Well, I acquired it legally. You can be sure of that.
So, right now, I'm upstairs in my office, because along with my bedroom, that's the only area of my house I can really be in right now, as I hired a bunch of dudes to come in and fix the damage from the flood earlier this year with the remaining money from my tax refund. This is apparently what you buy a house: you constantly pour money in it, and you freak that you're doing it wrong. (And yes, this means I've been doing all my hanging out and entertaining guests in a living room that was on bare concrete flooring with long strips of drywall missing from the walls all the way around the room, ever since early May. I'm very classy.)
I was going through my file of "things to write about someday" for this night's entry, and I found a bunch of my notes from home-buying. About four years ago, I bought a house and have since managed not to burn it down, or get tarred and feathered by the neighborhood HOA, so I reckon that qualifies me to write this very important guide on the process. It is incomplete towards the end because I forgot I was writing it. So, I give you:
HOW TO BUY A HOUSE THE THORNE_SCRATCH WAY.
(Bestselling author of, HOW TO GET BANNED FROM THE VATICAN THE THORNE_SCRATCH WAY, and HOW TO ROMANCE A DOLPHIN THE THORNE_SCRATCH WAY and lead screenwriter for the smash hit, 28 DAYS OF NAKED GYLLENHAAL)
So. You've decided to buy a house! Great! Or an apartment, or a condo, or a townhouse, or maybe just a large box in an alley someplace. Whatever you decide, that's wonderful-just come to terms with the fact now that buying a house is a lot like going to the dentist. Whenever you go to the dentist, no matter what you've done in the past year, it's never good enough. Likewise, whenever you decide to buy a home, no matter how hard you've worked or how much you make or how much you've saved… it will never be enough and your credit is never as good as you think it is and there will always be more expenses that you did not foresee.
So, you know, just get used to that. Put it on an embroidered wall-hanging. Embrace your preemptive failure. This is important.
Preliminary Step Before Step One: Get some money together.
This is so self-explanatory it doesn't get to be an official step. If you have a spouse or significant other, great. You've more likely than not doubled the amount of money you have available! If you're a loveless hermit like me, you're gonna have to do this shit solo. Your method may vary; you may choose to do a variety of things, separately or in conjunction. Options include but are not limited to: working and saving your salary, pawning or ebaying valuable heirlooms that (hopefully) belong to you; holding celebrities for ransom; betting at the racetrack or the craps table; piracy; playing the stock market; selling some of your less-needed internal organs; befriending a rich relative so they'll leave you their fortune when they die; forging a copy of a rich relative's will so it seems as though they've left you their fortune when they die; winning the lotto; blackmail; knocking over a bank; and so forth.
I am reliably told that society frowns on at least a couple of these options, so proceed with a due amount of caution.
Step One: Get a realtor.
Realtors handle a lot of the boring crap you don't really want to wade through when it comes to finding and purchasing houses, so I do recommend having one. This should be a thoughtful and well-researched process where you survey various firms and agents who are most familiar and experienced with the process and area that you'd like to investigate. You find out if they're a seller's agent, a buyer's agent, or both. You want to know if they do this full time or part time, and how long they've been doing this. You find out if they have a good set of crazy-eyed expressions for negotiation tactics. Personality is also an important factor, where you want to find if you're going to mesh well with your realtor, if you want a real hands-on person who does the work personally or someone who'll just line up houses to look at and farms out a lot of the other tasks.
…In my case, I went with the first person suggested to me: my mother's best high school friend's daughter, who apparently used to babysit me. I obtained her through the simple process of my mother telling me, "Well, Rosemary's daughter is a realtor, how about her?" and my saying "Great. Fine. Pass the potatoes."
Six months later, my mother reminded me again that Rosemary had a daughter who was a realtor and was I ever going to call her, and I said "Okay. Sure. Pass the green beans."
Some time after that, my mother called her friend's daughter, gave her my cell number, and told her to call me specifically at six in the evening. Which she did, while I was in the middle of making a baked macaroni casserole, wrist-deep in grated cheddar.
It was an awkward phone conversation, not unlike trying to invite your crush to the junior prom. This is the same woman whose wedding I attended, and where I got somehow sucked into a vaguely uncomfortable relationship with her cousin, where we went on dates to see movies, and then I would stand in the parking lot and let him kiss me until I couldn't take his sloppy tongue machinations any longer. This is relevant because she got married only a couple years ago, and at the time, I distinctly remember that she was working as a policewoman. (This will also be relevant later in the entry.)
After some initial chitchat-- ("Are you still seeing my cousin?" "Uh, nope.") -we got down to actual real estate talk, where she threw around terms and asked me how much I made and how much money I had saved. Caught off guard, I deployed my usual "someone is trying to sell me something" tactics, and after the initial stammering and hemming, agreed to both tell and do whatever she asked. (Twig has personally gotten to see me do this when I was visiting her in Boston, where a clerk at Teavana pressured me into buying eighty dollars of tea before I could escape the store. I am amazingly bad at this. In certain shopping malls, I have to skitter down the walkways like a nervous marmot because the dudes who run the kiosks where they try to sell those flat iron hair straightening things always try to grab me. And once someone has you on a stool with a large, hot piece of metal and ceramic getting waved close to your face and in your hair, it's game over. I have actually physically flung myself into maternity clothing stores and Forever 21's to avoid getting collared by the hair straightener kiosk guys.)
The important thing is that she agreed to be my realtor. Though as I mentioned, once I did the math in my head about the last job I knew she was doing, when that was, and what she was doing now, I realized I wasn't working with a veteran realtor, exactly, and I was also working with someone personally connected to me and my family.
Well, it probably won't matter that much, I told myself.
Step Two: (only do this if you are me) Ignore your realtor.
Due to both my crippling fear of major life decisions and my innate tendency towards laziness and eventual descent into the depths of entropy, I cope with key situations like this by either running at them full tilt with my eyes closed, or ignoring them completely. There is no middle ground. So far, it's worked out great.
The day after I got my realtor, she immediately started sending me emails with automated compilations of condos, townhouses, and houses in the price range and geographic areas where I had indicated interest. These listings were compiled on a website where I could view and then rank them into categories like "discard", "possibility", and "favorite", with appropriately cute, if bewildering, little icons of hearts and lightbulbs and wastebaskets and eyes.
I clicked the first email and was immediately confused on how to use the site. I tentatively clicked links, looking for pictures when they were provided, trying to figure out the meaning of the various abbreviations, and hoping I wasn't accidentally buying something. Occasionally, I would pause to hyperventilate over the asking prices.
This went on for about an hour. Feeling I'd done my duty for the day, I closed the tab again, and then ignored every email she sent me for the next month and a half.
Step Three: Get a mortgage broker. I think.
(I could not tell you the difference between a mortgage broker, a retail lender, a loan officer, or a wholesale lender if the pope himself were holding a gun to the head of the world's cutest kitten. All I know is I had someone who my realtor told me to use, and I saw no reason to try and inflict my own brain on it.)
You'll need to obtain a mortgage broker at some point. You see, your realtor's job is to get you to buy a place. Your realtor also profits from when you actually buy, usually getting a percentage of the money you plonk down. The mortgage broker is the guy who tells you how much money you'll be shelling out if you want to buy a certain place. He may resuscitate you when you hyperventilate over how much money that is. (Your better realtors can also do this, as well as perform the Heimlich maneuver and some minor brain surgery.) He'll tell you that you are getting a loan, and then he will eventually sell off your mortgage to other faceless companies, a hazy twilight zone where your money will go but you will not know why or where. You will merely stand on the edge of this dizzying precipice and blindly chuck your cash into the black vortex, hoping desperately that it's going somewhere good.
I eventually chose my mortgage broker the exact same way I got my realtor, in that I went with the first one who escalated from emails to actually calling me, whereupon I promptly gave in and surrendered a lot of personal information. However, after his initial numbers came back and the second potential mortgage broker got his hands on them through my realtor, the second guy promised to get me a lower rate. So I heartlessly switched to him. (And had my realtor dump the first guy for me so I wouldn't have to talk to him. See, realtors are very helpful!)
Also, I found out my second mortgage broker had the Indiana Jones theme music as his cellphone ringtone, which sort of escalated his worth in my eyes.
Step Four: (again, this is my personal approach and therefore optional) Ignore your mortgage broker.
Ignoring things is where I am a fucking champ.
Step Five: Actually look at some houses.
It is possible you will do this before Step Three, depending on how sure you are about the type of place you want and how fast your realtor will move to get you looking at places that will break your heart when you realize you'll have to rob a bank to even think about making an offer. At some point, your realtor will expect you to get off your ass and actually make a choice about where you want to live. Eventually, I got too guilt-laden over the number of phone calls and emails I was ducking, and decided it was time to man up and look at the website again.
After picking about eight houses at random, mostly based on whether or not I could locate them on the Bing map provided with each listing, I told my realtor we would go out looking the following day. She happily agreed, and told me about another listing I should go check out on my own time, since it was so close to where I currently lived. I agreed, in order to get off the phone, and then made the mistake of mentioning it to my mother, who immediately decided we had to look at it right now. So we did.
As it turned out, looking at houses is just like being bothered by salespeople in department stores (or by the dudes working in kiosks in the mall aisles), although in the cases of the houses, they want you to drop many thousands of dollars to buy something and additional money to fix all the crap that's wrong with whatever you're buying.
This particular place was nice. A bit old fashioned, but a great location, nice yard, and enough bed rooms that I could probably host a decent kegger. It was in the perfect area.I even liked the color. "Okay, I like it fine," I said. "Let's put in an offer."
Twelve hours later, my realtor called me back. "Sooo, apparently some other people are bidding, and it's becoming a war, and the owners want to know if you'll go over $400,000, so do you want to?" she said.
"Ffffffff," I said.
And so I had my first, "Yeah, no," experience with home-buying. But having broken the seal on making the effort, the next month became a madcap roller coaster of my realtor showing up every day and making me look at house after house.
At first I thought it was just a fluke, but, like, half the houses my realtor had shown me had been close to cemeteries. Like, superclose. In the backyard close. My working theory is that she is actually a zombie, and she was doing some preemptive pantry stocking, placing people in homes convenient to hungry hordes of the undead. I brought this theory up to Louise, since she was the person most likely to actually be spending any amount of time visiting and/or living with me. Louise said, (and I quote) "you should be open-minded about these things," and reminded me of the sizable chunk of time she and I had spent in our college's local graveyard, generally intoxicated and tripping over gravestones that said things like HERE LYETH INTERRED YE BODY OF EZRA HUCKINS, WHO DID EXPIRETH OF BLACKE PLAGUE. ALL YE SINNERS, LOOK WELL AND REPENT YE EARTHLY DEEDS.
Which is true, but still. I found it mildly curious.
There was this one place the realtor showed me that was haunted, I swear. Either that, or there was a homeless person and/or free-loading contractor hiding in the crawlspace. I kept hearing all these unsettling noises, and it was dark and scary, and I couldn't bring myself to actually check very hard. All the copper wiring had been ripped out of the walls already, and presumably sold on a shady black market. The basement was like something out of the Blair Witch movie or possibly just a standard Silent Hill import. (I did not stick my hand in the toilet.) Fortunately, this sort of occasion was where my realtor's former work as a police offer came in handy, as she simply shoved her baby into my arms, and strode up the stairs, yelling "hello?" loudly, as I stood there clutching her child and wondering if I should start running first, or chuck the baby as a distraction and then make a break for it. (The baby, no doubt sensing my thoughts, poked me in the face several times with his sticky fingers.)
Eventually, she came back down and cheerily told me she thought there might've been someone hiding in the basement, but they were probably gone by now. I really, sincerely, completely, honestly did not want to go into the basement but she made me, and I spent roughly twenty seven seconds down there quietly gibbering before saying in the politest way possible that I didn't think this house was for me, due to the large amount of home repairs that would be needed to make it livable.
Eventually, it got to the point where every day, I'd come home from work and we would see three or four houses that were on the market and had no one living in there right now, and on the weekend, we would try to hit as many open house showings as possible. My notebook eventually got extremely jammed up, but there were some of the places that stood out in my memory:
-The house with the cemetery in the backyard. (Aside from telling me I should keep an open mind, Louise also told me a cemetery nearby "could be useful." She was correct, but the last thing I needed was to allow Louise easy access to a convenient cemetery.)
-The other house with a cemetery in the backyard. This was a much more modern looking cemetery. I preferred the older looking one; shiny gravestones with carving you can actually make out just have less of that graveyard flavor to them.
-The other, other house with a cemetery. Not exactly in the backyard, but still visible from the master bedroom window. This was the point where I began to feel like there was some kind of sinister agenda at hand.
-The house where the hallway was so narrow I could only walk through with my arms at my sides. This house was kind of bonkers in its construction; it felt like they were trying to cram a much larger house into a much tinier space, and it left you feeling both uncomfortably claustrophobic and yet exposed at the same time in weirdly paradoxical fashion. The top floor was basically one big room, which was neat in a way because it was a Cape Cod style house, but that meant the master bedroom suite was pretty much it. And the basement had an uneven dirt floor and an ominous smell of dampness.
-The house with the Escher-like sunken garden. Can't remember a damn thing about the house, but the backyard was very tiered off in a variety of levels and boxes for gardening and little pond areas and such. It was nifty, but also somewhat creepy in an "Overlook Hotel for Midgets" kind of way.
-The house that looked normal from the outside but was hosting obviously three families at once and became gradually more batshit the deeper you ventured into it. The kitchen was weirdly retro and peeling metal and paint in all sorts of areas. All the bedrooms had extra hammocks hung up into the corners. As you went down the levels of the house, you realized it had basically been divided up into a bunch of separate living areas. THERE WERE FOUR STOVES IN THAT HOUSE. Each family, I'm guessing, had sort of made a kitchen nook for themselves in various odd places (including what I'm pretty sure was originally a laundry room and a linen closet) and imported the necessary appliances. There was also a very weird smell as you kept going deeper into the house-not bad, exactly, just weird.
It had a bunch of lilac trees around it which nearly swayed me to its side, though. I love lilacs.
-The house that used to be a daycare center building and had been hastily made over into a living domicile. I swear, you could still smell the paste and crayons. Not necessarily bad, just… very obviously not originally a house. You never realize how different windows are until you see windows from a house versus windows from a non-house building.
-The house where I accidentally knocked over a bassinet. (Unoccupied at the time.) The house itself could have been wonderful; I wouldn't know since I toured the rest of it in a haze of embarrassment and then hauled ass out.
-The house full of parrots. Again, I kind of was unable to focus on anything else about the house.
-The house that was gorgeous and had marble counter tops and all this suspiciously new remodeling, but which my parents walked through with tight-lipped smiles and basically told me as soon as we left that it was nice, but also located squarely in the most crime-filled section of that zipcode. See, this is why you need to take people with you! I was woefully out of date with the local murder stats. Even my realtor was pretty much, "yeah, I didn't know why you wanted me to take you there." Now that I think about it, maybe that was why she kept trying to shove me at houses close to cemeteries.
-The house we ended up breaking into twice. The first time, it was at night, and someone had left the back sliding door unlocked, so my mother (I was checking this one out sans realtor; it got to a point where I'd be driving, see a "FOR SALE" sign, and automatically pull over to go look, no matter what I was currently doing) decided we should take that as a sign from God and go investigate. I, however, am totally a wuss about breaking into dark, seemingly abandoned houses at night because I have played too many survival horror video games, and basically had to be dragged inside.
The next time, since I had told my realtor that I'd be interested in seeing the house again, maybe legally, we were supposed to have the key but there was a miscommunication. Undeterred, she went back to the sliding door , got into the back sun room of the house, were deterred by a lock door there, and were roughly five minutes away from my realtor boosting me in through a kitchen window when the grounds-keeping dude showed up and let us in.
That house also had a creepy basement, but was by the far the most bang for my buck, spacewise. I could have stored so many corpses in that basement. It has three workshop rooms! I felt kind of embarrassed that I didn't put an offer in after going to so much trouble to see it.
-The house I suspected was haunted by the ghosts of the elderly couple who had previously inhabited it. I'm not sure, man. I just had funny feelings about that house. Plus, it had funky 70's style paneling.
Anyway, the house I finally ended up with wasn't even on my schedule to see; my realtor sent me there on a whim. It was a townhouse that had just gone on the market, and I accidentally ran smack into one of the owners when she and her husband were returning to the house as the open house ended. Whereupon, we had this conversational exchange.
ME: Oh, sorry.
HER: No problem. I hope you liked the house.
ME: (frozen in indecision over what to say: do I honestly say I liked it, and make her think she can take me to the cleaners on the asking price, or do I take the douche frat-boy negging approach and try to make her feel bad about the house so she drops the price?)
HER: …?
ME: I liked your dog! (flees scene)
Their dog had been crated in the laundry room and had in fact scared the shit out of me when I walked in on him unexpectedly.
But it was a good enough house, in a reasonable geographically pleasing area, and so I decided that enough was enough and I wanted my goddamn tax credit, so let's put an offer in and start dickering.
Here is a conversation I had while in the middle of the process while will illuminate to you how I knew exactly nothing about buying and dickering for houses.
ThorneScratch: I don't like buying houses. It's hard. But the weather is nice.
twigcollins: It is. Are you any closer to any decisions or possibilities?
ThorneScratch: Probably buying it. I have a contract. Waiting for the appraisal.
twigcollins: Wow. Congratulations!
ThorneScratch: If the appraisal is fucked, then we go back to the drawing board. I shall live in a large box of some kind.
twigcollins: What's it like? What made you decide?
ThorneScratch: Honestly? Weariness. I was at the point where I was willing to fling money at the closest place that wasn't a crapshack with a graveyard in the back.
twigcollins: Where are you going to put the sekrit dolphin room? What about midget tossing?
ThorneScratch: The hyperbaric dolphin chamber/opium den will be in the basement!
twigcollins: "My only requirement is no backyard graveyard." Which really-- I mean, a close graveyard might be handy. I'm just sayin'.
ThorneScratch: Well, I mean. I don't want it as my backyard, which is what it was in that one place my realtor showed me. Close is okay; I can cope with close. Mostly the reluctance is in case of zombies, you know. I don't want them wandering in for tea. Or having keggers with Pyramid Head. He never cleans up afterward.
twigcollins: Always puts the toilet paper exactly the wrong way on the roll. And leaves bits of... stuff.
I cannot tell you how I actually ended up buying the house because I don't know. I just know my realtor handled most of it. She offered ridiculously small sums, their realtor countered with ridiculously large sums, and then vicious emails would go back and forth about the shoddy self-installed wainscoting or the relative distance of the house to local elementary schools. At last we decided I probably did want to buy the house, and they probably did want to sell it to me, for more money than I offered but less money than they wanted, and it would all depend on the home inspection visit.
The home inspection visit took place on an unseasonably warm day in April. I had overdressed for the weather, and was not prepared to have a camera go off in my face when I reached over to shake hands with the home inspector.
"Surprise!" he said.
"Fnargh," I said, blinking through spots.
"I like to put a picture of the potential new buyer on the cover of the report I give them," he said, which is why my home inspection report has a truly terrible picture of me on it looking sweaty, cross-eyed, and taken off guard.
He was kind of old, which meant I couldn't say anything mean, plus he was inspecting the house and I needed him on my side and not trying to sabotage me, so I just smiled in dutiful confusion and trailed after him for a good ninety minutes while he prodded things, took pictures, and scribbled in a notebook. It turned out the house was mostly in good shape, and was not sitting on an ancient Indian burial ground, which I admit, had been my foremost concern after the potential presence of radon, asbestos, and termites.
The inspector did fail to predict to me that the house would flood four different times in four different ways, go through two and a half sets of carpeting, and put me out in roughly six thousand dollars' worth of flood damages in that time, but who's perfect, eh?
The rest is honestly very boring, so I'm going to bulletpoint it all:
-The realtors argued more about the price and fought over who had to pay for the damaged (by pet urine, this was before the flooding) carpeting in the house.
-We agreed they would pay for replacing it, as long as I let them have a lengthy rentback so they could search for their own new house. Since I didn't have a lease or time-sensitive housing situation to worry about, that worked out well, and they ended up living there until July.
-I closed on the house the same day the Caps were getting eliminated from the 2010 playoffs by Montreal, which truly makes me worry to this day that I live in an unlucky place because that should have been our year, man. I might have to sell this place and move somewhere else if they don't get it together in a timely fashion.
-Before anyone gets a house, you have to exchange a metric fuckton of paper that requires five metric fucktons of initialing and signatures, mostly over multiple changes to all the things you've been arguing about. If you're smart, you'll go through them meticulously and review everything. If you're me, you'll just sign and initial without even checking to make sure you didn't just promise to give your kidneys to the mortgage company.
-You will attend at least three meetings with your realtor and your mortgage broker where they hurl terms at you that you pretend to understand but in reality are making up fantasy stories in your head about, like LIBOR, the evil overlord of real estate, and his faithful minion, Escrow. You have to nod and pretend to understand or they won't let you leave.
-You learn that you cannot actually write a paper check for such a big honking number as your deposit, so you have to get it issued by your bank itself. I advise having a chair on hand so you can sit down heavily in it and fan yourself when you realize the amount of money going out of your bank account.
-Then things are quiet and anticlimactic for a couple months because you don't get the house yet since the people are still living in it. I spent most of it haunting Goodwill stores and garage sales for potential furniture, and then being stymied by where to put any of it in my parents' house. The garage was really full of bookcases for a while.
-My realtor brought champagne when they finally turned over the key, and we toasted in the empty kitchen. People also give you wine when they learn you bought a house, which is good because it helps you cope with the fact, oh God, you bought a house. I moved into my place with roughly twenty bottles that people had given me.
-And at some point, I was alone in my house, and I sat on the floor because there was nothing to sit on at that point, and I thought, Hey, I didn't do too bad, I guess.
From there on out, it's nothing but painting, and floods, and carpeting, and waiting for the Verizon guy to come hook up your wifi, and finding scores of dead birds in your walls. But those are stories for owning your house and not the buying part. I'm sure we'll get to them by late December.
***
(The actual AIM conversation from the first time my house flooded, before I’d even properly moved in. Riiight after the new carpeting had just been laid down, too.)
Flidget Jerome: Ohnoes! How is your house and your work, madame? Have you used your murderbasement yet?
ThorneScratch: Got the carpet laid down again. Out three thousand dollars. Shall be using boxes for furniture for forseeable future.
Flidget Jerome: Jesus Christ on a Bike.
ThorneScratch: I know, right? But I can finally start putting stuff over there, now that it's dried out and fixed.
Flidget Jerome: I am sure they'll be very stylish boxes.
ThorneScratch: ....though we do have Hurricane Earl coming. Fucking floods. Oh, guess what. They also pulled not one, but TWO bull sharks out of the Potomac River, which is the river near where I live. I have decided never to enter the water again.
Flidget Jerome: Mmm, beefy sharks. I have to say, my sister, who is in Boston, is being very disdainful of your hurricane. Though, then again, the deaths in Florida were always newbies. ...stay out of puddles after the storm? That is usually my best advice. Don't walk into puddles, you never know where a downed electrical cable's gone.
ThorneScratch: I just don't want to get hammered with floods again. I don't like storm damage.
Flidget Jerome: This is a point. What's your insurance saying?
ThorneScratch: No official word yet, but they do not reimburse for outside water damage, so-- screwed, basically. At any rate, I am trying to lure Louise up because then I can trap her in my basement.
Flidget Jerome: She knows you would just-- yeah, she knows you well. She knows this water damage excuse is just to hide you have to keep changing the carpet due to the blood stains.
ThorneScratch: That is a damnable lie. (...she knows!) My one regret-- well, more than one, but one of my regrets is that I didn't take the opportunity to spray paint a huge message or smiley face or pentacle on the floor beneath the carpet before they laid it down again. Maybe a body outline like you see at cop scenes
Flidget Jerome: ...that would lead to interesting questions when you eventually sell.
ThorneScratch: I figured I could up the price that way, as long as I claimed it was someone famous. "Dick Cheney shot a man here."
Flidget Jerome: It IS really hard to keep track of all the men he shot.
ThorneScratch: And just the ones reported in the news, too!
Okay, NOW the guide is done.
I was going through my file of "things to write about someday" for this night's entry, and I found a bunch of my notes from home-buying. About four years ago, I bought a house and have since managed not to burn it down, or get tarred and feathered by the neighborhood HOA, so I reckon that qualifies me to write this very important guide on the process. It is incomplete towards the end because I forgot I was writing it. So, I give you:
HOW TO BUY A HOUSE THE THORNE_SCRATCH WAY.
(Bestselling author of, HOW TO GET BANNED FROM THE VATICAN THE THORNE_SCRATCH WAY, and HOW TO ROMANCE A DOLPHIN THE THORNE_SCRATCH WAY and lead screenwriter for the smash hit, 28 DAYS OF NAKED GYLLENHAAL)
So. You've decided to buy a house! Great! Or an apartment, or a condo, or a townhouse, or maybe just a large box in an alley someplace. Whatever you decide, that's wonderful-just come to terms with the fact now that buying a house is a lot like going to the dentist. Whenever you go to the dentist, no matter what you've done in the past year, it's never good enough. Likewise, whenever you decide to buy a home, no matter how hard you've worked or how much you make or how much you've saved… it will never be enough and your credit is never as good as you think it is and there will always be more expenses that you did not foresee.
So, you know, just get used to that. Put it on an embroidered wall-hanging. Embrace your preemptive failure. This is important.
Preliminary Step Before Step One: Get some money together.
This is so self-explanatory it doesn't get to be an official step. If you have a spouse or significant other, great. You've more likely than not doubled the amount of money you have available! If you're a loveless hermit like me, you're gonna have to do this shit solo. Your method may vary; you may choose to do a variety of things, separately or in conjunction. Options include but are not limited to: working and saving your salary, pawning or ebaying valuable heirlooms that (hopefully) belong to you; holding celebrities for ransom; betting at the racetrack or the craps table; piracy; playing the stock market; selling some of your less-needed internal organs; befriending a rich relative so they'll leave you their fortune when they die; forging a copy of a rich relative's will so it seems as though they've left you their fortune when they die; winning the lotto; blackmail; knocking over a bank; and so forth.
I am reliably told that society frowns on at least a couple of these options, so proceed with a due amount of caution.
Step One: Get a realtor.
Realtors handle a lot of the boring crap you don't really want to wade through when it comes to finding and purchasing houses, so I do recommend having one. This should be a thoughtful and well-researched process where you survey various firms and agents who are most familiar and experienced with the process and area that you'd like to investigate. You find out if they're a seller's agent, a buyer's agent, or both. You want to know if they do this full time or part time, and how long they've been doing this. You find out if they have a good set of crazy-eyed expressions for negotiation tactics. Personality is also an important factor, where you want to find if you're going to mesh well with your realtor, if you want a real hands-on person who does the work personally or someone who'll just line up houses to look at and farms out a lot of the other tasks.
…In my case, I went with the first person suggested to me: my mother's best high school friend's daughter, who apparently used to babysit me. I obtained her through the simple process of my mother telling me, "Well, Rosemary's daughter is a realtor, how about her?" and my saying "Great. Fine. Pass the potatoes."
Six months later, my mother reminded me again that Rosemary had a daughter who was a realtor and was I ever going to call her, and I said "Okay. Sure. Pass the green beans."
Some time after that, my mother called her friend's daughter, gave her my cell number, and told her to call me specifically at six in the evening. Which she did, while I was in the middle of making a baked macaroni casserole, wrist-deep in grated cheddar.
It was an awkward phone conversation, not unlike trying to invite your crush to the junior prom. This is the same woman whose wedding I attended, and where I got somehow sucked into a vaguely uncomfortable relationship with her cousin, where we went on dates to see movies, and then I would stand in the parking lot and let him kiss me until I couldn't take his sloppy tongue machinations any longer. This is relevant because she got married only a couple years ago, and at the time, I distinctly remember that she was working as a policewoman. (This will also be relevant later in the entry.)
After some initial chitchat-- ("Are you still seeing my cousin?" "Uh, nope.") -we got down to actual real estate talk, where she threw around terms and asked me how much I made and how much money I had saved. Caught off guard, I deployed my usual "someone is trying to sell me something" tactics, and after the initial stammering and hemming, agreed to both tell and do whatever she asked. (Twig has personally gotten to see me do this when I was visiting her in Boston, where a clerk at Teavana pressured me into buying eighty dollars of tea before I could escape the store. I am amazingly bad at this. In certain shopping malls, I have to skitter down the walkways like a nervous marmot because the dudes who run the kiosks where they try to sell those flat iron hair straightening things always try to grab me. And once someone has you on a stool with a large, hot piece of metal and ceramic getting waved close to your face and in your hair, it's game over. I have actually physically flung myself into maternity clothing stores and Forever 21's to avoid getting collared by the hair straightener kiosk guys.)
The important thing is that she agreed to be my realtor. Though as I mentioned, once I did the math in my head about the last job I knew she was doing, when that was, and what she was doing now, I realized I wasn't working with a veteran realtor, exactly, and I was also working with someone personally connected to me and my family.
Well, it probably won't matter that much, I told myself.
Step Two: (only do this if you are me) Ignore your realtor.
Due to both my crippling fear of major life decisions and my innate tendency towards laziness and eventual descent into the depths of entropy, I cope with key situations like this by either running at them full tilt with my eyes closed, or ignoring them completely. There is no middle ground. So far, it's worked out great.
The day after I got my realtor, she immediately started sending me emails with automated compilations of condos, townhouses, and houses in the price range and geographic areas where I had indicated interest. These listings were compiled on a website where I could view and then rank them into categories like "discard", "possibility", and "favorite", with appropriately cute, if bewildering, little icons of hearts and lightbulbs and wastebaskets and eyes.
I clicked the first email and was immediately confused on how to use the site. I tentatively clicked links, looking for pictures when they were provided, trying to figure out the meaning of the various abbreviations, and hoping I wasn't accidentally buying something. Occasionally, I would pause to hyperventilate over the asking prices.
This went on for about an hour. Feeling I'd done my duty for the day, I closed the tab again, and then ignored every email she sent me for the next month and a half.
Step Three: Get a mortgage broker. I think.
(I could not tell you the difference between a mortgage broker, a retail lender, a loan officer, or a wholesale lender if the pope himself were holding a gun to the head of the world's cutest kitten. All I know is I had someone who my realtor told me to use, and I saw no reason to try and inflict my own brain on it.)
You'll need to obtain a mortgage broker at some point. You see, your realtor's job is to get you to buy a place. Your realtor also profits from when you actually buy, usually getting a percentage of the money you plonk down. The mortgage broker is the guy who tells you how much money you'll be shelling out if you want to buy a certain place. He may resuscitate you when you hyperventilate over how much money that is. (Your better realtors can also do this, as well as perform the Heimlich maneuver and some minor brain surgery.) He'll tell you that you are getting a loan, and then he will eventually sell off your mortgage to other faceless companies, a hazy twilight zone where your money will go but you will not know why or where. You will merely stand on the edge of this dizzying precipice and blindly chuck your cash into the black vortex, hoping desperately that it's going somewhere good.
I eventually chose my mortgage broker the exact same way I got my realtor, in that I went with the first one who escalated from emails to actually calling me, whereupon I promptly gave in and surrendered a lot of personal information. However, after his initial numbers came back and the second potential mortgage broker got his hands on them through my realtor, the second guy promised to get me a lower rate. So I heartlessly switched to him. (And had my realtor dump the first guy for me so I wouldn't have to talk to him. See, realtors are very helpful!)
Also, I found out my second mortgage broker had the Indiana Jones theme music as his cellphone ringtone, which sort of escalated his worth in my eyes.
Step Four: (again, this is my personal approach and therefore optional) Ignore your mortgage broker.
Ignoring things is where I am a fucking champ.
Step Five: Actually look at some houses.
It is possible you will do this before Step Three, depending on how sure you are about the type of place you want and how fast your realtor will move to get you looking at places that will break your heart when you realize you'll have to rob a bank to even think about making an offer. At some point, your realtor will expect you to get off your ass and actually make a choice about where you want to live. Eventually, I got too guilt-laden over the number of phone calls and emails I was ducking, and decided it was time to man up and look at the website again.
After picking about eight houses at random, mostly based on whether or not I could locate them on the Bing map provided with each listing, I told my realtor we would go out looking the following day. She happily agreed, and told me about another listing I should go check out on my own time, since it was so close to where I currently lived. I agreed, in order to get off the phone, and then made the mistake of mentioning it to my mother, who immediately decided we had to look at it right now. So we did.
As it turned out, looking at houses is just like being bothered by salespeople in department stores (or by the dudes working in kiosks in the mall aisles), although in the cases of the houses, they want you to drop many thousands of dollars to buy something and additional money to fix all the crap that's wrong with whatever you're buying.
This particular place was nice. A bit old fashioned, but a great location, nice yard, and enough bed rooms that I could probably host a decent kegger. It was in the perfect area.I even liked the color. "Okay, I like it fine," I said. "Let's put in an offer."
Twelve hours later, my realtor called me back. "Sooo, apparently some other people are bidding, and it's becoming a war, and the owners want to know if you'll go over $400,000, so do you want to?" she said.
"Ffffffff," I said.
And so I had my first, "Yeah, no," experience with home-buying. But having broken the seal on making the effort, the next month became a madcap roller coaster of my realtor showing up every day and making me look at house after house.
At first I thought it was just a fluke, but, like, half the houses my realtor had shown me had been close to cemeteries. Like, superclose. In the backyard close. My working theory is that she is actually a zombie, and she was doing some preemptive pantry stocking, placing people in homes convenient to hungry hordes of the undead. I brought this theory up to Louise, since she was the person most likely to actually be spending any amount of time visiting and/or living with me. Louise said, (and I quote) "you should be open-minded about these things," and reminded me of the sizable chunk of time she and I had spent in our college's local graveyard, generally intoxicated and tripping over gravestones that said things like HERE LYETH INTERRED YE BODY OF EZRA HUCKINS, WHO DID EXPIRETH OF BLACKE PLAGUE. ALL YE SINNERS, LOOK WELL AND REPENT YE EARTHLY DEEDS.
Which is true, but still. I found it mildly curious.
There was this one place the realtor showed me that was haunted, I swear. Either that, or there was a homeless person and/or free-loading contractor hiding in the crawlspace. I kept hearing all these unsettling noises, and it was dark and scary, and I couldn't bring myself to actually check very hard. All the copper wiring had been ripped out of the walls already, and presumably sold on a shady black market. The basement was like something out of the Blair Witch movie or possibly just a standard Silent Hill import. (I did not stick my hand in the toilet.) Fortunately, this sort of occasion was where my realtor's former work as a police offer came in handy, as she simply shoved her baby into my arms, and strode up the stairs, yelling "hello?" loudly, as I stood there clutching her child and wondering if I should start running first, or chuck the baby as a distraction and then make a break for it. (The baby, no doubt sensing my thoughts, poked me in the face several times with his sticky fingers.)
Eventually, she came back down and cheerily told me she thought there might've been someone hiding in the basement, but they were probably gone by now. I really, sincerely, completely, honestly did not want to go into the basement but she made me, and I spent roughly twenty seven seconds down there quietly gibbering before saying in the politest way possible that I didn't think this house was for me, due to the large amount of home repairs that would be needed to make it livable.
Eventually, it got to the point where every day, I'd come home from work and we would see three or four houses that were on the market and had no one living in there right now, and on the weekend, we would try to hit as many open house showings as possible. My notebook eventually got extremely jammed up, but there were some of the places that stood out in my memory:
-The house with the cemetery in the backyard. (Aside from telling me I should keep an open mind, Louise also told me a cemetery nearby "could be useful." She was correct, but the last thing I needed was to allow Louise easy access to a convenient cemetery.)
-The other house with a cemetery in the backyard. This was a much more modern looking cemetery. I preferred the older looking one; shiny gravestones with carving you can actually make out just have less of that graveyard flavor to them.
-The other, other house with a cemetery. Not exactly in the backyard, but still visible from the master bedroom window. This was the point where I began to feel like there was some kind of sinister agenda at hand.
-The house where the hallway was so narrow I could only walk through with my arms at my sides. This house was kind of bonkers in its construction; it felt like they were trying to cram a much larger house into a much tinier space, and it left you feeling both uncomfortably claustrophobic and yet exposed at the same time in weirdly paradoxical fashion. The top floor was basically one big room, which was neat in a way because it was a Cape Cod style house, but that meant the master bedroom suite was pretty much it. And the basement had an uneven dirt floor and an ominous smell of dampness.
-The house with the Escher-like sunken garden. Can't remember a damn thing about the house, but the backyard was very tiered off in a variety of levels and boxes for gardening and little pond areas and such. It was nifty, but also somewhat creepy in an "Overlook Hotel for Midgets" kind of way.
-The house that looked normal from the outside but was hosting obviously three families at once and became gradually more batshit the deeper you ventured into it. The kitchen was weirdly retro and peeling metal and paint in all sorts of areas. All the bedrooms had extra hammocks hung up into the corners. As you went down the levels of the house, you realized it had basically been divided up into a bunch of separate living areas. THERE WERE FOUR STOVES IN THAT HOUSE. Each family, I'm guessing, had sort of made a kitchen nook for themselves in various odd places (including what I'm pretty sure was originally a laundry room and a linen closet) and imported the necessary appliances. There was also a very weird smell as you kept going deeper into the house-not bad, exactly, just weird.
It had a bunch of lilac trees around it which nearly swayed me to its side, though. I love lilacs.
-The house that used to be a daycare center building and had been hastily made over into a living domicile. I swear, you could still smell the paste and crayons. Not necessarily bad, just… very obviously not originally a house. You never realize how different windows are until you see windows from a house versus windows from a non-house building.
-The house where I accidentally knocked over a bassinet. (Unoccupied at the time.) The house itself could have been wonderful; I wouldn't know since I toured the rest of it in a haze of embarrassment and then hauled ass out.
-The house full of parrots. Again, I kind of was unable to focus on anything else about the house.
-The house that was gorgeous and had marble counter tops and all this suspiciously new remodeling, but which my parents walked through with tight-lipped smiles and basically told me as soon as we left that it was nice, but also located squarely in the most crime-filled section of that zipcode. See, this is why you need to take people with you! I was woefully out of date with the local murder stats. Even my realtor was pretty much, "yeah, I didn't know why you wanted me to take you there." Now that I think about it, maybe that was why she kept trying to shove me at houses close to cemeteries.
-The house we ended up breaking into twice. The first time, it was at night, and someone had left the back sliding door unlocked, so my mother (I was checking this one out sans realtor; it got to a point where I'd be driving, see a "FOR SALE" sign, and automatically pull over to go look, no matter what I was currently doing) decided we should take that as a sign from God and go investigate. I, however, am totally a wuss about breaking into dark, seemingly abandoned houses at night because I have played too many survival horror video games, and basically had to be dragged inside.
The next time, since I had told my realtor that I'd be interested in seeing the house again, maybe legally, we were supposed to have the key but there was a miscommunication. Undeterred, she went back to the sliding door , got into the back sun room of the house, were deterred by a lock door there, and were roughly five minutes away from my realtor boosting me in through a kitchen window when the grounds-keeping dude showed up and let us in.
That house also had a creepy basement, but was by the far the most bang for my buck, spacewise. I could have stored so many corpses in that basement. It has three workshop rooms! I felt kind of embarrassed that I didn't put an offer in after going to so much trouble to see it.
-The house I suspected was haunted by the ghosts of the elderly couple who had previously inhabited it. I'm not sure, man. I just had funny feelings about that house. Plus, it had funky 70's style paneling.
Anyway, the house I finally ended up with wasn't even on my schedule to see; my realtor sent me there on a whim. It was a townhouse that had just gone on the market, and I accidentally ran smack into one of the owners when she and her husband were returning to the house as the open house ended. Whereupon, we had this conversational exchange.
ME: Oh, sorry.
HER: No problem. I hope you liked the house.
ME: (frozen in indecision over what to say: do I honestly say I liked it, and make her think she can take me to the cleaners on the asking price, or do I take the douche frat-boy negging approach and try to make her feel bad about the house so she drops the price?)
HER: …?
ME: I liked your dog! (flees scene)
Their dog had been crated in the laundry room and had in fact scared the shit out of me when I walked in on him unexpectedly.
But it was a good enough house, in a reasonable geographically pleasing area, and so I decided that enough was enough and I wanted my goddamn tax credit, so let's put an offer in and start dickering.
Here is a conversation I had while in the middle of the process while will illuminate to you how I knew exactly nothing about buying and dickering for houses.
ThorneScratch: I don't like buying houses. It's hard. But the weather is nice.
twigcollins: It is. Are you any closer to any decisions or possibilities?
ThorneScratch: Probably buying it. I have a contract. Waiting for the appraisal.
twigcollins: Wow. Congratulations!
ThorneScratch: If the appraisal is fucked, then we go back to the drawing board. I shall live in a large box of some kind.
twigcollins: What's it like? What made you decide?
ThorneScratch: Honestly? Weariness. I was at the point where I was willing to fling money at the closest place that wasn't a crapshack with a graveyard in the back.
twigcollins: Where are you going to put the sekrit dolphin room? What about midget tossing?
ThorneScratch: The hyperbaric dolphin chamber/opium den will be in the basement!
twigcollins: "My only requirement is no backyard graveyard." Which really-- I mean, a close graveyard might be handy. I'm just sayin'.
ThorneScratch: Well, I mean. I don't want it as my backyard, which is what it was in that one place my realtor showed me. Close is okay; I can cope with close. Mostly the reluctance is in case of zombies, you know. I don't want them wandering in for tea. Or having keggers with Pyramid Head. He never cleans up afterward.
twigcollins: Always puts the toilet paper exactly the wrong way on the roll. And leaves bits of... stuff.
I cannot tell you how I actually ended up buying the house because I don't know. I just know my realtor handled most of it. She offered ridiculously small sums, their realtor countered with ridiculously large sums, and then vicious emails would go back and forth about the shoddy self-installed wainscoting or the relative distance of the house to local elementary schools. At last we decided I probably did want to buy the house, and they probably did want to sell it to me, for more money than I offered but less money than they wanted, and it would all depend on the home inspection visit.
The home inspection visit took place on an unseasonably warm day in April. I had overdressed for the weather, and was not prepared to have a camera go off in my face when I reached over to shake hands with the home inspector.
"Surprise!" he said.
"Fnargh," I said, blinking through spots.
"I like to put a picture of the potential new buyer on the cover of the report I give them," he said, which is why my home inspection report has a truly terrible picture of me on it looking sweaty, cross-eyed, and taken off guard.
He was kind of old, which meant I couldn't say anything mean, plus he was inspecting the house and I needed him on my side and not trying to sabotage me, so I just smiled in dutiful confusion and trailed after him for a good ninety minutes while he prodded things, took pictures, and scribbled in a notebook. It turned out the house was mostly in good shape, and was not sitting on an ancient Indian burial ground, which I admit, had been my foremost concern after the potential presence of radon, asbestos, and termites.
The inspector did fail to predict to me that the house would flood four different times in four different ways, go through two and a half sets of carpeting, and put me out in roughly six thousand dollars' worth of flood damages in that time, but who's perfect, eh?
The rest is honestly very boring, so I'm going to bulletpoint it all:
-The realtors argued more about the price and fought over who had to pay for the damaged (by pet urine, this was before the flooding) carpeting in the house.
-We agreed they would pay for replacing it, as long as I let them have a lengthy rentback so they could search for their own new house. Since I didn't have a lease or time-sensitive housing situation to worry about, that worked out well, and they ended up living there until July.
-I closed on the house the same day the Caps were getting eliminated from the 2010 playoffs by Montreal, which truly makes me worry to this day that I live in an unlucky place because that should have been our year, man. I might have to sell this place and move somewhere else if they don't get it together in a timely fashion.
-Before anyone gets a house, you have to exchange a metric fuckton of paper that requires five metric fucktons of initialing and signatures, mostly over multiple changes to all the things you've been arguing about. If you're smart, you'll go through them meticulously and review everything. If you're me, you'll just sign and initial without even checking to make sure you didn't just promise to give your kidneys to the mortgage company.
-You will attend at least three meetings with your realtor and your mortgage broker where they hurl terms at you that you pretend to understand but in reality are making up fantasy stories in your head about, like LIBOR, the evil overlord of real estate, and his faithful minion, Escrow. You have to nod and pretend to understand or they won't let you leave.
-You learn that you cannot actually write a paper check for such a big honking number as your deposit, so you have to get it issued by your bank itself. I advise having a chair on hand so you can sit down heavily in it and fan yourself when you realize the amount of money going out of your bank account.
-Then things are quiet and anticlimactic for a couple months because you don't get the house yet since the people are still living in it. I spent most of it haunting Goodwill stores and garage sales for potential furniture, and then being stymied by where to put any of it in my parents' house. The garage was really full of bookcases for a while.
-My realtor brought champagne when they finally turned over the key, and we toasted in the empty kitchen. People also give you wine when they learn you bought a house, which is good because it helps you cope with the fact, oh God, you bought a house. I moved into my place with roughly twenty bottles that people had given me.
-And at some point, I was alone in my house, and I sat on the floor because there was nothing to sit on at that point, and I thought, Hey, I didn't do too bad, I guess.
From there on out, it's nothing but painting, and floods, and carpeting, and waiting for the Verizon guy to come hook up your wifi, and finding scores of dead birds in your walls. But those are stories for owning your house and not the buying part. I'm sure we'll get to them by late December.
***
(The actual AIM conversation from the first time my house flooded, before I’d even properly moved in. Riiight after the new carpeting had just been laid down, too.)
Flidget Jerome: Ohnoes! How is your house and your work, madame? Have you used your murderbasement yet?
ThorneScratch: Got the carpet laid down again. Out three thousand dollars. Shall be using boxes for furniture for forseeable future.
Flidget Jerome: Jesus Christ on a Bike.
ThorneScratch: I know, right? But I can finally start putting stuff over there, now that it's dried out and fixed.
Flidget Jerome: I am sure they'll be very stylish boxes.
ThorneScratch: ....though we do have Hurricane Earl coming. Fucking floods. Oh, guess what. They also pulled not one, but TWO bull sharks out of the Potomac River, which is the river near where I live. I have decided never to enter the water again.
Flidget Jerome: Mmm, beefy sharks. I have to say, my sister, who is in Boston, is being very disdainful of your hurricane. Though, then again, the deaths in Florida were always newbies. ...stay out of puddles after the storm? That is usually my best advice. Don't walk into puddles, you never know where a downed electrical cable's gone.
ThorneScratch: I just don't want to get hammered with floods again. I don't like storm damage.
Flidget Jerome: This is a point. What's your insurance saying?
ThorneScratch: No official word yet, but they do not reimburse for outside water damage, so-- screwed, basically. At any rate, I am trying to lure Louise up because then I can trap her in my basement.
Flidget Jerome: She knows you would just-- yeah, she knows you well. She knows this water damage excuse is just to hide you have to keep changing the carpet due to the blood stains.
ThorneScratch: That is a damnable lie. (...she knows!) My one regret-- well, more than one, but one of my regrets is that I didn't take the opportunity to spray paint a huge message or smiley face or pentacle on the floor beneath the carpet before they laid it down again. Maybe a body outline like you see at cop scenes
Flidget Jerome: ...that would lead to interesting questions when you eventually sell.
ThorneScratch: I figured I could up the price that way, as long as I claimed it was someone famous. "Dick Cheney shot a man here."
Flidget Jerome: It IS really hard to keep track of all the men he shot.
ThorneScratch: And just the ones reported in the news, too!
Okay, NOW the guide is done.