So You Want to Sell Your House...

Sunday I went to look at a ranch-style house with the nicest realtor.  Originally I had vetoed this listing because I didn't think it had a garage, it turns out it has a two car, underneath garage. The online pictures just don't show it.  The realtor hadn't been to this particular listing before so it was new for her too.


I'm fairly certain what my first home choice is but I wanted to see what else was out there.
So we pull into the driveway and assume that the car already parked there is the other realtor's.


It's not.


The people that live there are home, awkward.


We take a walk around the yard and based purely on this walk I've decided that there is no way I would ever buy this house but we can't just leave because the people are home and that would just be rude.


So, just to be polite, we knock on the front door.


It went downhill from there.


We didn't bother looking in the kitchen, there was a woman cooking something that smelled like a combination of onions, lots of onions, and ramen noodles.  The ENTIRE house reeked of it.


It was as this point my three year old niece whispered, "Can we leave now?", in my ear.


With the exception of the living room we could barely walk through the rooms, there was so much stuff crap and assorted junk on the floors.


There were missing tiles from the bathroom vanity and the remaining ones had a weird brown moldy grout around the sink. The grout on the edges of the vanity was white so, yeah. Ewwweee.


We moved onto the semi-finished basement, with the fireplace that doesn't work.  It was pretty much what you'd expect from seeing the upstairs but the additional 'full bathroom' was the icing.


The plumbing for the basement bathroom was 100% exposed on the opposite wall.  This wall being the garage.  


The unheated garage.


This is New England, shit freezes here during the winter.  You know, like pipes.


But it doesn't end there...


the back deck needed to be ripped off, it was rotting;


there was standing water in the backyard;


the large front picture window was original, the house was built in 1960, the glass was falling out;


a squirrel/rodent lived under the front step;


there was a structural crack in the hallway ceiling which coincided nicely with where the hallway floor dipped;


It was like a nightmare that would never end.  It didn't matter where you looked, literally everything needed to be fixed.


While standing in the driveway getting ready to leave, the realtor comments that this house is priced incredibly high, $179,000 high, "This place is a disaster," she said, "it needs a bulldozer. It's NEVER going to sell."


At which point my niece dispenses with the whisper and chimes in with, "NOW can we go?!"


"Yes, now we can go."


It was my understanding that the realtor had another showing of that property later on that day.  Hopefully the onion smell will have worn off by then, but I wouldn't count on it.