OUR CROOKED HOUSE

Okay, so I have decided to bare all and share with you what’s going on with our house.  Thirty one years ago, in order to be closer to the church we loved and the Christian school where we hoped to send our girls, we began looking for a house.  It was not a great time to buy a house.  Interest rates were high and it was NOT a buyer’s market.  There were not a huge number of houses to look at in our price range.  Most were tiny too, so when our realtor said, “There’s one more, but I hesitate to show it to you because it has some settling problems”, we took a look anyway.  

In partnership with my parents, we had just sold our house in the historic seaside town of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, just two blocks from the ocean.  We bought the house five years previously from a very elderly couple who were selling it for an extremely low price.  I can’t remember whether we had a house inspection, but my guess is that we didn’t.  Not everyone did back in that day. So it was, that we had no idea until later that the house, built on the sandy soil of Ocean Grove, had settled. 

How did we find out? Well, not through a disclosure form which is required today.  No, we found out about the settling when we discovered that the legs on the headboard side of one of the beds had been cut shorter so the bed would be level!  We laughed at the solution that old couple had come up with to keep from sliding off the bottom of the bed in the middle of the night.  In Ocean Grove, settling in a house built on sand was apparently no big deal!

So it was that when the realtor back here later mentioned that the house we were going to see had settled, I was not discouraged at all.  The Ocean Grove house had settled, yet it had stood the test of time (and it stands still these 30 years later!).  The truth of her statement was obvious when we looked at the bedrooms.  There were no beds with legs cut shorter, but it was obvious the bedroom floors were listing toward the center of the house.  However they were certainly no worse than the house in Ocean Grove! 

Once I cast aside the concern about settling, the house was appealing.  I didn’t think I wanted a split level house until I saw one.  It had so much more room than the others we had looked at that my mind began to change.  And it was within our price range.  The detail that swung the deal for us was that it had an assumable, 3 % mortgage rate, at a time when the mortgage rate was at least twice that!  We had been praying for the Lord’s direction and to us this seemed like a providential  affirmation.  So we made an offer, and the rest, as they say, is history.

This is the house in which we have spent the last 31 years of our married lives.  In it we raised and launched two daughters, both now in their mid-30s and living on their own in other states.  And in it we raised our granddaughter for two thirds of her 18 years.  We have great memories of parties and graduations and holidays and grandparent visits and Bible studies and international student guests over the years.  But now this house is way too big and costing us too much, physically and financially, to maintain.  It has become time for us to downsize.  So we decided to put the house on the market.

Of all my family members, I seemed to dread the experience the most, because this wasn’t the first time we’ve tried to sell this house.  Back in the early 1990s, Jim’s company relocated its headquarters from Manhattan to Connecticut and offered their employees a relocation package that included the purchase of their homes.  We were excited about a possible move, so I contacted a realtor and began looking at houses in Connecticut, while also working with a realtor here to put our house on the market. 

The day of the realtors’ open house, and the days following, are ones I never forgot.  The company gave us the dire news – they didn’t want to buy the house because of the settling.  I remember my emotions – shock, discouragement, disbelief, embarrassment, anger.  In the end, we decided not to move.  The result was that Jim commuted for three hours back and forth to Connecticut every day until he retired three years ago. 

I vividly remembered the devastation of those days, so that this time around I anticipated more of the same, and I was not disappointed.  The reaction of our realtor and the other realtors who came to the most recent realtors’ open house was not encouraging.  The feeling was that few people would be interested in buying the house, even in a seller’s market with good interest rates. 

After our experience 15 years ago of trying to sell we hired a structural engineer whose report said the house had probably settled within the first year or so of being built (in 1955) and as far as he was concerned, had probably not settled any further since.  But because the report had been done 15 years ago, not a lot of stock is being given to it by potential buyers now.  So, after a month of being on the market, with not a lot of interest in our house, we spoke to our realtor about reducing the price substantially, to cover the land only, with the house thrown in, AS IS.  That was a week ago, and since then we’ve had more activity than we ever had when we were selling the house.

Maybe you wondering: After you had trouble selling the house the first time, why didn’t you investigate how to fix it and then do it? 

Jim and I talked about that tonight at dinner.  First of all we didn’t notice it all that much.  We had the bedrooms carpeted years ago using a process called flash patching where they adjust the carpet padding to minimize the uneven floor.  We didn’t even remember that until our son in law removed the bedroom carpeting and refinished the hard wood floors and the settling issue became more obvious.

Second, in the years since the early 90s, life intruded.  We were busy raising our family and working and it wasn’t a priority.  And then, as I said before, after our Ocean Grove experience, we really didn’t expect it would be an issue.  

We do have some things going for us. The best one, from a human perspective, is is that we live in a town very desirable because of its award winning school system.  But that’s not all we have going for us. We have prayer and a God who answers it.

Long before we put the house on the market, I began praying specifically about the sale as a result of a conversation I had with a lovely older lady from our church.  Years ago she and her husband had been thinking of doing exactly what we want to do – sell the home that had become too big and downsize.  They had a lovely split level home of which her husband took great pride and excellent care, in a town nearby.  Because the house was so well looked after, it took them by complete surprise when, before they had even listed the house, a builder approached them offering to give them full market value for the house, after which he would tear it down and build another, more modern home.  It was hard for her husband to agree to, but eventually they said yes, and sold it to the builder without ever even having to list it with a realtor.  Wow!

That’s exactly what I have been praying and hoping the Lord will do for us. I have been asking the Lord to send us a builder to buy the house, tear it down, and erect another – with a stable foundation and level floors – so that some other family can enjoy this property in all the ways we have enjoyed it, and at the same time be saved from having to market the same flawed house at some point in their future!

So why share all this?  It is definitely a first world problem.  Compared to the REAL problems of survival in much of the world, this isn’t all that big a deal.  But it is a big deal for us, an emotional and a financial one as well.  When the rejection of our house happened AGAIN, my primary emotions were embarrassment and shame over buying the house in the first place.  When people come into your home and overlook what might be nice about the house, and only fix their eyes on the flaws, it’s humiliating.  It feels like they’re criticizing your housekeeping, and maybe even your intelligence. And the thought of not being able to sell your house feels despairing.  So, for the last month, I’ve only shared this with a few people. 

But I decided to share it today with all of you for one reason and one reason only, and here it is:  One day soon the Lord is going to answer my prayers for the sale of this house – abundantly beyond all that I can ask or even imagine – and we will be able to sell it, hopefully as I have been praying, to a builder who will make the next one RIGHT. 

In the meantime, it’s a waiting game, one we hope will have a happy ending – for two families.