I really liked the country house. Junior was sort of noncommittal about it, but I liked its personality.

There were only two little issues with it. It had an older shake roof, which just isn’t done in California any more, and freaks out insurance underwriters. We’d discussed having the seller replace the roof for a higher offer, and she seemed amenable.

The other issue was so small-seeming. We were walking next to the driveway, and I spotted two ieces of pipe coming out of the ground. I asked what those were and the answer was an old farm fuel tank.

Oh, crap. Underground contamination was the core of my career for the previous decade, after all, and I know damn well what kind of trouble you can get into trying to remove a tank. The agents did a little talking between themselves, and the seller thought she had a letter from the local environmental agency giving an exemption for removal due to its size. She wasn’t willing to mess with taking it out, not with an exemption in hand, and I don’t blame her.

Now the question was whether or not we were willing to take the gamble of counting on the exemption holding up for the next twenty years. Environmental regulations change from year to year, after all, and almost always to the more restrictive side. If we were to find a mortgage company willing to lend us the money with that ticking time bomb on the place, and the regs let us keep it for twenty years, what were the odds that we’d be able to sell it without taking it out ourselves?

So that was that for that place. It was a nice house, in a nice area, but not worth the potential risk.

So we went to look at another one this morning. Also on an acre, and it had a nice pool, pretty high ceilings, and a lot of landscaping. Still, it didn’t call to us like the Yuppieville house. We’ve still got an offer in on that one, so we decided to let it ride. We hadn’t seen it for a couple of weeks, so a quick drive by refreshed our excitement for that house. It’s a little more work than one that would come fully landscaped, but at least this way, we can get things how we want them.

So now back to the waiting game. We’re still the only offer and things seems to be going forward on the short sale, so I feel optimistic about things. Even if it falls through, we’ve still seen a few that we think we could be happy in, so we’ll be all right.

When we started looking for a house, we sat down together and made a mental list of what qualities we wanted in a place we’re going to live for at least the next ten years.

We both are country people, and if possible, we wanted a place in the country. An acre parcel that had been split off from someone else’s orchard and stil surrounded it would be perfect, but anything that gave us a little elbow room and freedom from neighbors peering in the windows would do.

We wanted to raise the kids in the country; sure there’s a trade-off when it comes to lots of kids in the neighborhood and good bike-riding streets.

We wanted room to have a shop and maybe a pool or some pens for 4-H livestock, so that set our basic size requirement to about an acre.

We wanted to be between his work and mine, although he acknowledged that it’s more important to be closer to mine since I’m the one who’s on-call all the time. Ironic that, since I’m the one who actually doesn’t mind a little bit of a commute.

We wanted a house big enough for the six of us, but it didn’t have to be monstrous. The kids can share rooms as long as there’s enough living space in the rest of the house for everyone to get away from each other once in a while.

But what’s available around here isn’t quite what we were looking for. We ended up mostly looking in Yuppieville, a big subdivision really, although the lots are at least acres and the houses are all custom. You can at least have things like shops and steers, but it’s not a farming community any more. It has pretensions of being one, and it sure used to be, but these days the only crop around there is baby Yuppies. It’s crawling with McMansions, some more pretentious than others. That’s what we were looking at because there just wasn’t anything else around.

The one we have an offer on is a McMansion all prettied up to look like a country house, in fact. You walk inside and it’s that typical big open space, high-ceilinged look. It’s nice, and we do like it, but we’ve strayed a little bit from our original goals. No matter how much decorating we do to that house, it’s always going to show those bones.

So when a true country house went on the market this week, our agent called us. I happened to have time, so I drove by to see if we should go look at it. And it’s ugly from the front, but we’re learning to see through ugly into the truth of a house. This one was worth looking at, even with the horrible early-80s Spanish-style chunky stucco on the surface.

We walked through it on Sunday, and the first impression was also sort of shocking. It’s decorated before its time even, with that gold-leaf wallpaper that you saw in the 70s, not the 80s. Get in past the entryway though, and things improve. The kitchen has updated appliances, and even though the cabinets are really dark colored, they’re of extremely good construction. The living room has a gorgeous brick fireplace going all the way to the ceiling. There’s a loft opening right onto the living room, and it’s done up as a grown-up playroom, a concept that we could really get behind.

There’s a lot of storage there for a house of this era, even if not as much as the Yuppieville house. Yuppies do like their pantries, and I have to admit that I do too, but there is more than enough room for me in this kitchen too.

We’d have to build a shop over in Yuppieville, and possibly a pool too, if we really wanted one. There is no landscaping at all in that backyard. Junior doesn’t mind that so much as I do; he looks at it and sees that he gets to design it. I lok at it and see money and work. This place has a small pool, but a nice one, and a standing shop. It’s not the shop he would build himself, but it’s already there and better than nothing.

Things need work in this place, but almost everything that does is cosmetic, and we could absolutely live in it while we plug away at one piece at a time. Once we started thinking about the things we could do to this place to make it ours, I started to get more excited about it. The other one, we could repaint all we wanted, and it would still be somewhat generic. If we start making changes to this house, there will be nothing generic about it.

The bones of this little house suit us better in the long run, I think. The money’s about even when you consider how much work it will take to bring each to what we want, if not a little bit in the Country house’s favor.

I think the ultimate deciding factor for us is what kind of people we are and what kind of life we want to live. We could have a long and happy life in Yuppieville, sure, but at heart we’re Country people. We’ve both lived in town and out, and independently came to the conclusion that that’s who we are and who we want to be.

So after we check on some more details and maybe go take some photos of the Country house, we’ll make an offer on it. If it’s accepted, we’ll withdraw the offer on the Yuppie house, which hasn’t had a response yet anyway. If we’re going to take our lives in a particular direction, this house would be a good way to help it along.

It’s a dirty job, working third shift, no matter what job you’re doing.

You’re opposite from the rest of the working world. You’re trying to sleep while everyone’s up and about, running their leaf blowers outside your window and letting their dogs bark. Normal people don’t get so much of the lawn equipment noise at 2 AM, but your dead of night is fair game. You can’t exactly go run errands when you’re awake, because things like the Post Office close at five, right when you’re getting up.

You’re opposite from your family too. Juggling kids is really challenging, and forget about sleeping with your spouse. The rest of the family needs to adjust to, to learn to be quiet while Daddy’s sleeping. There is no vacuuming during the day; the noisy stuff is saved for the rare evening time when you’re both up.

Your body gets jacked up, especially when you’re trying to adapt to the changes. If you happen to work a four-day week, you get a little more time during the day, but only because you shift your sleeping schedule back and forth weekly. That often leads to 24 hours awake at a time, weekly, and that’s no good for your system. You’re always tired, always trying to catch up on sleep, and never quite making it. You have to learn to deal with being a zombie, and so does your family.

In the winter, you never see the sun, even more than the typical office drone. It’s dark at five when you wake up, it’s dark for your whole workday, and in this valley, it’s foggy on your commute home at 8 AM. The sun peeks out around three in the afternoon, but you’re not there to see it. It gets depressing.

Everyone else in the world works one calendar day at a time, but not you. Your workday spans two. So you technically get three days off a week, but you work early in the morning on the first one and in the evening on the last one. You feel shortchanged.

There are a few good things about the shift too; the peace at work, the more relaxed working environment, but they don’t balance out the downsides. It’s not a desirable shift by any means. And you do at least get dinner with your family, even if it’s your breakfast. You didn’t get that on second shift, not with having to go to work in the early afternoon.

But you do what you have to do. You put in your hours on the lousy shift and do your time waiting for a better one to open. You pay your dues. And maybe, in ten or fifteen years if you’re lucky, you’ll get to climb all the way up to first shift and rejoin the rest of the world.

Since a short sale can fall through at any time, or take six months, during which time we could find something even better, we keep looking. One popped up online this week, so we went to see it on Saturday morning.

 

From the front, it wasn’t bad at all; obviously a repo house, so the crispy lawn is par for the course. No big deal. Lawns can be rehabilitated, and at least half of the places we’ve looked at have been in the same boat.

We walked in the front door, and were immediately bombarded by the smell. Overwhelming old animal smell dropped this house’s points way down. Once our poor noses adjusted somewhat, it was possible to see that the layout of the place wasn’t that bad, even though the carpet and padding would have to come out, and the colors on the walls were hideous. 

The kitchen wasn’t horribly designed either. For once, most of the appliances were there, although if you started looking closely at them, you’d notice that they were the cheap end for their sizes. I found that odd; spend a ton of money building a nice house, and put in a gas stove with supports barely strong enough to hold a stock pot off the flame? Weird. 

It was when we started really looking that the flaws became so apparent. The dog shit in the kitchen was one thing, but the sheer amount of mouse shit spoke to a serious infestation. This wasn’t just a house mouse or two; this was an invasion on the scale of Normandy.

But still, all fixable, although the money involved to fix it all was already over our budget, considering the asking price of the house. Ugh, or the time! We do not want to spend that kind of time on a place.

Step out into the backyard with me, and see the last straw.

 No, not the ambitious and obviously interrupted outdoor kitchen project. That was kind of a neat idea, even if poorly executed.

Not the firepit either. I kind of liked that. 

 

No, take a close look at the pool. Is this a pool for children? It’s got a swim-up bar, with stools at what would normally be the shallow end. 

Except there is no shallow end. It’s all deep, except for those stools of doom lurking right under the surface waiting to break some kid’s neck. This is a party place for adults, trying too hard to be Vegas-like and pathetically failing. This is not a house where the kids could have fun, and since we have four, this house was out of the question for us. 

This isn’t the worst repossessed house that we’ve seen, although it is the worst that we’ve actually gone in. We’ve peeked through the windows of some and seen holes in the walls and electrical fixtures ripped off; we don’t even bother looking at those. A good deal could be had by someone willing and capable of putting in the tie to fix them, but we are not those people. Capable, yes, but not willing. So as a horror story, it’s not much, but it’s definitely not for us. It did make me appreciate all the more the one we have an offer pending on. I really like that one, and it won’t take much to make it liveable.

The house hunt has been wearing on us. I flip through the online listings every few days, and talk to our realtor weekly. I examine the real estate ads in the paper religiously. We drive through neighborhoods, jotting down likely-looking addresses. We obsessively stalk one place that’s been repossessed, waiting for a lockbox to appear that would indicate that it’s on the market now.

It’s getting old.

But on Friday, I was wasting my time as usual flipping through realtor.com, and I spotted one that raised my eyebrows. Our agent had been going to show us this house a few weeks ago, even though it was out of our price range. We got busy and skipped it. This week the price had been dropped right into our range, so we made an appointment to go look at it.

Turns out, it’s a short sale, which effectively means that the owner is losing it and is trying to unload it before the mortgage company takes it back. The owners typically owe much more than they can get out it, so their bank has to approve any sale and eat the losses. And the losses can be big, into the hundreds of thousands these days, especially if they had a second mortgage. Our agent told us sometimes the second-mortgage bank will only get three or four thousand dollars out of a hundred thousand dollar loan.

We’re hoping that a bank would rather deal with eating the loss now and have to mess with it less than if they repossessed it and then had to do all of the sales themselves, and eat the losses, because prices aren’t going up. This way, they don’t have the costs of selling it themselves, or of having it sit for months or years not making any money at all.

The banks don’t have to play by the rules though. They don’t have to respond to an offer within the usual three days, and in this situation, they don’t even have to consider offers one at a time. If someone else comes in with a higher offer in a month, before they’ve committed to one, we’re likely hosed. It’s an even bigger gamble than usual, and much less certain than buying either from an owner or a repo house.

 

But we liked this house, even though there’s nothing done with the backyard. There’s a lot of room for a shop and even a pool if we were so inclined. And we’re not just dicking around here; we really are shopping, so we made an offer on it yesterday. We’re not holding our breath and we’re going to keep looking at other houses. That’s one of the good things about them taking so long to evaluate responses; if we find another one that we want more after the ten days they have to answer us, we can go for that one instead without penalty.

I’d like this house; it would suit us, but we’re finding that there are quite a few places out there that will suit us. For now, for this one, it’s wait and see, so we shall wait.