Bartender: One House, Please

Once upon a time, I decided it was time to stop paying rent. In lieu of facing a civil suit from my best friend’s sister and brother-in-law (my landpeople), I decided to drop a few thousand dollars on a house. Besides, it would have been really awkward serving communion on Sunday to the people who were serving me a summons on Monday.

Turns out, buying a house involves a little bit of effort… unless you just won Powerball. [Note: I discovered winning Powerball involves getting all the numbers right. When you get half the numbers, you do not get half the jackpot.] So, I got a real estate agent. Mainly so I could say I have a real estate agent, but also to facilitate the buying of a house. While I trust the safety of the worldwide web as much as anyone, I choose not to disclose my real estate agent’s name. We’ll call her Rea… Give it a second.

So Rea began sending me listings. Now before you get too excited, realize that the listings I was getting sent my way looked nothing like House Hunters on HGTV. [Note: Yes, I have watched way more than my share of HGTV since this process began. In fact, it’s on right now. Make jokes if you so choose, but I acknowledge my weakness.] My preferred home-buying budget led me to get a lot of listings that could have doubled an antique barn or perhaps a meth-lab. So from these listings, I weeded out the barns and started picking houses to physically visit. Old school, I know, but they don’t offer many virtual tours of houses that haven’t been lived in since a Roosevelt was president.

House 1: So I hadn’t met with Rea in person regarding the house hunt yet. As such, when I pulled onto the street, I felt a little bad that, instead of being greeted by fancy stone columns of a nice gated community, Rea would pull into the neighborhood with a Budget Brakes on her left and a Missionary Baptist church in the basement of a Discount Liquor on her right – Pillars of the community. Realizing this was a house I was looking to live in and these were the neighborhoods I might end up in, I stopped feeling a little bad... Until I pulled in the driveway and saw Rea in her Mercedes coupe. She got out and informed me she might have been a little scared to get out of the car before I got there. Superhero moment. Anyway, to use a Wordly Wise word, house one was dilapidated. I almost made it out unscathed, but I bumped my head on the rusty overhang that led to the basement. Potential diseases acquired: Tetanus.

House 2: We drove from house one to house two. Logical progression if you will. The listing indicated house 2 was currently being rented. No big deal. They requested 2 hours notice before showing: Rea gave them 24 hours. “You see a car back there?” “Yeah, at least one.” “Ok, well, hopefully they’re not here, but we’ll knock in case.” It was at this point in the conversation we arrived at the front door. And heard a child crying inside. Awesome. So, we stood awkwardly on the front porch deciding whether or not to go in. We settled on knocking. Renter man opened the door. “We’re here to take a look at the house if that’s ok.” Rental man nods his head, opens the door, and proceeds to take off chasing his completely naked child who has just run through the living room. Good start. We make our way through the house quite quickly, but being sure to see all the rooms. Well, I take that back. I let Rea look at one room on my behalf. Primarily because there was a gentleman asleep in the aforementioned room. Potential diseases acquired: Tetanus. Naked people seen: 1.

House 3: Closing out day one of home-viewing, we went to my internet-favorite house. We go in through the (formerly) finished basement. The carpets were all rolled up to the middle of the floor. Flood damaged - Welcome to my home hunt. We proceeded upstairs. I liked it. Really, I did. I liked it a lot. I could handle the basement damage – it would give me a project to make all this HGTV viewing worth it. We take a lap around the outside of the house, where we casually discover that instead of putting gutters on the carport, the preferred means of water evacuation was to collect it in a giant heavy-duty receptacle. Seems it was full of standing water. Potential diseases acquired: Tetanus and West Nile. Naked people seen: 1.

Like I said, I really liked house 3. I tell Rea that I’m cautious to move too soon, but I did like it. She says she’ll look into it a little more and see if there are any similar listings. Within 2 hours, Rea tells me house 3 was theoretically sold when we looked at it. That’s not Realtor-speak for “You really liked it. It’s a good deal. I think we can make this work.” No, that means the house was sold when we looked at it.

This is going to be a good time.