Sunday, November 8, 2009

In Which We Take Ownership of Our House

Just the very process of legally transferring ownership from the previous owners to ourselves was slightly traumatic and a definite hassle. The day before the closing, Ramsey, our realtor, and I showed up at the house for our scheduled walk-through- which is when you go to see the house one final time to make sure everything is in order and on track for the closing the following day. Normally the owners would have moved their belongings out by this point and would have it to the point of being broom clean. Normally.

Not being the type of people who like to take the normal route to go about anything, however, Ramsey and I had chosen to buy a house from the Packrat of the Ages, which also included dealing with her equally eccentric, still-living-at-home, 40-something year old son. Which meant that when we showed up the day before we were scheduled to not only buy the house, but also to move all of our own belongings in, the owners were just beginning to pack. Forty years worth of accumulated clutter and not a bit of it had been budged from the last time we’d seen the house, weeks before. I don’t mean simply that things weren’t moved out of the house, I also mean that nothing had even been packed into boxes, beyond the stacks of boxes that had been piled up for years. The son had his pickup truck with a trailer backed up to the basement door and there were a few cartons stacked on it. We discreetly watched to see his progress. He would go up somewhere into the house- I don’t know where, the attic? Second floor, maybe?- then trudge back down the two or three flights of stairs and through the basement to load his burden into the back of the truck. Then he’d sit on the trailer for a few minutes, breathing heavily, until he’d recovered his breath and head back inside for another box. He informed us that he had health problems that affected his lungs so he had to take it slow. He also mentioned that once he had his trailer loaded up, he’d be driving it two hours north to a storage space that his uncle was making available to them. Then driving the two hours home and beginning the process over again, presumably continuing until the house was empty. We were… dismayed. At the rate these people were plodding along, they might possibly be out of the house in a couple of months but most definitely not by the next day.

Powwow in the living room. The son seemed shocked to hear that we had expected them to be out of the house before the closing. He began to become belligerent and raised his voice at us until finally Ramsey forcefully said, “I’m not talking to you, I’m speaking with her,” referring, of course, to the actual legal owner of the house. The mother looked slightly horrified and answered with the only words I remember her speaking at all, “Whatever he says…”, indicating her son. I wondered at which point she had stopped being the parent and had let her youngest child take over as the head of the household. The son continued to be rude and unreasonably make statements like, “Then we just won’t sell the house, then,” until we pointed out that they were under contract and that breaching said contract would invoke some pretty severe consequences on their end. His tone did change then, now instead of directing his verbal refuse at us, he began to sputter against his mother’s realtor, blaming him for not having informed them and suggesting that he would like to take a baseball bat to their realtor.

We took our leave and had a hurried consultation with our realtor on the curb. One phone call to the seller’s realtor and a day later, we were back at the house, an hour before the scheduled closing. The other realtor had hired two moving vans and had rounded up a number of congregants from the seller’s church to help them pack and load the vans. The impossible had been accomplished- the last of the ancient stash was being loaded into a moving van even as we looked over the house for the last time before it became ours. The interior looked even larger now that the rooms were empty. No cleaning had been done but I was just relieved to see that they were on their way out. We found the owners and a few of their helpers in the basement and remarked, with forced cheeriness, “Everything looks good!” They glowered at us as if we were Satan’s spawn, come to evict unwilling occupants with smoldering, three-pronged pitchforks, but silently handed over the key.

Because they were concerned about the threats of baseball bat beatings on the original realtor, the seller’s realtor firm sent another agent to the closing to represent them. A friendly, no-nonsense woman, she took their end of things in hand and we progressed through the legal proceedings efficiently and without incident.

Occasionally I think of them, the phantom mother and the confused, bull-headed son, and I wonder where they are now. We had been told that the son planned to build a log cabin in the woods a couple of hours north of here; judging by the progress he’d made on the renovations he’d started on this house, I can only cringe as I imagine how far they got on the cabin. I picture the son’s braggadocio having landed them in a camper parked next to the skeleton of a structure located remotely down some logging road, the silver-haired mother shivering over a cup of tea as snowflakes fall outside. But I tend to think of them more in the summer because grilling in our backyard brings them to mind. The yard has a handsome brick fireplace, one of the only things this house has to brag about, but it can’t be used because the son spitefully took the custom sized grill out of it when they left. When we have get-togethers we use the sides of the brick fireplace as extra space to lay out paper plates, bowls of salads, and corn on the cob and we do our grilling on our old charcoal grill.

9 comments:

  1. haha! that must've been quite an experience... i can only imagine someone who can't carry his own stuff out of his mother's former house trying to lift a baseball bat above his head... don't you think cutting off blood supply like that could affect the poor guy's lungs... lol

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  2. Sounds harrowing. So unpleasant to encounter people who are mad at the world, but still think the world owes them something. Everything. Glad you got the house afterall, though!

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  3. I'm glad I've never had a closing like this. Actually, I've never been at a closing. I've always been out of town. Maybe the closing have been like this and I wasn't around. :-)

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  4. I'm soo glad my closing didn't go like that, but then again, we bought a new house. It was kinda funny, though because I worked in the construction industry and was 8 months pregnant when we did our final walk, so I pointed out EVERYTHING. I was nice about, surprisingly.

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  5. Oh, it was definitely an experience! And it was one I was glad to have over with. Just a normal, straightforward move/closing can be stressful enough! And there's definitely something to be said for buying a new house, I'm sure...

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  6. Wow -- we bought our house from pack rats too, so I can relate. We actually sat with our first load of our stuff in the driveway, waiting for them to finish loading up all their stuff. But at least there were no baseball bats required!

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  7. Awww shucks, that will probably be me in 30 yrs. Well not quite that bad, but I do tend to hold on to things. Give up control to a youngster, NEVER!

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  8. OMG I cannot believe he took the grill!

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  9. That sounds awful. I guess things are different in Canada - the new owners don't come to get the keys until possession day and they get it from the lawyer so you never have to see them. We were out of our house with an hour to go. Thanks for visiting our blog!

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