Reality Check
Friday, June 8th, 2007 by rebeccaAbout those granite countertops? Turns out they came with a $30,000 to $40,000 repair bill for everything the owners did wrong in the rest of the house. We went through with a contractor on Wednesday, fully prepared to sit down with our Realtor afterwards to write up an offer letter. It was like watching a car accident in slow motion as over the course of an hour (an hour of our lives that we will never get back), we learned that, in addition to committing some major drywalling offenses, the current owners had:
- Improperly cased nearly every window and door in the house
- Improperly installed the ceramic tile in the hallway, such that when you stood on it, it moved, and the grout was rapidly deteriorating
- Attached more than the allowed number of connections to the 2-1/2″ water supply before putting down new floor, thereby eliminating all access to the plumbing except via a 24″ crawl space
- Been blissfully unaware of major termite damage
- Installed concrete block piers without any mortar
- Overlooked a gap in the roof beams such that anyone who stood over the gap on the roof would fall in
- Neglected to install a shower pan under the master bathroom shower or any waterproofing material behind the slate tiles on the wall of the shower, such that the contractor’s recommendation was to rip it out and start over, and hope that maybe we could salvage the door
- Blindly cut through a load-bearing wall to make room for said shower in the master bathroom
After the fiasco, our realtor gave the seller (who is also the realtor) some feedback, to which she responded by offering to reduce the price by $20,000. Suffice to say we weren’t interested.
