Worst House Ever

The whole process of selling and buying a house has to be one of life’s most stressful events, right up there with Marriage and Divorce and being so all-consumed with going out your mind vacuuming everyday that you didn’t even remember that Sunday was Mother’s Day let alone send your own Mother a card.

After 43 days of multiple showings almost every single day, several with less than one hour’s notice, including two weekend-long open houses and the never-ending picking up of toddler toys and windexing of dog snot and be-sparkling of every single surface possible, our house is finally sold. And now the feeling of panic sets in because as of July 14th, if we don’t find another house, my family will be homeless.

The thing is, we know exactly the home we want to buy and our mindset is pretty much exactly like that of an uncompromising toddler. My husband, Mark, wants to be within biking distance to transit, I want a room on the main floor to open up a Photography Studio and we both want a master bedroom large enough to accommodate our king-sized bed and a sitting area with a fireplace and a sun-facing yard because we like to bask under the warmth of a yellow summer sun and consume adult beverages.

So now that our house is sold and the clock is tick tick ticking before we’re homeless, we’ve put ourselves in high gear to try and find a new place to call home. Ajax is our first choice, because, well, we just really feel like it’s where we call home, but we’re also scouring Whitby and Pickering and keeping our options open for relocation.

We’ve seen a lot of really nice homes, but we’ve also seen a lot of really bad homes. And I don’t mean bad like the walls were Easter egg pink and the doors were robin-egg blue, because that’s just cosmetic. I mean really REALLY bad homes.

Like, I’m not handy man or anything, far from it, but I’m pretty sure when you lay tile they’re supposed to line up in a straight line. And that stapling black carpet to the ceiling of a dimly lit basement will make people freak the eff out and think they are looking at a ceiling covered in mold.

Oh, and then there was the home where I watched four dudes perform a “financial transaction” in the driveway next door before the distinct smell of pot wafted through the air.

But the kicker, oh man, the kicker was a home with a listing that began with, “Bring Your Fussiest Clienys.” And I should have known that a typo like that was a red flag, but we asked our agent to see it anyway and wow, was this property ever a doozy. We had to sit in the driveway and wait 20 minutes for the listing agent to show up and let us in. And during that time we were greeted with the lovely view of a parked car in the driveway completely dented all along the left side and I am not even kidding, several foot tall long weeds and the disrepair of a giant hole in one of the garage door windows.

Ok, so the exterior was rough, no biggie. It’s just cosmetic right? Surely the inside would be better considering the price they were commanding. But, nope, these people must live on cloud nine because to walk into a home that literally smells like sewage is like, the most disgusting thing I can think of.

There were even holes in the walls, a colony of ants in the living room, a moldy ceiling, a moldy and leaky tub and, AND, get this; a still decorated CHRISTMAS TREE! IN MAY!

And it doesn’t end there. The seemingly stunning oak scarlet O’hara staircase was chipped and wobbly and about to fall apart, the kitchen cupboards were falling right off the ceiling and all of the light fixtures were not even installed properly and left hanging by their electrical wiring.

Wait. It gets even better. They removed all the mirrors from the bathrooms because they didn’t want to sell them and they even removed all the tiles from the basement wet bar to take with them. Yes, that is right. They REMOVED tiles and left the top of the bar surface dusty and grimy and horribly stupid looking. And the paint job? They didn’t even cut in, so like, all the rooms had these half-assed paint jobs with white strips around the ceiling and wall corners and if that wasn’t bad enough, half of the rooms had the closet doors removed, and the closets where were either half painted or hanging by a thread with cracked and shattered closet door mirrors.

Oh yes, there is more. The basement had semi-finished tiled-baseboards and the furnace was covered in duct-tape and the ventilation was ripped and hacked to shreds.

I’m no expert, but either this was a mold-infested grow-op or a home with someone with delusions of grandeur.

I’ll probably never know, but in the meantime, I’ll keep looking for a home that at the very least doesn’t stink an entire community farted in unison.

This is an original post to Canada Moms Blog. Karla Cadeau also writes on her personal blog Untangling Knots.