Buying A House

Last weekend we went to (Southern City) to look for houses.  We'd been searching online for the last month, hoping to find something good enough to justify flying into (City) early, but nothing great came up.  So we flew in, spent an entire Saturday looking at houses and finally found one we liked.

Since at least half the people who read this blog have already heard (or were part of) the riveting bodice-ripper that is the ANCIANT HOUSE HUNT TALE, I won't rehearse every step of the quest.  The summary is: we bought a somewhat quirky house in a very unquirky neighborhood.  At first we thought the sale would go very smoothly.  As we prepared to board the plane to return to LA, however, we learned that someone else other than us wanted our house.  Drama ensued.

Below is an email I sent to some friends describing the last few days.  Apologies for not writing up afresh; the email captures most of what there is to say about the process....

[Couple friend has sent us email saying how much they like house: this is the context]

....Thanks for your email. We have gotten so frazzled by recent events we have begun to question all our thought processes and reconsider the decision (not fundamentally, but, you know. Doubt creeps in).

The last few days have been incredibly hectic and tension-packed. On Sunday night we wrote an offer on the house, thinking we were the only ones interested. Because the house had already been on the market for a month, we assumed we’d get it for way under asking price. Then on Monday morning we learned another buyer had also made an offer. Various calls went back and forth—the sellers wanted us to be able to give them all their money at the end of June, all sorts of other stuff—and we assumed, as we boarded the plane to fly back to LA that we were going to have to make what’s called a “highest and best” offer. (Basically, both interested buyers make their best offer blind, and the seller chooses one).

We spent the whole flight trying to decide what that highest and best offer should be, while at the same time working out what would be our fall-back house if this house fell through. Then, when we landed we learned that the sellers did NOT want us to make a ‘highest and best' offer. Instead they sent us a very unorthodox (at least according to our realtor—who called it ‘amateur hour’) email in which they stipulated exactly the offer they wanted us to make. Make that offer, they said, and you get the house. Since their offer was actually BELOW what we we had been prepared to make (the money was the same, but we were going to throw in a number of ancillary inducements) we happily gave them what they wanted. We still got the house below its list price, too, but not as much below list as we’d hoped.

Then, in the last 24 hours we’ve each of us—the Wife especially—started to worry that maybe we were rushing into something, that we were buying a house just b/c we HAD to, that it was too unorthodox and odd, etc etc. This house is definitely better than anything else we saw, but is it our dream house? Maybe so, maybe not. On the other hand, are we going to find our dream house in two or three weekends? Probably not. So we’re happy, if a bit trepidatious. It’s a soulful house—not another [Southern City Neighborhood] cookie-cutter, and I think it has a lot of appeal. It’s on a huge lot, relatively speaking, but the outdoor space is a bit chopped up. It’s not necessarily a house where you have three kids running around on the lawn with a golden retriever—more like a house where you have one introverted child who locks himself in his room to memorize the name of all the French Generals of the Napoleonic wars—but, that’s probably what our child will be like. So, that’s ok. If he wants to frolic on lawns he’ll have to change families.

I don’t know if we mentioned this, but [WIFE] has recently gotten involved in providing HIV care for the Trans community. That will be one of her specialities, perhaps, when we move.  I’m very taken with the idea of introducing ourselves to our neighbors by telling them that my wife is an expert in HIV Trans care, and to please remember her when they’re referring their friends. Also, maybe, we could tell them our house will be a sometimes clinic for Trans sex workers.

Shake things up a little, as it were.

Escrow

As of today, we're in escrow.  The top offer came in about 8% above listing.  Plus they waived the appraisal contingency AND gave us a free lease-back (meaning, we can live in the house for month after it's sold and they won't charge us rent).  AND we have a backup offer already signed in place--meaning that if this offer falls through, somehow, we are legally already committed to someone else (who's agreed to the exact same terms as the initial buyer).  AND they agreed to install a fountain that makes gumdrops in both our old AND new house.  And the gumdrops are lemon-flavored only!

Many more hurdles to get through, escrow-wise, but (maybe) the worst is over.  Tomorrow night we're going to see a performance of Mozart's Requiem.  (No connection to the house sale--wife got the tickets weeks ago).  I've been listening to it all day trying to get to know its contours before seeing it live.

Here's an article I'd recommend strongly: I've been thinking about it a lot since I read it last month.  It's about the most effective ways to use money to buy happiness. It assumes, in other words, that money can, if used well, make you happier.  What it wants to know is, what does it mean to "use it well?"  What's worth spending money on?  And what isn't?

A sample:

...f you take nothing else from this post, take this tip: buy great soap. I think that people strongly undervalue the happiness to be had from excellent products in cheap categories. A Chanel bag costs $5,000 not because it’s 1oo times better at being a bag than a $50 bag, but because it’s a signaling-positional-keeping-up-with-Joneses-luxury good. On the flip side, in every category that’s not consumed conspicuously the highest quality things will not be overpriced. I drive a cheap car and wear $30 jeans but I buy the best soap, underwear, toilet paper, tea, socks, shaving cream and bbq sauce I can find.

Offers Are In

As of noon today we have six offers on the house.  They're all over list price, some by as much as 5%.  Now our agent is putting out 'best and final' counter; essentially he sends everybody who's made an offer a description of the best offer on the table.  They try to beat it (if they want to).  Then, I guess, we pick the best offer.

Bink, in collar and tie.  He's preparing for Escrow.

It's been about as painless as it can be so far; we're lucky, I guess, in that we have a house that people want.  Of course I attribute that to our incredible good taste and decorating skill (not to mention my wife's reverence for the house, and ongoing insistence that we maintain it as well as we can).  But who knows.  The whole process awakes a complex stir of emotions.  On one hand, it's nice to feel like you have something people want--to be desired, in a way.  Two different clients, we're told, have told our realtor that "this is their house."  Yesterday afternoon I looked out the window to find two people standing at the foot of our driveway surveying the property.  They were discussing the tree, they were discussing the view.  Clearly they were imagining themselves in it.

That's the unsettling part of the whole thing--the sense not of losing the property, but of losing its meaning.  This is the house where we started our marriage.  This is the house where we dealt with the vicissitudes of California.  It's filled with our meaning--things we did here.  People we have over, movies we watched.  Everything.  And those meaning are about to emptied out.

My wife wants to take the front door with us when we go.  It's unlikely this will be possible (the door is a statement piece; it has a complicated stained glass and wrought iron pattern on it) but I understand, fully, the desire.  We want to retain something of who we were when we lived here.

One Down, Several More to Go

Thursday night we had our first Open House.  It's an odd and unnerving feeling, having to first clean and then vacate your house so that a horde of strangers can tromp through it.  This was on Thursday night--what they call a "Twilight Open House."  The idea seems to be to give prospective buyers a sense of how wonderful it will be to come back to your house after a long day of work.  We never did one when we were buying houses: maybe it's a new thing?

During the three hours we had to be gone we went to a top-rate wine bar.  Throughout the evening our realtor sent us updates.  News seems to be very positive: he said this was one of the most crowded and well-attended Twilight Open Houses he can recall.  Today he told us that he is "confident" our house will sell above its listing price.  So that's good.

House Is On the Market. Our Dovecote May be Evil

The listing for our house is now on the MLS.  A "For Sale" sign will soon appear in our yard.  It is sad.  We love our house.  It's where we started our marriage.  It's where I first learned to play the bassoon.  It's where my wife first intuited that HIV could be cured by only eating oranges.

No, no.  But it is sad.  We are excited to return to a city with friends and families, and LA has been mostly not great, but I do love our house.  And now strangers will tramp through it, casting a cold and judging eye on the contents within.  Strangers!

Our realtor, in writing up the description of the house for the website, has described the dovecote as being 'infamous.'  I now must a polite email asking he change it.  The dovecote is many things, but it is not infamous (I hope).

Inside the Bowl

We've had painters at our house for the last three days.  They're working on the exterior right now--getting things prepped for our Open House next Thursday.  They start inside next week.

The problem is, our house is 80% windows.  At least, that's how it's felt the last few days.  Having strange men wander around your home's exterior tends to make you want to close those windows.  It's a little disconcerting to be in the midst of trying to read or change clothes or engage in ritual disembowelments and looking up to see a painter's face two feet away from you.  So, I close all the shades.  The result is that I've been essentially living in a cave since last Thursday.  It's like I'm Trent Reznor, or Des Esseintes.  It's very gloomy.  Plus, there's constant scraping noises coming from outside.  It makes me feel like I'm holed up against a siege.

During these days of darkness, we've taken the Bink to be boarded; he does not do well with strangers  at his perimeter.  Today, though, we've decided to keep him in the front room.  Even now I hear his beleaguered howlings.  The siege engines draw nigh, he says.  To the battlements!

I know how he feels.

Here are some of the photos of the house, btw, from our listing online.

House Works

So judging by the comments on the last post, the real way to keep people reading your blog is to talk about bees.  Who knew?

We have an update: the bees, it turns out, were not what we thought.  (Just like in X-Files).  Turns out the photo sent by my realtor--the one in the post below--was NOT a photo of their hive.  Yesterday the realtor showed me where on our tree he'd seen the "hive"--towards the front, facing the house.  When I showed him the actual hive--which is in the back of the tree, away from the house--he was confused.

So what had he photographed?  A swarm.  Bees living in the hive had outgrown the space and decided to emigrate.  When this happens, they first assemble in a pack.  That's what he had seen--a group of departing, colonist bees getting their marching orders.  Sitting on the docks, waiting for their outbound ocean liners, so to speak.

But now they're gone.  The hive is massively reduced, and there are no bees visible from the house.  So all is well, at least bee-wise, with our home.


* * *

I spent the last day and a half finding and haggling with the tile guy cum painter who we're using to spiff up our home before next week's showing.  First, I bargained his initial quote down by 20%.  Then I felt bad that I was making him do a big job (four days of work) for too small an amount.  So I told him I'd give him back 10% of the fee at the end of the job, assuming it was done well.  Not exactly the most ruthless of negotiators, am I.

Bink lobbying to leave the beehive alone.  "Can't we all just get along?"

* * *

I've just finished Grand Expectations, part of the Oxford History of the US.  It covers the period from the death of FDR to the resignation of Nixon.  Nixon was a terrible terrible person.  That's my 5 second précis.  Even worse than I knew.  There's really almost nothing good you can say about him--even the much-ballyhooed 'opening up to China' was mostly a sham.  I'm going to write some more about that soon.  Also surprised by how little impressed I came away by JFK.  The more I learn about him, the more hollow and inadequate he seems.  All charisma and good lucks, but very little real acumen.  They were ruthless, those Kennedys.  Not a very inspiring bunch.

Reading now a truly unusual book: Nightmare Alley by Thomas Love Peacock.  I'll try to talk about that too.  But now, the painter has arrived.  He is about to start power-cleaning the outside of the house.  Thank God the wife took The Bink to be boarded.  If he'd had to stay indoors all day while men worked on the exterior of our house he would have lost his fuzzy little mind.

To bee or not to bee

How it is with selling a house is…you're constantly being asked to make an endless series of small but seemingly crucial decisions.  None of them necessarily feels heartbreakingly important on its own, but as a collective--an integral, as it were--they add up.

And the decisions never abate.  You make one; five more appear.  Since you're talking about, potentially, hundreds of thousands of dollars they all take a feeling of momentousness.  They none of them have clear and obvious answers.  In some ways, they all seem too insignificant to even bother with.  But then as soon as you start to bother with them, they threaten to drag you into insensibility.

The issue right now is our beehive.  We have a beehive in our backyard; it resides in a cavity in our biggest tree.  We like the bees.  They keep the flowers pollinated; they don't bother us (they sleep most of the day); and we basically support and approve of their existence.  Beehives, as probably a lot of you know, are dying all around the world--some kind of hive sickness no one fully understands--and so the thought of having our bees relocated (which we've considered once or twice) has never appealed to us.

Now, though, we're going to have strangers coming to our house (only two weeks away) to consider buying it.  The beehive is, we think (and our realtor agrees) a definite plus for buyers: bees are good for yards.  But, he suggests, there's a chance that one of our visitors might get stung while touring the house and sue us.  So maybe we ought to relocate it.

The beehive was there when we bought the house.  It dates back to the previous owner, the woman who bought the house in 1950.  We don't want to get rid of the beehive.  But maybe we should.  Who knows.  It's just one of the millions of picayune choices facing one buying a house.  Like bees they swarm around you.  They don't seem like they will sting--but you never know.

Take On Me

I wish I could access some photos.  They say that photos are the key to getting your posts read.  And how am I to overawe and destroy Justin Bieber if I can't get photos?

As part of my ongoing preparation to go on Jeopardy, I've been trying to become current on today's pop music.  I downloaded a whole bunch of recent hit songs and have been trying to listen to them.

So I guess I'm old because I mostly hate all of them.  In fact, the wife and I went to Vegas last month and I got so depressed by our car ride--when I listened to a whole smorgasbord of Kesha, LMFAO, Bruno Mars, et al, that by the time we got there I just wanted to go home.

What a good pop song has to have, at minimum, I think, is wit.  It doesn't have to move you, necessarily; it doesn't have to make you feel; but it has to be clever.  Maybe it's melodically clever; maybe it's lyrically clever; maybe it's both.  And Drake, for example, is neither.  He's not even close to clever.  He can't even see clever through a telescope.

And I just think--b/c I'm old--the pop music of the 80s: it was just better.  Objectively, clearly better.  Boy George or Human League or Adam Ant--all of those guys produced songs that were orders of magnitude better than the stuff that's being done by, say, Maroon 5.  And why that is--maybe it's just that pop and rock is an exhausted genre, and there are no new ideas left--or maybe it's a less sophisticated listening audience--I don't know.  But it's dispiriting.

Two small bright spots: Meghan Trainor and (small selections of) Bruno Mars.  Actually, only one song of Bruno Mars (well, really Mark Ronson with Bruno Mars): "Uptown Funk."  Highly derivative of James Brown, but man is it good.  And M Trainor is pretty good too.

But that's it, as far as I can see.  Give me The Thompson Twins and Thomas Dolby any day.

Home Sales

We're meeting with listing agents now, looking to find someone to help us sell our house.  All very frightening.  Well--'frightening' is too strong, but it's stressful.  Essentially you're entrusting someone you've met only for maybe an hour, and read about some on the internet, to handle an incredibly significant action for you.  And it's significant not just financially, but also emotionally.  For all that I dislike the city where we live, I love our house.  Every morning I come in and work, sitting by an enormous floor to ceiling window that runs the length of my den.  Outside the bees circle around a limb of the giant tree in our backyard.  In the summer, a smaller tree gives us lemons.  Our front yard has a white picket fence covered in rose bushes.  Right now the roses are in bloom, and the blossoms and the flowers tower into the air.  It's fantastic.

On Saturday we met with two different realtors.  One was recommend--through a friend of a friend--and the other we found off the internet.  Both had good and bad qualities: I think I have to meet with them both again.  They both work in teams; it seems like one person does negotiations and contracts and the other is in charge of 'prettifying' the house--getting it looking sharp and snappy for sales.

A greatly embarrassing moment: the Bink bit one of the realtors!  He was one of those guys who, when told a dog is not good with strangers, responds "It's fine, I love dogs.  And they love me."  So then he stretched out his hand and Bink bit him.  And drew blood!  Which has never happened before, ever.  But it was terrible embarrassing.  Of course he laughed it off, but still.  Urp.  We're going to have get the Bink some training when we move.  I'm planning for our house to be a center for swirling gay cafe society--a constant stream of dinner parties, intellectual salons, and wine tastings.  And that means we can't have a dog who loses his mind anytime strangers come around.  What's frustrating is that, around us, he's the most sweet and docile little bear in the world.  But, he isn't used to strangers.

He's very much like his parents, I guess: very kind to people he likes, and very grouchy towards people he doesn't know.

Bink!

Trump

I've been trying to put together material for a post on the election but I'm not sure where to start.  I've been intrigued and horrified by the Trump phenomenon--it's like a car wreck that I can't look away from.  How prescient and relevant this blog's last debate about presidential politics now seems!  (I'll have to cut some relevant excerpts from that into a new post, soon).

My main take-away about Trump right now is this: I don't think he wants to be President.  I don't think when he started running he'd ever given any thought to actually winning.  I think he thought it would be a great way to go on TV and get publicity--to build his 'brand' such as it is.  That's why he doesn't have handlers; that's why he doesn't have a lot of staff.  He isn't interested in trying to win.  He just wants attention.

I'm not saying that he ever necessarily said to himself--I have no chance--I just don't think he thought that far ahead.  And now that he's at least likely to be the nominee, he wants a way out.  He doesn't want to spend all summer campaigning.  He doesn't want to face the vast forces that have finally arrayed against him; he doesn't want to get pummeled in the general election.  He wants a way out.

How he contrives that way out, I don't know.  Maybe that's why he keeps upping the ante on the outrageousness and offensiveness of what he says; he's hoping he'll finally cross some boundary that precludes him from running.  But if the GOP could work out some non-humiliating drop-out mechanism--some way to frame his leaving not as a defeat or an admission of giving up, but as something triumphant and noble-- I think he'd take it.