…I climb up on the top of the stairs And all my cares Just drift right into space
Like hell they do. Type in correction: none of my cares are drifting into space. They are piling on rapidly and my plate was already full before this week even started. Prognosis: no relief in sight.
On the roof is peaceful as can be And there the world below can’t bother me…
Oh it bothers me plenty. Plenty. Thanks a lot world, for sucking it to me again and again. Thanks for last night as well (sorry, friend, for standing you up for drinks last night; I was quite incapacitated).
When I come home feeling tired and beat I go up where the air is fresh and sweet…
Where would that be? The fresh and sweet air I mean? In the crawlspace that the engineer came to inspect this morning? Is that it? Seemed fine up there. This is a forty year old house, damn it! You want a new property – here I’ll show you some houses farther west. Add a couple hundred thou and you can have all the brand new roof tiles you want!
Oh, did I hear that you registered your child for the local elementary school already? Well forget it! Tell junior mommy and daddy were forced out of the house by VERY ANGRY SELLER! I have no patience, no remorse, no oomph, no stamina left! Go pick on someone else, buttheads.
No more mr. nice-guy from me, ever. I tell you, it doesn’t pay! It DOES NOT PAY!
UPDATE: In case the buyers do not understand blogs, I am compelled to remind all that Ocean is a blog that believes in looking at tense moments with humor. I did modify the text a teeny tiny bit so as to not appear totally wacky. Which I am not.
* lyrics: my commenter was right. Peter belts it out, but Carole King wrote it
Be strong, Nina.
ReplyDeleteOf course, they're being unreasonable and, of course, you and your lovely house deserve better. But I wonder, how much would you pay to have this whole mess just go away? And is it more or less the same amount the ugly buyers want to knock off of their offer? It might be worth it, just to be done with this drama forever.
--A friendly stranger who reads your blog
Reminds me of our exact opposite experience when we were buying a house just five months ago. As two attorneys, you'd think we would have been good at negotiating a deal on a house that had stood vacant an entire winter. Nope. My husband despises whining and nagging and haggling. Take it or leave it is the mantra around here. Saul admitted that we were in love and 3K less than her asking price seemed as good as we could do. He liked the tiny sink in the powder "closet" and all the hardwood floors and I liked the original glass door knobs upstairs and the dining room windows and original light in this 1921 (or is 1922) house. The owner told us not to worry about the rotting deck (that visibly sank a short time after we moved in when Saul stood at its edge one day), the asbestos (which we were told was "encapsulated" so not to worry there, only to lean at a neighborhood party later in the summer that encapsulation doesn't do the trick, so now i see small flecks of white dust on shelves just under the pipes, and the cat likes to sleep there when we are gone) and don't forget the basement that never leaks, except when it leaked and I waded through water one afternoon (a problem that solved itself by accident when a friend with a chainsaw convinced us that we should cut down all of the big overgrown bushes in front). But it's home. Nice guys don't always finish last, because we got the house we wanted. Tell those fussy home buyers that it's only money. As my father used to say, "That's what money's for, to buy the things you like."
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Friendly Stranger, and as such am sticking with my previous advice.
ReplyDeleteVenting on the blog is fine, but it's conceivable that telling them officially to sod off would cost you more than whatever it will cost to appease them. They might be totally unreasonable, but you can test that easily enough by countering with a suitably small fraction of their requested discount.
That said, I think the buyers are being jerks.
I like that song... But I like this one by The Bloodhound Gang too:
ReplyDelete"The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn,
Burn motherfucker burn."
I'm not advocating arson to give your lovely buyers a real defect, but sometimes thoughts of fire really are heartwarming.
I'm sorry your buyers have turned into numnuts.
Yikes! It sounds like you are having an awful time with these people! They don't seem to have any type of consideration for you as the seller, judging from your previous posts. What rude people! Hang in there!
ReplyDelete"The Roof is On Fire" is an old school rap song, from like the early 80s. Rockmaster Scott & the Dynamic Three? I think. P Funk and billion other people have sampled it, including Bloodhound Gang. Anyway, off topic. Just sayin'.
ReplyDeleteNina! Of course you do not accept a lower offer, if you have already accepted a higher one! That's just ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteAbout 10 years ago, nearly to the day, I was already living in AZ and dying to sell my old house in MA. It really was an old house, too -- going on 90 years, then. Finally I had an offer (after having to replace ALL the plumbing and completely redo the upstairs bathroom) and everything was going fine, until it rained. And the new bathroom flooded when the roof leaked. AAAUUUGGGHHHHH!
The roof was old, and the buyers knew it. Not one of us expected that to happen, though. We did not have to renegotiate the whole deal, though -- I just knocked $2K off for a roofing allowance, since their original bid had been made knowing the roof was going to need work sooner, rather than later, and that was acceptable to all.
But I just about died until we worked through all that. If the sale hadn't gone through we would've lost our then-being-built house in AZ. I don't even want to think about how complicated that would've been!
Anyway: deep breaths, judicious applications of alcoholic beverages, and lots of time with friends will get you through this. At least you are in the same time zone as your old property. It will all work out eventually.
Me, again. Can I tell you how funny it is that you actually called these people "buttheads"? That is so un-Nina-like that I really did laugh.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry you're going through this, truly. I stand by my previous advice (especially the alcoholic beverages in judicious amounts.) Hang in there!
I do have burning thoughts and songs about devils and a lot worse in between.
ReplyDeleteAnd early night wine is a good friend before it becomes the enemy of late night spinning.
And yes, I did get close to falling off a cliff last night -- at least in my head I was convinced that I was falling off the cliff. In reality, there was soft carpet underneath me.
As for the butthead thing: I have to have to have to always remember that my readership includes new and old students who are unfamiliar with unusual terminology of this sort. Especially out of the mouths of their law profs.
The buyers want to buy the house much as you want to sell it. Negoition is a must. h\Hang tough. You will get the correct market price if you persist. Don't panic. Have a martini!
ReplyDeleteBert