House Update
It pretty much looks like we’re buying a house. However, it also looks like we might be inheriting a problem renter. She’s taken very good care of the house, but she doesn’t seem to be in a big hurry to move out. She’s supposed to be out on the 30th of this month (as in, 7 days from now) but she doesn’t seem to have made much progress in finding a place. Preston and I don’t want our first act as new homeowners to be booting someone out on the street. It just seems like bad karma. So we signed an agreement with the current seller that if there’s anyone in there after closing, the seller will pay us $32/day ($950/month) for every day that we can’t move into it. Hopefully, that will be enough incentive for the seller to get her out of there ASAP. Our agreement expires on April 30th, so if she’s still in there at that point, we won’t feel bad any more about booting her out. At that point, she’ll be a squatter and not a renter so we won’t have to evict her, we’ll just have to have her arrested for trespassing. Which is still a big pain in the ass. Hopefully, the seller will evict her before we get to that step.
But other than that fairly major inconvenience, everything seems to be moving forward. We meet at the title company on Monday to sign all the final papers so that the closing can happen as planned on the 30th. As far as I know, there’s nothing that can fall through at this point, so it appears that we will own a house next week. We’ve started thinking about decorating options. In particular, we have to take out all the carpets and paint the walls before we can move in, since the tenant has been smoking in the house for the last four or five years. After looking into all of our flooring options, we’ve decided that you can actually do really cool things with concrete floors. It’s not just for warehouses and garages anymore. It’s relatively eco-friendly, and you can paint it and stain it in all sorts of beautiful ways. So the big decision to be made is about paint colors for both walls and floor (the ceiling is all popcorn which we don’t want to deal with, so that will stay white). I started collecting paint color books, and I cut out all my favorite color combinations to show Preston.
Each card shows a combination of four colors that I like a lot. Preston gets overwhelmed by too many options, so I’m not even showing him the whole books. This stack of colors is probably plenty overwhelming. I also picked my favorite combination out of all of them, so now it’s a matter of negotiating with Preston to pick a cohesive picture. He has a tendency to refuse to follow the structures I like. (”Sure, we can use your tan and orange scheme, but also I want to paint my room bright green.”) Anyway, here are my choices.
Of course, the colors don’t come out on the computer screen, but that gives you an idea. We’d use only one tan, one white, and one pink color, rather than the two variations that are shown in this scheme. The dark purple on the lower right will probably switch out for a dark orange-red (darker and redder than the upper left square) to suit Preston’s quirky taste. And I’m thinking the concrete floor will be whichever tan color we go with. I’m thinking that using one light color for all the floors (except the bathroom and kitchen, which are already tiled) will help make the place look bigger, and will also be easy to deal with, rather than trying some complex artistic thing with the floors right now.
March 24th, 2007 at 10:22 am
A couple of things to keep in mind. Concrete floors are really cold and really permanent. If you don’t get a really smooth silky finish on it, they are also really hard to clean. Have you looked into the wood laminates? Like what I had on the floor in the Choteau kitchen? It is very easy to install yourself, is very easy care, long lasting, and relatively inexpensive. You want to go with a good brand if you do it though. There are cheapy off-brands that chip and don’t like to get wet. If you go with Pergo or one of the other good competitors (what I had wasn’t Pergo - it was one of the others - less expensive but just as good) they are worth the extra money, imo.
In terms of the renter, the problem with having her there after you close is that you become responsible for anything that happens to the property at that point. There are liability issues both for the property itself and for anyone on the property because the property is *yours*.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Well, it’s not like concrete would be our first choice if we were starting from scratch. We’re just pretty sure that there’s *already* a concrete floor under the carpet. Even cheap laminate is more expensive than free, pre-existing concrete and a bit of paint. We’d rather spend our money on windows at this point. (Have I mentioned that the whole south side of the house has no windows?!)
I’ve been looking around at concrete floors lately. Our favorite breakfast place in Seattle has concrete floors with a beautiful mottled grey paint job on it. The office where I work (a converted garage) has a painted concrete floor. Part of my annex room in Onalaska had a painted concrete floor. Each of them has varying levels of beauty, but they all seem to work okay. Throw down a couple of rugs, and I think it will work fine for now. At least until after we get the walls painted and put in a few windows. We’re also open to the idea that we might end up pulling up the carpet and finding something other than concrete under there, in which case we’ll ponder our options at that point. If we went with wood, we’d probably do real wood, not the laminate. We have a really cool salvage place in town that has salvaged hardwood floors for around $1.50 per square foot. That’s even cheaper than cheap vinyl around here.
As far as the tenant issue…yes, it’s a pain no matter how you try to work it. The fact is, she’s probably going to be there after we close, whether it’s legal or not. Simply refusing to sign the papers isn’t an option because we really want the house. If we decide that the seller has broken the contract by not having all personal items removed in time for closing, then we have to start over again with a new offer and everything. We don’t want to risk losing it that way.
So it’s true that we could just have her booted out the day after we close, but that means that we have an angry squatter in our house, and we would still be liable for anything that happens to the house during her forcible removal. That doesn’t seem like a good option either. We opted for trying to make it really inconvenient for the seller to allow her to stay. Even after the house closes. The seller isn’t getting any more Section 8 vouchers for her rent after the house closes. Which means that if she stays for another month it will cost him close to $1000 out of pocket. That more than covers our house payment, including taxes and insurance, and it makes it in the seller’s best interest to help her find a new place, rather than that task falling solely on us. Certainly it’s less than ideal, but it seemed the least inconvenient to us.