House Hunting

So yesterday was the house hunt from hell! We looked at over 13 houses, and ended up deciding (tentatively) on the first one we looked at! UGH! To make it even worse, we started out in the 150,000 range, and decided that we should probably get a cheaper house so we could afford to do more than just live in our house. I thought eating was optional but Jeff told me it's not... Anyway... so we started looking at houses more in the 100,000 range, which are surprisingly a lot less nice to look at. First house we looked at (and will be putting a bid down on in the next few days) is a great example of the crap we had to go through. So we pull up to the house, and it's adorable. It's blue, with hearts around the windows, kind of victorian looking... but you can see that there is an addition to it, it's the largest house in the neighborhood. So I'm thinking, it's adorable! It's also 3,000 square feet! How is the price so low??? hehe... I soon found out.

So we get inside, and it looks like a construction site that got hit by a tornado at a daycare. Baby toys everywhere, including used baby diapers! I look at the sheet, was this a repo? Surely it was a repo if these people left the house in such disarray (understatement of the year). We move on to the kitchen, where we see food encrusted dishes, baby food, and yes... more dirty diapers. The living room looks like it was also being reconstructed, and there is wood and unfinished molding around the entry way. There is another room downstairs also being redone, covered in random wrappers and what not. So I hit the stairs, praying the upstairs is better. Much to my dismay it is not... The room I can only conduce is the master bedroom, is strewn with condom wrappers (Trojan Magnums if anyone was curious), used diapers, a poster with pictures of the family on it, and dirty panties you can tell belonged to a young girl around 5. I'm using my CSI skills to put together a plot in my mind at this point... but can't process the evidence because it's too disgusting. The toilet in the master bedroom is also broken, and the shower is very very questionable... mainly after seeing all the condom wrappers, I was reluctant to touch anything. Meanwhile, Jeff is going nuts! He's telling me that this guy was going to try to built a third floor, as evidenced by these stair shaped boards on the wall. This guy was ambitious! We walked over to the newly built part of the upstairs, and found this amazing master suite this dude was in the process of building. Not only that, but it was craftman-worthy! This guy knew his stuff. He had a place for a nice jacuzzi bath, a sitting area, 2 huge closets, and the workings of a surround sound area so that we can make our own theatre room... wowee... Jeff tells me he must have run out of money because this type of construction is costly. Hannah, our realtor, decided the woman had to have left the man that owned this house, with all the construction he'd done he'd been doing it for quite a while, and we saw the rest of the house, they were living like racoons!

So we went on to see 300 other houses, all were half the size of this first one. None were nearly as great in layout, nor did they need Jeff's constructional magic to fix up and then sell for lots of money... although we did visit some shady neighborhoods and found 3 of the houses had cracked foundations (very bad apparently)... so ultimately we decided the first one was our best bet (after I solemnly swore that I would not be the one to clean it out). We took Jeff's parents to see it a second time. They confirmed that it was a great buy, we could fix it up and sell it for a decent profit. So we called up Hannah and told her to do the paper work for our bid. On our way out, we met the neighbor. She was a nice girl around my age or maybe older (i can't always tell). She gave us the scoop on the house!!! So here's what happened:

The guy that owned the house was a Contractor, who was trying to make his house worth more so he could make money off of it. Meanwhile, he had a wife and four kids. Apparently, his wife cheated on him during his construction endeavors, and he was having a hard time finding work in the area. He found out about her cheating, and also that there was a lot of work in Oklahoma, so he told her he would forgive her if she moved with him immediately to Oklahoma. Apparently they dropped everything and left within days, maybe the same day... and apparently they were horrible neighbors and everyone was glad to see them go.

The end... I'll keep you posted on if we end up getting the house, and then the adventures of fixing it...