by Dave Barry
Homes And Other Black Holes
Dave Barry
Dave Barry is a staff writer for the Miami Herald, where he writes about such topics as politics, world affairs, and giant mutant crickets attacking villages in Peru. His weekly humor column appears in more than 120 newspapers, and his writing has appeared in a number of national magazines. In 1986 he won the American Association of Newspaper Editors’ Distinguished Writing Award for commentary. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, an event that confirmed the widely held view that western civilization is headed down the toilet.
Barry lives with his wife, Beth, and son, Robby, in Coral Gables, Florida, in a house that is slowly getting worse.
Dave Barry.
Homes And Other Black Holes
The Happy Homeowner’s Guide to Ritual Closing Ceremonies, Newton’s First Law of Furniture Buying, the Lethal Chemicals Man, and Other Perils of the American Dream
Introduction: Why It Was Probably A Mistake To Buy This Book
The desire to own a home of one’s own has been a part of human nature ever since that fateful moment, millions of years ago, when our earliest ancestors climbed down out of their trees and moved into their very first caves. It was a major moment in history, and its glory was dimmed only slightly by the fact that their furniture did not arrive for another 250,000 years.
Yes, moving into a new home is one of life’s great adventures, constantly posing new and exciting challenges.
For example, just recently my wife, son, and I moved to Florida, and the first thing I noticed was that there were crabs living under our house. There were two main ones, named Bob and Steve, who had established holes on either side of our front door, which they were always working on. I’d come out in the morning to get the paper, and there would be Bob and Steve, waving their claws at me as if to say in cheerful crab language: “Hi, Mr. Barry! We’re digging holes under your house, and unless you do something, the entire structure will eventually fall into the canal!”
What I ultimately decided to do about the crabs was the same thing I ultimately do about virtually all homeowner-type problems, namely—and you might want to write this down, because it is the core philosophy of this entire book—I try not to think about it. Trust me, this is the best way. If God had wanted us to spend all our time fretting about the problems of home ownership, He would never have created beer.
This is not to say that I am recommending that you totally ignore your responsibilities as a homeowner and just sit around all day with a beer can in your hand. No indeed, I have long been a believer in purchasing bottled beer, and pouring it into a chilled glass. “If you’re going to do something, do it right”that is my motto, and you will find that throughout this book I have made every effort to present all relevant house-owning information as accurately and completely as possible given the fact that I am making almost all of it up.
Which is not to say that I am unqualified to write this book. I have bought and sold several homes in my day, although I will admit that in the case of our current home, I never even saw it until after I signed the agreement of sale. My wife, Beth, did the actual shopping. This is because I get extremely nervous in sales situations. I will do absolutely anything to please the salesperson. Usually, in stores, I can flee on foot before a salesperson gets to me, but if I don’t get away, I’m a dead man. Like, if I’m walking through Sears, and I happen to pause for just a moment in the major appliances section, and one of those Sears appliance salespersons in polyester sport jackets comes sidling up and says, “Can I help you?” I instantly go into a state of extreme anxiety and say: “Yes, I’ll take one of these, please,” pointing to whatever major appliance I happen to be standing in front of, even though we probably already have one.
So I am a bad person to have on your side in a real estate sales situation. I drive my wife crazy, because I always want to buy whatever structure we happen to be standing in:
Me: Well! This looks perfect! My WIFE: This is the real estate broker’s office. ME: Well, how much are they asking?
This is why I was not actively involved in the purchase of our present house. But I still have to help pay for it, which is why even though you may not be thrilled that you bought this book, I’m certainly glad you did.
Chapter 1. Getting Ready To Get Real Depressed
Deciding Which House To Buy
In deciding which house to buy, the first thing you have to do is determine your Price Range, using this simple formula:
1. Take your total annual family income, including coins that have fallen behind the bureau and any projected future revenue you have been notified about via personalized letters from Mr. Ed McMahon stating that you may already have won fourteen million dollars.
2. Count up the number of children you have and note how many of them are named Joshua or Ashley. That many? Really? Don’t you feel this trend toward giving children designer names has gone far enough? Don’t you think we should go back to the old system of naming children after beloved uncles and aunts, even if we in fact hate our beloved uncles and aunts and they have comical names such as Lester? Can you imagine having an aunt named Lester? These questions are not directly related to your Price Range. I’m just curious to know how you feel.
3. Now take these figures (No! I’m not going to tell you again which ones! Pay attention!) and multiply them by six; which will tell you, in thousands of yards, roughly how far away the lightning bolt was. No! Wait! Sorry! Wrong formula! You want to take these figures and multiply them by something other than six. This should give you a very strong idea of what your Price Range is, although we shall soon see that it doesn’t matter because there are no homes in it anyway.
There! Now you’re getting somewhere! But you’re not done yet: you need to decide what style of house you’re looking for. The major styles of houses in the United States are:
OLDER HOUSES with many quaint and charming architectural features such as that during certain phases of the moon the toilets flush up.
NEWER HOUSES built by large developers using modern cost-cutting efficiency measures such as hiring semiskilled derelict felon gypsy work-persons who are prone to forgetting to install key architectural elements such as windows and those large pieces of wood, “rafters” I believe they are called, that hold up the roof
REALLY NICE WELL-BUILT, WELL-LOCATED, AFFORDABLE HOUSES that are not for sale.
Another very important factor is neighborhood. Ask any real estate broker to name the three most important factors in buying a property, and he’ll say: “Location, location, location.” Now ask him to name the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, and he’ll say: “Location, location, location.” This tells us that we should not necessarily be paying a whole lot of attention to real estate brokers.
If you have school-age children, by far the most important factor in selecting a neighborhood is, of course, the proximity of the nearest Toys Backwards “R” Us store. You will be spending a great deal of your time and disposable income there, because from kindergarten through about sixth grade, the average child attends approximately 36,500 birthday parties. Your child will go through a period, usually around first grade, when his classmates will have as many as six birthdays apiece per year, meaning you’ll spend virtually all of your Saturdays racing to Toys Backwards “R” Us, then racing off to the party, leaving a trail of flattened pedestrians because you are wrapping the present as you drive. But all the hassle is worth it when you see the look on the birthday child’s face when he or she rips open the present and remarks with delight: “Hey! I already got this!”
Once you have selected several potential neighborhoods, you should drive around to evaluate them, using this convenient .
..
Neighborhood Checklist
Note What The Residents Do With Cars That No Longer Function Good Neighborhood: They get rid of them. Bad Neighborhood: They keep them all forever, arranged tastefully on their lawns, as if expecting the Car Fairy to come one night and whisk all the cars away and leave everybody a nice shiny quarter. Note What Kind of Names The Local Streets Have Good: jasmine View Court Terrace Bad: Interstate 95
Note What Kind Of Businesses Are Operating In The Neighborhood Good: Arthur A. Wutherington IV, Investment Banker Bad: Earl’s All-Night Nude Revue & Motorcycle Repair Note What the Neighborhood Youths Are Doing Good: Selling lemonade Bad: Selling you your rear wheels back Note What Kind Of Bumper Stickers The Neighborhood Cars Have Good: “SCHOOL’S
OPEN! DRIVE CAREFULLY!” Bad: “I LOVE MY PIT BULL” Note The Types Of Neighborhood Social Activities Good: Barbecues Bad: Cockfights
It also might be a good idea to do some formal research into neighborhood property values by going down to the Municipal Building and getting shunted from one civil servant to another in an increasingly desperate attempt to find one who is not hostile, brain-damaged, or eating lunch, until finally you open fire at random with a semiautomatic weapon. So we can see that this is not, after all, such a good idea, and it probably should not even be included here. Although frankly I doubt that any jury in the land would convict you.
Choosing A Real Estate Broker
It is possible to buy or sell a home without a broker, as will be discussed in a later chapter (Unless we forget to write it). But most people prefer to use a broker, because of the many advantages, such as:
1. If you have a real estate broker, you have an excuse to fend off the other brokers, who will otherwise follow you around and hurl rocks through your window with notes taped to them explaining the many advantages of using a broker.
2. Brokers always have nicer cars than you do, a phenomenon that will become more understandable when we get to the section on commissions.
This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list of the advantages of using a broker. The only reason I’m not listing all the others here is that they don’t spring immediately to mind.
The best place to obtain a broker is at a junior high school, where you’ll find that virtually all the teachers obtained real estate licenses once they realized what a tragic mistake they had made, selecting a profession that requires them to spend entire days confined in small rooms with adolescent children. Often it is sufficient to just drive by the school and beep your horn; within seconds, brokers will come swarming out of doors and windows, eager to abandon their lesson plans on the Three Major Bones of the Inner Ear so they can help you find a home.
There are many factors to consider in selecting a broker, such as competence, honesty, vertical leap, and placement in the Evening Gown Competition. But the most important factor is an intangible quality called “professionalism,” by which I mean “car size.” You want to select the broker with the largest possible car, because you’re going to spend far more time in this car than in whatever home you ultimately buy.
Next you should tell your broker what your Price Range is, so he or she can laugh until his or her official company blazer is soaked with drool. What your broker finds so amusing, of course, is that there is virtually nothing, outside of the Third World, available in your Price Range. I don’t care if your Price Range is a hillion jillion dollars, there will be nothing available in it. This is a fundamental principle of real estate.
At first you will probably insist on looking at the something in your Price Range anyway, which will result in the following comical dialogue:
YOU: This is It? They’re asking $89,500 for a refrigerator carton?
BROKER: Yes, but I think they’ll take $85,000.
This process is called “getting a feel for the market.” Once you’ve undergone it, your broker will explain a creative new financial concept that has been developed to enable people such as yourself to enjoy the benefits of home ownership, called: Spending Way More Than You Can Afford. Usually you have to talk yourself into going with this concept. Here are some sound financial arguments you can use:
1. Although you may not really be able to afford a more expensive home at your current income level, it makes sense to buy it anyway, because in just a few years, at your current rate of progress in your career, you’ll probably be dead.
2. There are major tax benefits to owning a home. The law, written by wise lawyers and bankers, permits you to deduct all the money you give to lawyers or bankers, which will turn out to be virtually all the money you have.
3. Owning a home is a smart investment. As inflation pushes up the cost of living, you will build up equity in your home, so that, when you eventually sell it, you will have made enough profit to be able to afford to pay the point and closing costs’ on your next home!
So as you can see, you really can’t afford not to buy a home that you really can’t afford. It’s time to sit down with your broker and take a serious look at the listings.
The listings are computerized lists, or “listings,” of all the houses that all the brokers in your region have been trying to sell since the Carter administration. Listings are always written in a special real estate code. For example, this listing:
CHARMING RANCH, 2 full, 4BR, 3B, 2TD, land scaped, newly renovated. ...
can be decoded as follows:
1. Rooms the size of nasal spray cartons
2. IN URBAN AREAS: No attic or basement. IN RURAL AREAS: Also cattle have wintered in the foyer.
3. Four bedrooms
4. Three bathrooms
5. Two turtle doves
6. Extensive comical lawn statuary including minority groups holding lanterns; also large, permanent, fully mechanized, spectacularly illuminated display of Santa’s Workshop
7. The walls have been pretty well scraped clean in the room where the demonic beings from another dimension came through the TV set and caused the previous occupants’ heads to explode.
Study the listings carefully and make a note of any houses that look right for you, so your broker can confirm that they were all sold just that morning. This is actually good, because it will help to get you into the proper highly desperate frame of mind where you will do almost anything to get a house, including paying large sums of money you really don’t have to people you really don’t know for reasons you really aren’t sure of. Which is the essence of real estate.
Chapter 2. How To Pretend To Look Knowledgeably At Houses
Okay. Now we have reached the most exciting part, the very essence of home buying: actually going inside specific houses so we can examine them and fail to notice major defects.
One important warning before you get started: You want to be on the alert for the Helpful Seller. This is the kind of seller who, the instant you enter his home, leaps out and attaches himself to you, like an intestinal parasite, only worse, because intestinal parasites, for all their flaws, do not feel a great need to point out every single one of their home’s numerous features, whereas the Helpful Seller does.
“This is the hall bathroom , he’ll say, showing you a bathroom in a hall. Then he’ll watch you very closely, trying to gauge your reaction to this bathroom, and you’ll feel obligated to compliment him on it.
“Very nice!” you’ll say.
“This toilet seat was installed quite recently,” he’ll say.
“Huh!” you’ll say.
“It’s padded,” he’ll say.
“Bang,” you’ll say, shooting him in the forehead with your small-caliber revolver. This is why many real estate brokers these days use tranquilizer darts to subdue hyperactive sellers right in the foyer, before they have a chance to become too Helpful.
How Many Houses Should You Look At?
Most experts recommend that, for maximum effectiveness, you should look at forty-five or even fifty houses per day. Experienced home shoppers often reach the point where they can leap out of the real est
ate broker’s car, look at a house, and get back into the car before it reaches a complete stop.
if you follow this procedure, by nightfall your brain will be tightly packed with hundreds of thousands of bits of important real estate information, and you and your spouse will be able to have useful decision-making conversations like this:
YOU: I kind of liked that contemporary with the fireplace in the kitchen.
YOUR SPOUSE: No, the contemporary had fire damage in the kitchen. You’re thinking of the split-level, the one where the garage floor had a Rust-Oleum stain shaped like the Virgin Mary.
YOU: No, that was the colonial, remember? With big white pillars out front and no toilets.
YOUR SPOUSE: No, you’re thinking of Monticello. Remember, We went there on vacation in 1979?
YOU: No, it was 1978.
Using this logical elimination process, you’ll begin to narrow your list down to the three or four dozen houses that you are truly interested in. These are the ones you should go back and inspect in a thorough manner, using this convenient checklist:
Home Inspection Checklist
The Roof
This is a “must.” There is an old German expression that goes: “A house without a roof is like a machterstrassefurtermorgennachtdankeschoen without a gutsprechenbuchlungwiegehtvolkswagenporsche.” If anything, this is an understatement. So the first thing you should do is go up and crouch in the attic and see if you get bit by a bat. This is usually an indication that the house contains bats, which, depending on your lifestyle, could be a negative factor, especially if one tries to suck out your blood, because that means it’s a vampire bat, which means the house is located in South America, so right away we are talking about probably a fairly long commute to work.
