The Moat Next Door

More in the continuing saga of the empty house flipping next door.

I haven't written about our "neighbors" since January 14th (two entries) http://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2008/01/house-next-door-unplugged.html. Before that you can check out my earlier posts: http://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2007/07/house-3.html, http://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2007/07/house-next-door-2.html, and http://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2007/04/our-neighbors-house-in-middle-of.html.

Things don't seem to be improving for our poor hapless "investors" that purchased the house next door and thought they would hang some baubbles, double the price, and skip along down to the bank with their check. Fools. Dreamers and Fools is what this business attracts.

The house has sat idle for quite a while, with the realtor sign finally coming down at some point and no work activity. Some time in March, a new sign appeared in the front window that stated that the bank had moved to winterize the piping to "protect their investment". Seems that action was a little late. You generally do that at the beginning of winter, not at the end. The scary thing is that the house burst all its pipes last winter and the owner didn't even try to drain or prep the house for winter this year.

A couple of weekends ago, the son of the owner came out and was loading something into the back of a pickup with another guy. A couple of days after that, my wife called and told me that some workers showed up and came to our house and asked if they could use our electricity. Andrea told them no, and I was ready to go home and re-emphasize that if necessary. By the time I got home they had 6 pickup trucks in the yard with a generator chugging away somewhere. I left to go jogging about an hour later and I looked over and noticed that there was a trailer filled with cabinets, all bungied down. As I started running, it occurred to me that they were taking things out of the house, rather than fixing it up for sale. When I got back from my run, all the trucks were gone. I peeked in the windows and discovered that they had indeed taken all the cabinetry and sinks out of the kitchen and first floor.

A few days later, more trucks came and started removing carpet. Someone got stuck in the waterlogged front yard, and another neighbor helped pull them out. We have some nice new pretty ruts to look at, now.

A few weeks ago, while looking for a cat, I noticed that their pool equipment room had a foot or so of water in it. This little basementlike foundation had its little pool house on top that was removed and then a deck was put on top of it (which is not sealed to rain, I don't think). However, the stairs have always been open to rain and the foundation has a floor drain. That must be clogged with leaves. The last time I checked, this little room (after our 3" of rain this week) has 3' of water in it. I'm sure the heaters, filters, and pumps are ruined after spending 3 months underwater.

The pool is filling with leaves and looks like a giant glass of iced tea. I recently spotted a 12" across (the shell) snapping turtle in the pond. I'm guessing that the turtle fell in full-grown as opposed to getting this large by living his whole life in the pool.

There are some pretty daffodils still, missed by the "landscapers" whose main function seemed to have been to tear things out rather than planting anything. The grass looks surprisingly lush and I can't tell that there has been much damage from leaves choking anything out. The other side of the house away from us has deep ruts and big low spots from the construction over there, and there is still a lot of construction debris laying around. The "breezeway" that they installed from the house to the "guest house" or studio (whatever that box they built near the pool) has a large opening that would allow animals as big as a cat to get inside of the house. I wonder if anything has taken up residence in there.

We know they bought the house for a lot more than the person before, and we know that they were able to get a loan for even more than they paid for the house, probably to finance the improvements. After the freeze damage and the other problems, I'm sure they are thoroughly upside down on the house. They not only haven't paid any of their utility bills, but they also did not pay the last notorious contractors (the guys with the tricycle mower). So if the house happens to have any leins on it, it's in even worse shape than just trying to sell it.

The house wasn't ready for someone to buy and move in before this latest trend of tearing it up. Now it's in even worse shape. I don't expect to have new neighbors any time soon. I do wonder how long it will be before the house goes up for auction.

Giving Up?

I freely admit to spying on neighbors.

However, I'm not sure you should even call these ones neighbors. House flipper realtors don't really count as neighbors.

I saw a couple in a white SUV on the driveway, talking to the "owner" flipper. I watched from my window. The conversation did not look congenial.

At first, I thought maybe it was a potential buyer, then I started wondering if it was the realtor. The couple was a man and a woman, but the woman was a lot older than the man, so I didn't think they were husband and wife, but maybe colleauges.

It looked like the owner was sort of arguing, maybe not in a contentious way, just trying to get his points across, and the couple looked like they were utterly unconvinced.

Later, I noticed that their footprints in the snow showed that they went to the front doors of the house where the electricity disconnection notices were still posted. I also noticed that the owner backed into our yard and made a mud rut with his back tire.

The next day, the real estate agent's sign was removed.

News of the housing markets just keep getting worse. I went through the back yard around the pool last night, looking for a cat and noticed that there was 2½' of water in the pool equipment room. Obviously, the drains are clogged with leaves and debris. It's possible that the cabana that they removed used to keep the water out and the deck that they replaced it with does not. I wonder how much damage the water is doing to the pool heater and filter? More money just evaporating away.

I wonder if we'll see a foreclosure sale sometime?

Postscript:

I called the realtor. It was another exercise in unreality. The secretary had a guy call me back that didn't even know that their company was listing the property. He kept trying to engage me on the phone, even when I figured out that I needed to talk to Pamela. Truly Dave, you are an idiot.

Pamela is his kindred spirit. Maybe they are brother and sister, their mental processes were certainly a match. Pamela said that they were going to "re-list" it. This is another meaningless buzz word that can mean anything they want it to mean, similar to the way they would tell us that the house was "under contract", which we were supposed to interpret as meaning that they had someone interested in buying it, when it really meant "I don't want you to think we are losers".

Pamela (if that is her real name) said the house is now $900,000 (down from $1.2 million - 25% off! that's a real sale!). They would be willing to take $875,000, as is. That means that for $900,000 he'll finish working on the house. Then she proceeded to tell me about the granite counters they are going to put in the guest house.

If this isn't like putting makeup on a pig, I don't know what is.

These Colors Run

I have a visceral aversion to seeing the flag on the ground. My noexistant neighbors can't pay their bills, so I don't know why I would expect them to respect the flag.

This house kind of reminds me of the current fascination with "The World Without Us". A fascination that I will admit that I share, which answers the question, if humans suddenly vanished, what would happen to all our buildings and works? This is the scientific equivalent of the Left Behind series, where people suddenly vanish in the rapture.

The house next door appears to be an experiment trying to figure out what this would look like in my neighborhood. My favorite part of the experiment is when the animals come back. Thank you foolish house flipper for the the deer and wild turkey.

House Next Door - Unplugged

It has seemed that the person that bought the house next door and the strange contractors that worked on it were complete insane, but they talked up a good story about how great! they were doing, and on some level, you want to believe them.

Apparently, they were not doing that great, as evidenced by the fact that last month their water was shut off, and this month, their electricity was cut off.

With the looming housing crisis, you have to wonder what will happen, and just how bad the place will look when it finally gets sold. I had a handyman/contractor come by last week to look at a busted storm window, and he said it would only be worth about $500,000 if it was in perfect shape, but he thinks $350,000 would be more likely, given the amount of work that needs to be done. I wonder if they still want $1,200,000 for it.

House 3

The subject that just doesn't want to die: what's going on next door?

It's still a fiasco.

I ran into the guys that were going to do the rework next door. They had to clean up the yard, redo all the interior, and finish connecting the main house with a "photography studio" by a breezeway. This is the infamous maneuver that will "add 2500 square feet to the main floor and increase the value of the house by $500,000" according the the genius behind the plan.

By the way, they are still saying that it's 4 acres, which it is not. It's 2½ acres.

The house reworkers told me that they were going to redo the house by July 24th. That was on July 9th or 10th. They had what looked like a tricycle to mow the yard with. 2½ acres of yard should not be mowed by a tricycle from 1956 with a 24" cut. Especially when the lawn is 24" tall. They took 3 days to mow the front yard and then took a week off. The net effect was to mostly kill the front yard, which was at least green before, and to make the pile on the driveway larger.

I did learn some interesting things from them, though. This guy Chris Powell that drove a red truck and used to work there was a real piece of work. This is the guy that used to rev up his big truck, squeal the tires every time he left, and go into the yard, making ruts. He used to bring a four-runner ATV with him and go around in circles in the back yard, making muddy ruts everywhere while his dog chased him. This is also the guy that supposedly brought the machine gun out and was shooting it wildly around the back yard. He is supposed to be the guy that was dumping debris from other jobs on the driveway including the dirty diapers. He is suspected to be the guy that stole the dishwasher, refrigerator, and hot water heater. We were told that he took a bunch of the money he was paid to work on this house and used it on other jobs, in effect ripping them off. That's most of what we heard about Chris.

What about the fate of the house as told by the new workers? We were told that the Chiefs bought the house for $1.2 million and that they were going to move the parents of someone they just signed into the house. They had until the 24th.

My old neighbor that used to live in the house heard about this and gave the realtor a call. Besides being asked if he wanted to sign a contract over & over again, he was told that it was going to be finished on July 24th (no mention that it was already sold - which turned out not to be the case) and that it had been appraised for $1.2 million. He asked her how they could appraise the property for what was going to be done to it in the future, but they assured him that it was all on the up & up. I don't think they said "those figures are right, all ready" like in Fargo. It was such preposterous BS that he finally asked them if this was some kind of scam. "Do you want to argue or do you want to hear more about the house?" was the answer.

The 24th has come and past. I can't tell if anything other than mowing the front yard and ripping up the flooring on the first floor was done. A few days ago, a truck with a front end loader appeared on the driveway and is still just sitting there. Not much was going on until yesterday, when someone knocked on the front door of our house. It was the guy they "hired" to do the drywall next door (hired is in quotes because if they don't pay him then technically, he volunteered). He needed some water in a 5 gallon bucket from our hose. My wife asked him, "don't you have the water on next door?" Apparently, not. I would think a simple thing like a $40 a month water bill would not be that hard to maintain when you have a $1.2 million dollar house. They are obviously out of money if turning off the water is part of the plan.

There are clouds of mosquitos coming out of the pool and huge bullfrogs live there now. The weeds are really starting to take over and wildlife is the most active element around the house. It somehow reminds me of hopes and dreams that have faded away. There's no telling what the next chapter will bring, but I wonder how much the house would bring in at auction now? Certainly not $1.2 million.

The House Next Door 2

House flippers are on crack.

The house next door was purchased for $225,000 in 1990 by the last person to live there more than a couple of years. They sold it for $380,000 in 2001 to the previous crazy owner, who moved in 6 months later, that summer.

This is a continuation of the story that I first wrote about in the posting "Flip That House" on April 29th. Here we are on July 7th and the situation isn't much different.

That big pile of trash outside the house, remember that? They started dumping bags of trash over it. The bags had dirty diapers in them and burst open. Imagine living next to a house where they thought it was OK to dump bag after bag of dirty diapers out on the driveway.

I finally got pissed off and called them. There was this strange little game of cat and mouse trying to contact the guy. The number that the "owner" had given me was a loan & real estate office. The guy I talked to didn't answer the phone and the guy that did insisted I tell him what I wanted to tell the other guy. The guy asked me if I wanted to sign a contract. What the hell does that even mean? I wouldn't tell him anything, and he kept explaining that he was this guy's partner and I could talk to him. Finally, after some frustration that I would not get to talk to the owner, I started telling his "partner" about the pile of poopy diapers. You never heard anybody backpedal so fast. Suddenly, he had nothing to do with that property and he was all about getting off the phone and stopping our fruitless discussion.

Last week or so, a new For Sale sign went up.

They had not finished this little breezeway connection between the master bedroom and the "Photography Studio" that the crazy Cuban had built. They paved the area below the causeway and ran water to the building. This was the infamous $20,000 work that would increase the value of the house to $1.1 million dollars! It's not done yet. The yard is about 2' tall, completely overgrown, and the dirty diapers are still there, rotting in the hot summer sun.

The realty company is one I've ever heard of before. I spoke to my friend that used to live in the house yesterday. He called the realtors to ask them what was going on. They told him that they wanted $1.2 million for the house (remember, they only paid $605,000 for it 6 months ago, and it's in worse shape than it was). He went "WHAT! You've got to be kidding!" and the realtor immediately said, "Well, we'd be willing to negotiate... we'd be willing to take off a lot." So my friend asked, "A million?"

He was told that the entire house would be redone and ready for sale by the 24th of July and asked if he wanted to see it and if he wanted to sign a contract. He told them he'd be willing to look at it after they finished the work.

Like I said, house flippers are on crack.

Flip that house

My boss used to live next door to my house, the house I grew up in. He bought the house from an uncouth and clueless bozo with a yappy dog that divorced soon after moving in. He lived there a while, moving out during a really contentious divorce that I found myself in the middle of.

They sold the house to a couple that allowed their children to run naked in the yard. The mother believed the angels were watching out over them, and sometimes she followed the angels into the woods, trespassing on another neighbor's land. They were loud and undisciplined and a thorough mess to live next to. They brought immigrant labor in to build a photography studio in the back yard, it was a large 2-story monstrosity that did not match the house and loomed over the poolside cabana.

They left suddenly about 3 years ago. The house sat vacant, and then was put up for sale after a few months. I think he wanted $500,000 for it (I'll check my notes). The grass in the yard would get to be about a foot tall, and then a crew would show up and chop it down and leave it all dead like a farmer's hay field. No one came by later to bale the grass, so it was quite a mess. One time we found three wet hungry kittens, lost from their mother after a mowing crew left. We still have them today - they are the best things that ever came from that house. I finally found out that someone had purchased it some time later, and the next phase in the adventure began.

Things between the new owners and us were contentious immediately. They had routed the septic system into the pond and I knew that a literal stink would develop over this when someone moved in. I had to do an inquiry with the state real estate commission just to find out who owned the property and to register my protest about the rerouting of the sewage into our pond. The new owner, a house flipper, at one point threatened to sue me if I didn't back down.

He went in and totally renovated the house. There were contractors over there for months. They tore out a screened in porch and made it into a room in the house. One of the contractors that worked on that told me that he found some files in the basement about someone that was a child molester and had gone to jail. I never got to see them and the guy didn't have many details. They reworked the first floor of the house, demolishing a brick bar and reworking the structural support of the second floor. The first floor was transformed into someone's idea of a home furnishing style magazine spread. Meanwhile, the basement, formerly finished, was ripped up to accommodate the changes. The upper floor, which had been redone by the lord of the flies people in jungle, angel, and baseball wallpaper themes, was not touched. The jungle wallpaper, probably done over too many sherries by a god-fearing housewife, was peeling off the walls and looked tragic. After seeing the house at this phase, my wife remarked, "No one is going to pay $800,000 for a fixer-upper." Eventually, the price was reduced to $750,000.

The house sat vacant for some months longer. We thought someone had bought it when the For Sale sign came down, but then nothing happened, no one moved in and there was no activity. Then some weeks later, these construction laborer types started pulling up in all kinds of pickups and got busy. They brought in a giant trash dumpster and started working day in and day out. How strange this was since the house was supposedly finished and there was an enormous amount of construction material going into the dumpster. I went over one night and peeked inside and there appeared to have been extensive water damage from upstairs to the central part of the house and from the first floor down into the basement. There was a ton of drywall missing, and it was a complete mess in there. The pipes had frozen, burst, then proceeded to flood for some time (days) before someone figured that out.

We met a friend that used to live in the house. He heard that the house has been sold again to another house flipper. They ripped into it, trying to fix the damage from the frozen pipes, but also making changes like putting plumbing into the "guest house" (the photographic studio abortion), pouring a concrete patio and tearing out a nice poolside cabana. My wife found on line that they bought the house late last year for $705,000. My friend was told by the contractor that they were going to fix it up and sell it for $1.1 million.

Meanwhile, the contractors started playing monster truck rally in the yard. Every time they pulled out it was a minute long squeal of tires and a trip through some portion of their yard or ours. Then Mr. Wonderful started bringing his dog and his ATV out and proceeded to rip up the entire yard with his exploits. My neighbor (who had been trespassed on by the Angel Chaser) told me that he heard automatic weapons fire coming from the house. We weren't there and a subsequent investigation by the police (with the crazy contractor being the only suspect) resulted in nothing.

I finally met the new "owner". He was actually the next house flipper. I had this really nice conversation with him, where he explained to me that there had actually been 3 house flippers owning the house (he was the 3rd). He said he paid $605,000 for the house and got $75,000 insurance for the water damage (which he said would not cover the costs). He showed me the house and told me that he was thinking about living in it himself. He showed me the work on the "guest house" which was being attached to the house through a concrete patio and a breezeway. He told me that this would add 2500 square feet to the main floor of the house and add $500,000 to the value. Looking around, I guessed he was putting maybe $20,000 into this modification. If wishful thinking can be taken to the bank, that man will be rich. I told him about the septic problem and he assured me he was going to repair it.

Despite that, we're running lab tests of the pond water as a baseline for the proof that their septic system routing into the pond was done incorrectly.

As we say, we have another in a lengthening line of idiots involved with the property. Maybe they can paint it tie-dyed and make it into a hippie commune. That would be fine with me except for the sitar music. My boss, who used to live in the house, confided in me his thoughts about the house. He was embarrassed, but asked me if I thought maybe the house was cursed or haunted. The barn he had made when he lived there has been eaten into a swiss cheese affair by the squirrels. I didn't believe it until I saw it myself one day. There must be some tasty starch in the particle board used for binder. The tennis court is completely overgrown and is crumbling away. Wild animals roam in the yard, including turkeys, deer, owls, and a friendly muskrat. I really like that. One day, our refugee kittens caught a cute furry little mouse and brought it terrified into the house. I grabbed it (disappointing the hell out of the cats) and my wife was aware of the episode. My wife is a tenderhearted animal lover, and I knew I would have to answer to her later, explaining what I did. We once tried to adopt and nurse some baby mice after their mother died in a tragic lawn mower accident, so I knew what her feelings about mousicide would be. If I returned the mouse to the cats, they would play with it for hours, no fun for the mouse, and just as likely to result in an escapee in our house as a meal for kitty. So, releasing it outside would probably result in it being re-caught by the cats. Dashing its head on the patio was sure to win me the disapproval of my wife. I finally came up with a solution. I assume it was captured in the empty house next door, so I returned it to its home.

No one has been over to work at the house for several weeks. There is an enormous pile of trash in the driveway, and from time to time, people show up and throw more trash, brought from somewhere else, onto the driveway. It will probably fill up one of those enormous dumpsters, whenever they get around to bringing out another one (I reckon there have been around 8 or 10 taken away from the house in the last 3 years - these are the big semi trailer sized ones).

We spent a nice weekend working on the yard and my wife expressed her concern about the trash pile and the foot high grass in the yard next door. I told her that I don't care. Let them trash the place. I enjoy having the wildlife and the quiet, and if no one moves in, that will be fine with me. I wonder if they are upside down on the loan. The housing market is terrible now and rather than doing something reasonable, people keep trying to scam someone into plopping down much more than it's worth though some scheme. That means we are likely to have someone with a lot of money and very little sense move in. Not my idea of an ideal neighbor. I keep wondering and waiting for the place to mysteriously burn down some day. It seems to me that this would be the only way for the house flippers to get out of this trap.

It's not over yet.