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buying a wreck of a house on Valentine's Day
Tuesday, February 14 2017
This morning Gretchen and I had our closing on the Brewster Street house. This time we used a different lawyer, one a few doors down Fair Street from the one we'd used for our other three (actually four) real estate transactions since moving here in 2002. The conference room seemed a couple grades higher-end, and the pens were so great that I couldn't help but comment on them. They'd been provided by a bank, and Gretchen asked if we could keep them at the end (we could). Today's was yet another cash-only real estate transaction, the kind drug dealers make. The guy selling the property was named Stephan and he was operating as an LLC that included the words "Flippin'" and "Crazy" (and nothing else) in its name. After all the form signing was done and the checks handed over (and Gretchen had raised a minor stink about the lack of smoke detectors in the ruined house we were buying), Gretchen asked Stephan if flipping was his thing. It turned out that he was mostly doing what we do: renting houses to tenants, and also managing properties for others. He said he had about forty properties that he'd acquired over the last seven years, and that he (and his in-house attorney, who was there with him) were always learning as they went. At this point, he said, he only rents month-to-month and he always does background checks. This was useful intel; Gretchen had relied entirely (and not completely successfully) on her gut, never bothering to check a reference. And we sign year-long agreements that Stephan indicated are essentially unenforceable.
With the closing out of the way, the house was ours. My workday was about to begin, so I hurried to Brewster Street and immediately began testing the plumbing system. The house had no electricity, but I'd brought an air compressor with a tank full of 70 psi air as well as some soldering equipment. I knew of a half-inch copper elbow that had been pushed off one of the pipes to which it had been soldered by ice expansion during an unwinterized phase. I fixed that first thing and then tried pressurizing the whole system from a hose cock on the first floor. But the system absorbed all the air I had in my tank. It's possible this meant there was still some other leak. But it could've also meant that most of the air went into the water heater tank. In any case, it was fucking cold in that unheated ruin of a house. At least I had somewhere else to be: my heat-and-electricity-supplied laboratory. Gretchen, on the other hand, would be at the house all day interacting with contractors bidding to do the necessary fixes. Bur the first such contractor wouldn't be arriving until 1:00pm, so she headed off to the new vegan-friendly Latino place on Broadway while I headed for home.
Normally Gretchen and I go out for pizza at Catskill Mountain Pizza on Valentine's Day, but not today. Instead she made bucatini pasta and we cracked open a bottle of red wine.
Meanwhile, I was making steady progress on the basement door project. At this point I was mostly delayed by the need to wait for spackle to dry in between applications.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?170214 feedback
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