Sadness Street
Just because it took me and John four months and one week from getting pre-approved to getting around to look at our first house doesn’t mean we weren’t doing anything. You have to understand that the whole prospect of house hunting roiled up in me every regret, fear, anxiety and insecurity any good Yankee girl experiences when someone wants her money. I had a heap of fretting to do first.
I quickly realized that as a house hunter late to the market, you are under constant threat of being swindled, bamboozled or doing something stupid. My only defense was to arm myself with knowledge, to get inside the business, know everything, be prepared, learn the lingo, pick up on the nuances, the inside-outs. The only problem was, real estate crap is boring.
I mean really. If I had wanted to learn how to negotiate and finance and haggle and talk about contingencies and title searches and conduct comparative market analysis and read contracts and know when to walk away and when to close the deal, don’t you think I would’ve already owned a house and had a real job and a 401K and a vacation timeshare and a living will and nursing home insurance? The reason mad creative types like me aren’t taking over the world is because it’s all we can do to get our email to work and our bills paid on time and a comb through our hair. (OK, well, maybe not the latter in my particular case.)
But somewhere along that sixteenth week, I started getting twitchy. Prices were rising, interest rates were falling and even the teeniest apartment-neighbor noise was driving me crazy. (“Did you hear that? Someone just put a sweater on, I know they did.”) We figured going to open houses would be the most uncommitted way to launch this very commitment-driven process. We just hoped no one would ask us what we thought we were doing.
So, one late October Sunday in 2002, on our way to our beloved and now-defunct Café Uffa (oh, and for just one more Anaheim scramble), John and I bought the Sunday Telegram. We spread out the real estate “Open House” section between us and began eliminating. First to go were the places out of our price range (most of the listings). Next were ones in towns we didn’t want to live in (many more), then the ones that looked utterly frightening (most of what remained) and then the open houses that would interfere with beers at Gritty’s later that afternoon. That left us about five houses to look at.
The next task was to put them in chronological order. Most open houses, we learned, usually last only a couple hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Of course, the 10-to-noon open houses you want to look at are inevitably located as geographically distant from one another as possible, so you can spend the entire day driving back and forth from Westbrook to Gray, if you ever wanted to live in either of those places, which we did not — but timing was still a challenge. Once we had our game plan down, however, there was nothing left to do but attack.
We chose for our very first house to view a tiny (we had no concept of what 8oo square feet meant) bungalow (box would have been more apt) in (to my mind) a rotten neighborhood (in which we would eventually settle). I pulled up in front of the house next door (not in front of the house for sale, dear God no), and there we sat. The house was squat and mean and low, with a sagging porch, rickety steps and peeling gray paint. I checked the listing just to make sure we weren’t on Sadness Street.
I didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want to smell inside. (I have olfactory issues.) But we bucked up, figuring everything that followed would look better. We even got out of the car. We made it to the walkway and then the stairs, where I stopped and wheeled around. “You go,” I said to John. “No, you go,” he said. “What if someone talks to me?” “Answer them.” “You’re nicer than I am.” “No I’m not.”
This went back and forth for a while, until our malingering was starting to look, I felt, unseemly. Finally, we did what any good, healthy married couple would do (no, not compromise): We paper-rock-scissored to see who went first. I can’t remember who won or lost. I think in the end we kind of crowded through the door together – à la Hansel and Gretel. What I do remember is what we saw took our breath away.
It was one of those houses time forgot. Fake oak paneling. Fat-slatted, dingy Venetian blinds. High school graduation pictures from the 1950s with that creepy pastel pink-and-blue tinting. Many, many crocheted items. Plastic flowers. Shag carpet. Deep shag carpet. And germs. Everywhere, I was sure. My cootie issues went into overdrive.
It was clear this was a grandma’s house — not in the “good” sense of a grandma’s house, which we would later learn in real estate-ese means a house that’s been untouched and has retained its original fixtures and charm. No, this was a grandma’s house of that bad variety – a dead grandma’s house. I overheard the agent talking about an out-of-town son, a motivated seller. (And where was he during the illness? Surely there had been an illness.) I didn’t want to look in any more rooms, lest grandma be laid out on one of the crocheted comforters in her best beige suit waiting for that neglectful (yet forgiven, always forgiven) son to show up and put her to rest.
I needed air — life-giving, fresh-smacking air. Fast. I slunk out the front door like a shoplifter and never even had to sign the registry or talk to anyone. John was a couple steps behind me, but if he hadn’t made it out, I can’t guarantee I would’ve gone back in for him.
We sat in the car without speaking until we were able to shake off our what’s-the-point-in-buying-a-house-we’re-just-going-to-die-anyway? torpor. We then motored on to house number two, where we would get our first taste of Bad House Mojo.
This was only the start.
Elizabeth Peavey, whose column runs biweekly, will be participating in “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night…: Stories by Local Luminaries in 5 Minutes or Less” on Thurs., Nov. 3, at Space Gallery. Please hereupon address her as Your Luminaryness.
