House-Hunting Treasures

Calicobebop has a post up right now about the process of trying to get her house ready for selling -- a post that made me think about the hilarity (and pain) that can be trying to buy a house. And given the current crises in the mortgage markets, I thought perhaps a little levity around the subject might not be unwarranted. So without further ado, here are the best (and by best, I clearly mean worst) houses I ever looked at while house hunting.

Looking to buy our very first house after years of apartment living, we told our realtor that we didn't want to look at any ranch houses. We wanted a house with a staircase. That's the difference between an apartment and a house, I felt intuitively: houses have an upstairs.

The first place she took us? An "adorable" little ranch house. It only had one bedroom (we'd said a minimum of two). It was in a terrible school district (we'd been particular about what we were hoping for). She thought the house was "just so cute" that we would "fall in love with it." We thought she was absurd and a bad listener. And yet, we let her continue to drive us around that day. Our bad.

The second place she took us? A ranch house that really had to be seen to be believed. It had "four" bedrooms. Two were normal. Then there was the side porch that ran the length of the house. It had been enclosed, but it still had a sloping, lumpy brick floor, poorly concealed with carpet remnants. Some pieces of 1970s paneling had been nailed together to form a partition to divide the porch in half. It had no heat (this is Michigan, you recall, and we were looking at houses in Feburary, so the lack of heat was somewhat noticable). This fine space constituted the additional two bedrooms.

And then, as we were looking at the rest of the house, we were stunned to find the tiniest kitchen imaginable (really, nearly unworkable) that opened into a postage stamp of a hallway, off which was another door into a very large room that was combination laundry room, furnace room, and ... wait for it ... BATHROOM. That's right. A free-standing, antique clawfoot tub stood nearly in the middle of a room that also housed a pedastal sink (not placed up against a wall), a toilet (ditto), a behemoth of a furnace (?!?!), and a washer/dryer (occupying some wall space). The room was spacious but shaped like a random polygon. Not only did I have a hard time getting my head around the vision of a furnace in the bathroom (a bathtub in the furnace room?), but I couldn't figure out why anyone in her right mind wouldn't have knocked down the existing walls, rerrranged a little plumbing, and made a giant kitchen with a closet at one end to hold the washer/dryer, and a small bathroom, with a separate furnace closet.

Unless of course furnces need a large space in which to breath or something. In which case... WTF? WHO would buy that house? Seriously.

We saw houses that had been subdivided into rabbit warrens of impossiblity, once used as rentals for college students, whose needs apparently did not extend to luxurious extravagences such as counters in the kitchen or a space of some kind to put a table on which to eat.

We saw "fixer-uppers" that most people would have labeled "tearer-downers."

But nothing we saw could top the house I remember looking at with my dad and step-mother in about 1979. My sisters and I were sure that this was the house for us as we drove down the driveway. It was a long, steep, curving drive that ran past a very large swimming pool on the way to the house. The house was set far below the level of the street, on a wooded and beautiful lot. We were sold immediately.

Then we walked indoors.

The main living room was gigantic. It was mostly devoid of furniture, since the current owers had already moved out. But it still had a very large collection of dolls arrayed on the built-in glass shelving units that lined one wall. Their dusy magnificence fascinated me, and I secretly hoped that since they'd been left behind when the owners moved, perhaps they came with the house. The carpet in that room reeked, reeked, I tell you, of dogs who were not house-trained. And there was a gorgeous, huge, heavily carved, gilt harp in one corner of the room.

I was smitten.

I desperately wanted to touch the surprisingly thick metal strings of the harp.

My parents, ever polite, toured the rest of the house while I stood shyly by the harp, imagining myself playing it, and then took another gander at the doll collection, hoping some of them were real antiques. I tried not to notice that my eyes were getting itchy and red, and I pretended that my sneezes were nothing. My nine-year-old self could tell that, even covered in a thick layer of dust, some of these dolls were magnificent. I wondered if anyone would notice if I took one down to hold it and look at it more closely.

Just as I was reaching out my hand to touch one, gingerly, my parents motioned that we were going to check out the basement, so my sisters and I trooped downstairs. AGAIN, a treasure! This time, a treadmill. I stood on it, imagined myself running on, was fascinated and mystified. (Remember, this was 1979, and home-exercise equipment was hardly de riguer.)

Emerging quickly from the basement's back room, my parents politely thanked the realtor, told me in no uncertain terms that we were leaving, and we all got out of there fast.

They looked stunned.

"Oh, you should have seen it!" breathed my sister.

"Seen what?" I replied a little scornfully, not wanting to reveal that I felt a pang that I'd missed something else wonderful in that perfect perfect house.

"It was...it was...what was it again, Daddy?" my other sister asked.

"A buzzard," my father replied grimly.

"A stuffed buzzard?!" I was so disappointed. HERE was something you didn't see every day.

"No," my step-mother clarified, "not a stuffed buzzard."

My father chimed in, stone-faced. "It was a real buzzard. In a cage."

A real live buzzard! And I'd missed it!! I was nearly crushed with disappointment.

My parents? Did not buy that house.