Monday, October 15, 2012

Mold, one point

We looked at another house on Saturday. This one was a short sale here in town, and we really liked it. It had three bedrooms on the main floor and a reasonable amount of living space, then a basement. You went down and found a pretty good sized living room down there, and opened a door and found a humongous room with a ping-pong table and groovy bar table, and then you opened another door with an even more humongous unfinished room with the washer and dryer, a door up to the yard, hanging racks for clothes, stacks and stacks of boxes, and the heater and hot water heater. It just kept going. It was phenomenal. Also, the people had a cat, which was definitely a mark in their favor.

The mark against them was that the basement was overrun with mold. One wall had been torn out, and the carpet really should have been. Our realtor did some digging, and found out they'd had a mold inspector in back in MAY who recommended massive mold remediation which was never done, and warned of possible structural problems. I get that it's the responsibility of the bank that owns it. But why wouldn't the bank try to, you know, preserve its investment? Nobody is going to win if they have to tear down the house. And if I lived there, short sale or no short sale, I think I'd invest in $5 worth of bleach and start scrubbing. I'd also knock down some spiderwebs. There were a lot of happy spiders.

Our realtor says it's always an adventure looking at houses with us!

I hate to see a house neglected like that. On the strength of it, I washed my strawberries in vinegar water today and bleached a moldy window frame.

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