Home Inspection -- The Final

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage.

“Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.”

“What?”

“We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.”

He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement.

“I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.”

“It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.”

“Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.”

“The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?”

“Well, she’s…”

“It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.”

“They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?”

I knew he was serious, because he didn’t say “right?”

The next morning I went out and looked at the garage. Not only was it not dangerous and not a part of the frame, what was there was something someone had clearly added later as part of an elaborate[1] network to increase storage space.

All the guys who came by to do the work on the house[2] were really nice and efficient. The guy who was replacing the toilet seemed to have a little trouble fitting the new one on, but he did it.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a low-flow toilet, necessary in a city that was built on a desert in a state with little naturally occurring fresh water sources and in the midst of a ten-year drought --- you can’t waste a lot of water on poo. But still, no comforting “flush, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle, whine whine whine (as the water re enters the tank), THUMP”. No. Now there was a super-efficient “Whhhoooopsh”, like an airlock opening in a sixties sci fi movie follow by an ultra-quiet “fooooooo” of the water refilling which then just --- stopped. The first few times I had to go and check to make sure it hadn’t overfilled onto the floor because I was used to the thumping noise. The first time I checked, I noticed the hole.

There were a lot of wacky things in the house. The bathroom counter had been done in a heavy white tile with a shelf running the length of the wall. I think this had been done for --- well, I actually have no idea why anyone would do something like this. It was a great place for geegaws and knickknacks --- maybe that scented candle you kept in the bathroom to mask --- you know. But it was right under neat a towel rack that was right underneath a linen cabinet, so that seemed to be a perfect prescription for combustion.

The toilet itself sat right below that and after they put the new one in I noticed the hole.

Yes. The hole.

About three feet long and maybe six inches high. A hole that led into the space between the walls and down into the crawl space below. Apparently, when they had put the original toilet in, they had cut into the wall to fit the toilet in[3]. And that had been two toilets and several droughts ago.

So the new, ultra-low flow toilet with pressurized flush-o-matic airflow[4]left a hole in the wall.

Well, the buyer would have to hear about that.

Then the guy came to look at the “very dangerous” situation in the garage. I can’t testify that he giggled, but I can say that he made two hundred dollars for some pretty easy work. And I left the old doors, carpet remnants and brass bed up there. Never had to move them.

Arrangements to move all the stuff were surprisingly easy. Made three calls. One gave me a quote over the phone[5]. Two sent people out. One was a woman celebrating her thirty-fifth year of estimating moves. All of them gave me prices about one-third of what I was expecting to pay. I hired the company with the woman celebrating her thirty-fifth year. She was the nicest, the most interesting and could really use the skin resurfacing I think the commission would get her. She looked like leather, which is what thirty-five years of driving around in eight to ten UV status gets you[6].

Two calls got the cars taken care of. Again, for much less that I expected, but I did cheap out on the delivery. They WOULD bring it right to your new home, but I opted to save a couple of hundred bucks and go pick it up at the local transit station.[7] Not only would they come to the house and pick up the cars, but also if you had the tracking numbers you could actually trace their progress across the country.[8]

So there was only one more moving arrangement to be made. We had to take care of…

THE THIRTY FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR RABBIT -- NEXT

entire contents copyright 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

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[1] And by “elaborate” I mean “amateurish”

[2] And they WERE all guys. I mean, really. Where’s feminism in the contracting arts.

[3] Or something. I really have no idea.

[4] I am making that up.

[5] Based on the size of our house. Which I thought was bizarre because we could be total hoarders. Well. Okay. We WERE total hoarders.

[6] But she didn’t have any brown spots on her face. I did. Time to go.

[7] Please resist skipping ahead to find out what the local transit station was. Some things are worth the wait.

[8] Yes. There will be humor growing out of this.