Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART III

Love and Marriage

14

Owning a Home

A few years down the road, you may find yourself tiring of renting and eager to buy your own place—or, more likely, you and the Mrs. are feeling ready for that step.

The process of home-buying is a wonderful lesson in how little most of us think about real estate—and as a result of this, we’re happy, well-adjusted people. Buying a home was once a technical, complicated, and headache-inducing process, but now thanks to the efforts of realtors, the experience of homeowners during the housing boom and bust, the influence of HGTV, and a ton of federal, state, and local regulations, it’s now an even more technical, complicated, and migraine-inducing process. A quality home can make it all worthwhile, but at some point, you will begin to wonder if you’ve unfairly discounted a nomadic existence.

Why is buying a home turning into your own personal logistical challenge on par with the Berlin Airlift? For starters, there are these wonderful websites like Zillow that, in their opinion, provide a reasonably accurate calculation of a home’s selling price. The site’s formula is a complicated, secretive algorithm, but it appears to be something like this:

1.Begin by calculating the average price of similar-sized homes that have sold in the past year in that neighborhood.

2.Add a giant sum of money to that total.

3.Presto! You have the current market value.

The “giant sum of money” is perhaps a zillion, which would help explain the name.

A disturbing number of people have plugged their home into one of the sites and promptly leaped out of their chair to do the happy dance, as the real estate website has just given them a projected sales price that will allow them to finance that vacation property in Aruba. Sometimes the seller’s flesh-and-blood realtors will urge them to adjust the price downward a bit, sometimes they won’t. Once someone has been told that they can sell their house at a price that will allow them to live the lifestyle of the Sultan of Brunei, they’re quite reluctant to let go of that dream.

Thus, as you tour the open houses—all too often, scheduled for 1 p.m. on Sundays, because apparently the entire real estate world hates football fans—you will find yourself in the presence of an excruciatingly cheery realtor or realtor assistant who seems to think that you’re eager to sign over a five-, a six-, or even a seven-figure sum just because they put out a dish of candy that they couldn’t give away last Halloween.

You and your beloved, who’s got her heart set on a fireplace, a parking space, and a gas stove, will walk around, trying to envision how the place would look with your furniture in place of the seller’s, or, in some cases, the painfully generic staging furniture. Staging furniture is designed to work in every room, which means it aims to have absolutely nothing distinctive about it. It appears to be made up of tables and chairs that witnessed mob crimes and had to be ushered into the home furnishing equivalent of the Federal Witness Protection Program. It’s so determined to not conflict with any existing décor that it’s pacifist furniture.

You’ll grow suspicious that the “third bedroom” was once a walk-in closet. There are a lot of mirrors, making the place look twice as large as it really is.

The glossy one-sheet of information on the property will invariably insist it’s “stunning.” This seems hyperbolic after the first property you’ve seen, and increasingly ludicrous after each following dozen. If seeing a house or condo that’s been cleaned up for an open house left you genuinely stunned … you probably couldn’t handle the ending twist of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

“And then we learn he was dead all along!”

(Realtor clutches heart, gasps, dies.)

As you’re touring the home, the Stepford Realtor will follow you around, attempting to attach itself to you in a manner similar to the aquatic remora. Like the party guest you just can’t seem to ditch, it’ll offer one helpful factoid after another, as if you were one bit of trivia away from hocking a kidney on the black market to ensure you could bid over the asking price.

“The kitchen drawer latches are new!”

“The door frames have been completely replaced.” (What the heck happened to the old ones? Just what were you doing that generated significant wear and tear on a door frame?)

“The sellers are willing to throw in the ice cube trays with the refrigerator. They’re from Restoration Hardware.”

“It’s got great potential!” Which means it stinks now.

Sometimes the home is a rambler, and sometimes the realtor is.

There’s only one thing more unreasonable than the expectations of the people who are allegedly trying to sell you their home. That’s the expectations of the people who will, a few years down the road, allegedly try to buy your home.

One of the hard lessons of real estate—and life—is that the true value of what you’re trying to sell isn’t determined by a website, or what other homes have sold for, or recent trends. It’s determined by what somebody’s willing to pay. Until you’ve got a buyer who’s actually willing to pay, your house is worth 0.

You and your spouse may begin intending to play good cop, bad cop in the negotiations. It’s a nice strategy, but you’ll eventually find yourself playing bad cop, bad cop, with your realtor assigned the role of the good cop. And then, as negotiations progress, all three of you are going to turn into Dirty Harry, Andy Sipowicz, and Vic Mackey. You will fantasize about smacking the perp/buyer around with a phone book under a hot, sweaty light, demanding answers to questions like, “You thought you could get away with asking for another $3,000 in closing costs covered, didn’t you?”

It’s just about impossible not to get irked at some point during the sales negotiation process. And by irked I mean driven to a rage that would leave Bruce Banner telling you to see an anger management counselor. It’s a perfect formula for stress: enormous sums of money at stake, people’s personal attachment to their homes, real and assumed deadlines, and the required approval of banks, loan officers, assessors. I’ve seen people who were working on high six-figure real estate transactions walk away from deals over differences of $2,000. I suppose it was a bad omen that the buyers were working with the realtor firm of Pennywise and Poundfoolish.

The smaller the disputed point or amount, the more intensely each side will be convinced that the other side should concede it. You thought I was kidding about the ice cube trays earlier. We had a buyer declare that our revised asking price was a bad-luck number, and request a different number. I was tempted to reply, “I hear 8 is a lucky number. Why don’t you pay 8 million? Would that be lucky enough for you?” We agreed to reduce the price by a dollar. I was really tempted to ask them to loan me a buck at the closing.

But when it’s all said and done, you’ve completed the deal and are on your way to many happy years in your new home. Just try to ignore the sound of the Darth Vader-like breathing of your bank’s mortgage officer.

The Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns of Buying a House

Closing on a house is such an odd experience, because it’s a blend of terror and banality. There’s something truly scary about signing a piece of paper that demands you make sizeable monthly payments to someone for the next thirty years of your life, but you’re not just signing one page. No, the process drags on page after page … an initial here, a signature there, and don’t forget to date it here, here, and here. I’ve bought two homes in my life, and both times I just had this awful feeling of “what am I getting into?”

That’s partly because the process of buying a house is much more casual than it should be. We try on clothes before we buy them. We can take cars for test drives (I’ve even had dealers tell me to take a car home for the weekend). But you’ll likely spend just a couple of hours in your new home before it is actually yours. Sure, a home inspection will have taken place before you plunk down any money, and it will likely catch most big issues. It’s been my experience, however, that even the most conscientious of inspectors won’t tell you everything that you’d like to know. You might not even know to ask. The process of buying a house is full of what Donald Rumsfeld called “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” You know, for instance, that you don’t know and can’t tell how effective a home’s heating system will be when you’re buying a home in July (though you can probably make an educated guess based on how evenly cool the temperature is inside the home with the air-conditioning running). The unknown unknown is something you don’t think about, because you don’t know to think about it.

The first house we bought was in Oklahoma City. Built in 1912, it was an Arts and Crafts-style house on a huge lot, and it offered slightly more room and a slightly better neighborhood than the rental house we were currently occupying. Even better, it was just a few blocks away so we didn’t have to move the kids to a new elementary school. The home passed inspection with a couple of minor issues that were fixed before we moved in, and after undergoing that terrifying process of signing away the next thirty years of my life (or so it felt at the time) the house was ours. So were all of its issues.

The first unknown unknown that popped up was the wiring. Some of it looked like it could have been installed by Edison himself, while other portions looked to be relatively new. I was constantly worried that the old wiring would cause a fire, but we didn’t have the money to replace the wiring throughout the house, so it became a “known unknown” that lingered in the back of my mind throughout the rest of the time we owned the house. That worry was compounded when I had to get deep into the crawl space under the house for some unremembered reason and saw that the pillars holding up the house were a mix of cinder blocks and bricks that looked incredibly dangerous and unsteady. To jack up the house and install real pillars would have been thousands of dollars, and we didn’t have thousands of dollars to spare. So, for the rest of the time we lived there I would tread as lightly as I could, and I waited at night for the inevitable moment when a brick in the Jenga piles holding up my house would crack and crumble under the weight, causing the entire thing to collapse.

I was really glad to leave that house. But, for what it’s worth, it’s still standing. The massive oak tree in the backyard is still dangerously (in my opinion) close to the back of the house, towering over the shingled roof and casting its welcoming shade during the blazing summer months. It hasn’t burned down and it hasn’t collapsed. Maybe I worried over nothing, but when we moved to the D.C. suburbs and sold it, I swore to myself I’d never buy another old home again. There were just too many unknown unknowns.

When we left Oklahoma City, it was one of the most affordable places to buy a home in the country. We moved to the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., which was (and is) one of the most expensive places to buy a home. We actually ended up renting the entire time we lived there, which worked out well. There are certainly times when buying a home isn’t the responsible, adult thing to do. We liked our neighborhood, but if we bought a home there it would have been right at the cusp of what we could afford, we would have bought a home close to the height of the housing bubble, and we likely would have ended up underwater on our mortgage. We were lucky, but we also recognized that the housing prices were inflated and chose not to buy. “Don’t spend what you can’t afford” is one of those adages that you don’t hear much in Washington, D.C. (or its suburbs), but it’s pretty solid advice.

We did eventually buy a home, but it was far from Washington, D.C., and its inflated real estate prices. After months of looking at properties across three states, we found a small farm in central Virginia that actually fit our budget. There’s plenty of room for chickens, pigs, goats, a huge garden, our neighbor’s cattle in our pasture on occasion, and a safe place for us to go shooting whenever we like. And, despite what I swore to myself, it’s old. Really old. The earliest part of the house dates to between 1775 and 1780, and it’s been added on to over the years (including a bathroom addition that was done with spectacular incompetence). There’ve been plenty of unknown unknowns, including an Asian lady beetle infestation, carpenter bees turning my carport into Swiss cheese, a leaky roof, and even running out of the propane that we use to heat our home during a February snowstorm.

Life is full of unknown unknowns, and they shouldn’t stop us from buying a home, taking a job in a new city, or any other major life-changing decision. Yeah, it’s scary to buy a home, and home ownership comes with a lot of challenges. After renting for years and being reimbursed by my landlord for things like repairs to the home, new appliances, and new flooring, it was definitely an adjustment to have to actually pay for this stuff. Buying a home warranty helped immensely in that respect. (If you buy one, get it from an established home warranty firm. There are a lot of scammers out there with a website and not much else.) We adjusted our budget in a lot of other ways too, and that helped us find our new “normal.” And in the meantime, we had something of our own. Something we loved.

You might love a brand-new home that no one’s ever lived in before, but that’s not really for me anymore. That’s the kind of house I grew up in, and while having the latest technology and up-to-date everything is a definite plus, I’d trade it for a house with a couple hundred years of history and the chance to add my own family’s memories to the mix. And as it turns out, now that I have my previous experience as the owner of an older home to draw on, I’m not constantly dwelling on what awful things might befall my old farmhouse. When those unknown unknowns pop up, they’re more challenges to be conquered, not things to be feared. And when you fix something, having a wife who’s as crafty as Martha Stewart and as handy with tools as Nicole Curtis (among a multitude of other talents) really helps.

What Would Ward Cleaver Do?

As a former Navy Seabee, he could build a house. Buying a home was probably a comparative breeze for him.