimentally tied to in the extreme. [We have it on inside information that there has been a series of offers on that house, most of them probably not too far from our offer, all of which have been rejected.]
Anyway, that taken care of, we were left to prepare for the Houseguest’s arrive – essentially we thought it appropriate to shove some of the boxes into the corners of the apartment so he could have a place to sleep until the move actually began. On Tuesday, the Houseguest arrived, fresh from his own housing woes since he was searching for an apartment in the city he will be moving to shortly. There was a modicum of celebrating, but mostly exhausted falling to sleep that evening.
The next day was a bit of an enforced pause – it was the Fourth of July. Seeing as no one was in their office, there was little that could be done about any of the outstanding issues – i.e. we still wanted to buy a house, and the Douche-Nozzle was still out there somewhere refusing to release us from the now dead contract and thus threatening to interfere with the forward progress of our lives. I am not sure if I am doing a terribly good job in conveying the rather elevated level of background anxiety the Douche-Nozzle situation was causing for the wife and me. Yes, it was in the lawyers’ hands – both the friendly original lawyer and now the Litigator – and there really wasn’t anything in particular the wife and I could do anymore, but it was an omnipresent disturbance. Think of the grimace on Yoda’s face when he senses that some planet or another has exploded, causing a disturbance in the Force.
Anyway, on the Fourth we took the Houseguest to the quaint local fireworks display. As evidence of this pause I offer you these pictures taken that evening.
The next day, with the Houseguest in tow, the wife and I returned once more to the real estate agency to write up yet another purchase offer – this time for the house on Genessee, hopefully the last real estate contract we would be dealing with for quite a while. At this point the whole paperwork process was old hat to us, so we flew through all the signings and initialings, occasionally having to correct or prompt the perhaps less than brilliant realtor.
This contract took on a double bit of intrigue. You see, on top of our needing to make our offer contingent upon successfully getting out of the unresolved contract with the Douche-Nozzle, this seller – Ms. Unrealisitc – did not want to close until two weeks after the still uncertain closing date of the house she was buying. Thus, at the end of this contract session we were armed with a many layered contract which demanded a closing date on or before the first day of October. And this closing-date clause, since we had to be out of the new, temporary two-room apartment we were moving into the next day by mid-October, was a deal-breaker.
That afternoon and evening were spent boxing up possessions with the exceptional assistance of the kind, understanding, and emotionally supportive Houseguest. After a less than adequate night of sleep, early the next morning the wife and I went off to pick up the moving van and began the move. Over the course of the day great progress was made (thanks, again, to said Houseguest and a particularly helpful classicist) and the whole moving into a small two-room apartment thing seemed far from unimaginable – in fact, once all of the furniture was in place, it became evident that the new abode might be quite lovely, even if it did require a bit of a stripped down existence.
About mid-afternoon, though, we received a call from our realtor. Ms. Unrealistic was unwilling to accept the firm closing date clause. She was still insisting on being able to simply sell the house sometime later. When? Sometime between September and January. I, both physically and emotional exhausted, informed the realtor that this was insane, I was sick of the whole process of dealing with Douche-Nozzles and unrealistic twits, and that no, we were not flexible about this need for an actual closing date. I furthermore hinted that the wife and I would be walking away from her services as a real estate agent to find someone I felt to be, well, competent.
The realtor quickly back-pedaled and vowed to work on it and see if anything could be done. Calls would be made, faxes would be checked, perhaps even a church bell or two would be rung in case the Red Coats were coming. I then indulged myself in a bit of a rant in the company of the wife, the Houseguest, and the helpful classicist.
By then end of the day we had essentially moved. There were still a whole lot of things to deal with, mostly boxes and boxes of things – not yet boxed up – to put into storage. But the core of the move was complete and, along with the Houseguest, the wife and I had moved across the street to the new apartment. At midnight that night I gently kissed the wife once and said “Happy Anniversary.” It was now the seventh day of July and it was the fifth anniversary of our wedding. Perhaps this was not how we expected to spend our anniversary, but we were together. Thus, despite all of the complications, there was happiness. Huzzah for the wife!!!
The next morning we awoke late, wished each other happy anniversary again, and headed off to have breakfast in town with the Houseguest. Just after breakfast, as we were perusing the annual book sale on the village green, the realtor called and informed us that the seller had changed her mind and we had a house – assuming that none of the myriad complications reared their ugly heads along the way. But, perhaps, we were getting an anniversary present: a house to buy.
Unfortunately, the seller – Ms. No-Longer-Unrealistic – did not like the us getting out of the other contract clause – who can blame her – thus the wife and I decided to attempt to make contact with the Douche-Nozzle’s realtor to see if there was a way to resolve this without going to court. We stopped by his office; he wasn’t there, so we left a message.
A few hours later he called us back. Let’s just shorthand this since the call, essentially, went to crap. He was an Ass – and I do mean a capital-A Ass, an unremitting Ass – I got pissed, I informed him that we would be filing a grievance with the Board of Realtors against him [we had already contacted them and they felt we definitely had cause for grievance] as well as probably suing him, he call me an imbecile and hung up on me. I ranted and raved again, and then we got back to a bit more work. The wife called the Litigator to get his advice on the problematic safety clause and to update him on my rantings. He was not pleased with my conversation with the Ass – I didn’t particularly care – and he advised us to go ahead and drop the clause from the contract. While this was theoretically dangerous, for all practical purposes the contract with the Douche-Nozzle was dead. So, the wife called our realtor, dropped the offending clause, and we went forward with buying the new house.
Since it was our fifth anniversary, the wife and I called it an early evening and went out for a nice dinner with the Houseguest and celebrated. Thus Stage Two drew to a close. The next day promised a small amount of finishing up in the old apartment, but for all serious purposes we were safely ensconced in the new apartment, and we had entered into an agreement to purchase another house – one that was rather lovely. All that remained to be dealt with was the Douche-Nozzle.
Damn you Douche-Nozzle! Damn you to Hell!
[To be continued…]
3 Comments:
I am greatly enjoying this account of your real estate woes. However, I can't help but feel that it would be improved -- nay, rendered absolutely mesmerizing -- if there were more in it about this "Houseguest" you keep mentioning. He seems like a fascinating figure -- even if dubbing him "the Houseguest" is disturbingly reminiscent of Conrad's creepy "the Intended" in Heart of Darkness.
oh, I agree! who is that masked houseguest?!
I believe the Houseguest -- whoever he may be -- should come forward and offer his own ruminations on his role in the Saga of Real Estate Woe. If he were to email such a thing to me I would certainly include those thoughts in said Saga -- perhaps as an Appendix or an Epilogue.
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