When foreclosure makes things better…maybe

The former home of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum is looking pretty spiffy in its new coat of paint. Yesterday I spoke with the painter (the man works even cheaper than my guy—who would think it possible?). He gave me the grand tour of the worksite.

As it develops, they are replastering the pool, contrary to my speculation that they were just sanding and painting the interior. The back yard is already looking better with the outhouses dragged off, the dead stumps pulled, a new watering system installed, and the jury-rigged aluminum screening removed.

Ken the Painter (presumably a long-lost brother of Joe the Plumber) said that the owner is a speculator who intends not to rent but to sell, at a price hugely marked down off the going rate in our neighborhood. He said she has been buying and flipping houses steadily and having no problem unloading them.

She’s doing a lot of things right over there—removing the popcorn from the ceilings, replastering the pool, covering all the concrete in back with KoolDeck, getting rid of the hideous work sheds, pulling up all the flooring to replace it with tile. But she’s also cutting some corners: she plans to keep the ugly, worn-out dwarf-sized 1970s kitchen cabinetry, though she’s having the black formica countertops replaced. The house desperately needs new cabinetry, and the kitchen is so teensy it just wouldn’t cost that much to put in some Home Depot cabinets. She’s painting the eaves and other wood trim, but not painting the cinderblock walls on the sides and back—and especially in back, those walls really need to be painted! As long as she has the guy there, how much more could it cost to have him spray three not-very-big block walls?

So, that’s too bad. Of course, she’s not replacing the decrepit roof (which, it must be admitted, is nowhere near as decrepit as the roof next door, where Inez and Carlos the Knife reside), and she’s not replacing the ancient, loudly groaning air conditioner.

This will allow her to sell the house to someone else who likely will park his junk on the lawn and let the place go to pot. Any time a neighbor’s home sells, of course, what you get for a new neighbor is a pig in a poke. But when prices drop into the basement, you often find that people buy an older house without realizing what it costs to maintain it; once the learn that, they just let the place go. Because the have to: they don’t have enough to keep it up. And often you’ll get what around here are affectionately called “cultural problems”: people who don’t understand that in a middle-class neighborhood you don’t celebrate New Year’s by shooting your shotgun up in the air, you don’t let your pit bull run loose, you do put a muffler on your Harley, and you do store your pick-up, your trailer, and your unseaworthy motorboat somewhere other than on the front lawn.

But there’s always a chance that someone who’s thrilled to get their first house will move in, someone who will fix it up and keep it fixed up as long as they live there. That happened with Steve the Contractor’s house. Steve was a sketchy sort of guy who spent most of his time pretending to be a self-employed contractor (what he actually was doing was sitting around a lot while watching his house fall to rack and ruin). He finally was evicted—the previous owner had carried back the mortgage and it took her two years to get him out of the place—and the house was sold to a young couple who did a KILLER job of repair and renovation. To this day, the house is a neighborhood showplace.

Wish I could figure out how to unload the house downtown and install M’hijito in Dave’s house. He could bicycle to work from here. And it has a nice pool with plenty of backyard space for him to entertain his many friends. Plus it has four bedrooms, making it a lot easier for him to conduct his money-making room rental enterprise. Hm. Wonder if the speculator would take a trade….
😉