How to Buy Your Dream House
Don't let today's crazy real estate market keep you from grabbing your dream!
A couple of times a year, I debate whether to sell my house, reap some profits and buy another house. On these occasions, I find myself driving around in a car with a chatty realtor, looking at the tree lined streets of some picturesque rural area that was recommended by a friend. As I try to comprehend the financial and social implications of making this enormous life change, I nod and pretend to listen to their endless stream of lifestyle advice and amusing anecdotes about grandchildren as they fill the space between us like an unstoppable lava flow from a still active volcano.
So we drive from destination to destination and we stand on front porches looking for hidden keys to assorted front doors. Then we stand in unfamiliar entry ways beside baskets full of turquoise colored plastic booties that a hand printed sign has asked us to please slip over our shoes. We breathe in the odd odors of the departing tenant’s musty rooms, realizing we are able to identify the competing strains of air freshener and mold. As the day creeps slowly forward, we watch helplessly as the good will between us starts to wilt. When it turns out I am not ready to hand over my life savings because I have not seen anything I want to buy, the cheerful fountain of energy that was bubbling between us stagnates into a muddy puddle of typhoid infested standing water.
At the end of the day, as we pretend to make plans to do this again sometime, I can hear my inner voice begging me to please not to make an appointment. Because what I find, time after time, is that everything for sale in the price range I am seeking is…peculiar. People live in very weird houses! The only bathroom is in the kitchen. And the kitchen is in the bedroom. And the bedroom is in the garage. Or the house is three stories high, and the patio is in the storage shed. And the garage is attached to a closet in the dining room which also is where the only shower is located. Sometimes there are no closets. Sometimes there are nothing but closets. Or there are three doors inexplicably right next to each other that all lead to what are mysteriously referred to as ‘the media room.’ More times than not, the man of the house did alot of these renovations himself. What other explanation can there be for a porch that is two feet wide and thirty feet long?
And that’s before we get to the financial specifications. Sometimes the seller is only accepting all cash and not allowing inspections. And, just to make it more fun, the realtor won’t say how much other interested buyers have bid. Over all, it is a lot like buying into a neighborhood in The Matrix or a John Waters movie without first getting a look at what the screenwriters have already got planned for the sequel. And that is why I have prepared this list of useful time-saving steps to help you succeed should you attempt to buy a house. Here-in lies the only path to real estate success that I can figure out. (I would add some disclaimers but as far as I know, Beyonce and Jay-Z do not subscribe to my substack.)
Good luck to us all.
your writing makes me want to write as well so i can imitate you. Badly of course, but perhaps with iwth enough reflected humor to please my editor
The house I bought
I wasn't fooled by "View of river if you stand on toilet and twist to look through upper left 1/8 of window when all the trees are bare."
Was fooled by "Water in the basement has never been a problem." (Doesn't mean what you thought she said.)
Didn't realize "Tear out the kitchen ceiling and have a lovely cathedral view of the barn's beams above" was true because the kitchen is The Middle Territory to raccoons, mice, squirrels, and others, and last winter to a porcupine who spent it peacefully under the kitchen floor.
Or that "Lovely view of Dick's garden from the pantry" is because Dick, an angry, misogynistic, incessant gardener later sent to jail, had a survey done to show he owns the side of your house.
BUT, buying that house also meant I lucked into buying a vacant lot/swimming spot on the river for a song that has now grown into bird habitat.