Rich, my agent (did I mention he mostly guides hunting and fishing trips for a living? That's a big fish,) called today at 12:30 and said he had appointments to see some places starting at 3:00, but that all but one of them were "under contract" which seems to mean that they have had offers that the owners have accepted and they're just waiting for the money to come through. I was still really anxious. I'm trying to be non-chalant, but this kind of thing is really hard for me.
The first house we saw was the one on Sunset Ave, and it was truly awful. It was really, really bad. The floor was about as rotten as the back bedroom in the cabin was when Mom and Dad had it fixed. The babysitter, who didn't speak english was the only one there and I had a hard time with her spanish, but she seemed to be saying that the furnace didn't work at all, that the electricity only worked sometimes, that the water came out brown half the time and then shut down. The design of the home was terrible, and the yard was really bad. The garage looked big from the outside, but when you went in it it was small. Then we saw a door on the side and opened it up to find that they were using half the garage as an illegal apartment. There was no bathroom or kitchen in it. It was really bad.
The second place we went was the one on 9th west (it seems to be so sold it doesn't show up on the website anymore). It was "under contract", so it was unlikely that I'd have been able to get it, but it was well taken care of. It was very out dated, and the furnace was ancient, and the addition on the back seemed to slant down a little, but everything else was in good shape. It was a little creepy. There was no one there and we used one of those remote key boxes to get in. The old lady who had lived there's stuff was all around still, like her clothes, and old pictures, and a bunch of catholic pictures and crosses, and it smelled like old people. But, like I said, it was the best place.
We drove by the one on Jeremy St., but they had wanted 24 hrs notice before anyone came by and Rich didn't get it. It was "under contract" too anyway. It looked ok from the outside, but the street definitely didn't look good.
Then we went to the one on Roosevelt (which is no longer showing on the website either) which had been my greatest hope, but when we went in it was really awful, almost as bad as the first one. It smelled terribly of cigarette smoke, and there were cigarette burns in two of the four different styles of bad carpet. The kitchen was pretty awful, and it was hard to imagine anyone fixing food there. There was a bunch of panneling on the walls, some of which was ripped out exposing pipes. The addition on the back was leaning pretty badly, and wen we went around to the front again we found that it was too. There was a big picture window in the front and as we were looking at it it looked like the window was a straight rectangle, but the hole for the frame was a parallelogram. The people who were there were inspecting the house for the buyer, and they'd left their level out, so we put it up there for confirmation. The window was in fact square.
Here are the other houses that I was interested in, upon which my hopes have bit the dust. The one on center street in Midvale (off the website aready, sheesh), the one in West Jordan, and the one in Sandy.
So, all in all, my first house hunting expedition to the interiors was pretty discouraging. If all of these houses that were bad, or in bad locations (for me at least) were being sold as fast as they were it doesn't bode well for my search. I think what it said to me was that I neither have, nor make enough money to be choosy about where or in what I live, as long as I want to buy a single family home.
No comments:
Post a Comment