Why We Walked Away From Our Dream Home…A Cautionary Tale (Part 1 of 3)
It all seemed meant to be. January 2nd, 2022 I moved out of my studio, and the same day we went to look at this house on a whim. It had all of the old world charm of a house built in 1935— a big foyer, a working fireplace, lots of closets, and it was poised for a makeover. Project! It was in our favorite Kingston neighborhood and the yard was bigger than most in the area.
Moving out of the studio with my 3 month old in tow
Moving out of the studio with my 3 month old in tow
We bid above asking and they ended up accepting our offer a few weeks later after waiting for other bids to come in. We were thrilled!
Day of Inspection: I decided not to go because Isaac had his first round of shots and I wanted to let him rest. This is three months postpartum so I’m just trying to keep my head above water. Emory went alone to meet the inspector and his report to me was “everything looks good, there are no issues.” At the time, I didn’t look at the inspection report. In the back of my mind I was waiting for the other shoe to drop but that’s just my MO in general, so I ignored any little questions I had about the house.
While we waited for the closing details, we started to move forward with some renovation plans. We were going to knock down a wall in the kitchen and we even hired someone to start designing and pricing it out.
Every time we would visit the house with the builder my throat would be scratchy to the point where we would be there for maybe 15 minutes and the rest of the day I could feel a scratchiness deep in my throat. I am always the canary in the coalmine, so I am used to experiencing things others don’t. But regardless, it was concerning to say the least.
About a month later, after having some nagging thoughts about some things concerning the house I asked to look at the 114 page inspection report. When I finally looked, I saw lots of things that needed to be tended to. I am more of the details person in the relationship and Emory is the big picture person. In a lot of ways we work really well as a symbiotic team, but that means both people have to be seeing the same information. After spiraling into a research hole about asbestos, and toxins in old houses, I finally hired an environmental consultant to come in and do some testing. We had to decide which test we wanted based on what we thought was an issue based on the inspection report. The testing is very pricey.
This is all happening out of pocket of our own volition just because I research deeply and started to go down the rabbit hole of all of the potential toxins in this house. And again, this is a few months after the birth of my first baby, so mama bear mode is activated.
So we get the testing done and we find out the following:
Alarming level levels of lead in the soil
Lead paint on every surface inside and outside
Alarming levels of mold in the basement (we only tested the basement for mold there’s very likely mold all over the house)
There was asbestos completely covering every pipe in the basement
There’s asbestos in the linoleum covering the kitchen floor which would 100% be ripped up in any kind of remodel it’s very dated
There was no asbestos in the walls
The old roof was asbestos
We contacted a remediation company to get an estimate to have all of this safely taken care of. The remediation company quoted that it would cost about $80,000 to get the asbestos properly remediated where you are ensuring that none of the flyaway pieces are getting anywhere. The mold remediation was also going to be very pricey. When you remove mold you disturb the spores which then scatter through your space, so if you don’t do it correctly you end up with mold all over your home. To remediate the asbestos is even more involved. To redo the roof, you have to get a special kind of dumpster and you have to completely cover the roof with plastic and make sure that there’s no flyways when you’re doing that work. You have to contact the city and let them know, contact the neighbors and get a permit you have to pay for. Howver, the crazy part is that there’s no laws around this, so most people are just going around doing this work on their own on the cheap and then endangering themselves and people around them because it’s way more expensive to do it yourself and it all adds up at a cost to you. There’s no grants, no government support or no financial incentive to do it the right way. It is noow months after we have had our offer accepted and signed paperwork, we don’t have the $80,000 sitting around waiting just to put into the house to make it habitable and safe for us and our family. And we don’t know if there are other things that would need to be tended to once we scratch below the surface. The other thing is this will give us no extra money to even do things like strip the wallpaper, paint the floors, redo the kitchen any of the stuff that we wanted to do that was more cosmetic. Not to mention the outside landscaping situation where you’re basically removing layers of soil and replacing it with non-lead soil just so that you feel safe walking on it feel safe with your little toddler crawling and eating the soil or whatever may happen. So at this point it was devastating but we decided we couldn’t go through with it because we were already going to be paying $470,000 for this house which in the early 2022 market in this area was a seemingly good deal, but for a young family starting out, a lot of money not including all of that work. And so, we walked away.
Walking away sounds painless compared to what happened. We had to break our contract which resulted in months of back-and-forth between our lawyers and the lawyers of the people selling and it got really ugly. There was points where lawsuits were being threatened and they were trying to keep our entire deposit. They put it back on the market even when they hadn’t given us our money back or ended our contract. Their lawyer was bat shit crazy and accused me of things that flat out never happened, all while calling me “Susan Neeley” which is neither my first nor last name, and also not even they correct spelling of Neely. I feel like that gives you a sense of how out of touch this lawyer was. They accused me of speaking to people and doing things that were the opposite of what actually happened, as a way to try and rationalize keeping our money. There’s no protocol about any of this. A small clause in the contract says something about habitability and being able to get out of the contract if it’s deemed to be in uninhabitable, however who is quantifying “uninhabitable.” Nobody. So it’s just a lot of gray area. No one‘s looking out for the health and safety of homeowners. Unfortunatly, not even our realtor who has been selling houses in this area for years. She is aware of all the toxins leftover from previous eras but shrugs it off. Essentially it was an EPA cleanup project that we were going to be taking on. From a previous time when lead paint was used on everything, and asbestos was used in all these building materials.
This all took place from January to the end of May. Almost 6 months. It was disheartening and devastating. I felt so hopeless about our search to find a home as the market interest rates were going up every day. To be looking to buy in this market within a certain budget was a recipe for heartache. It felt like the places available were getting smaller and the prices getting bigger every time I would look. I was sad about still not having a yard and a garden and not having access to nature every day two years after leaving New York City and having an entire baby. I felt disconnected and hopeless about the whole situation. It was a real test of my faith, and ability to have vision beyond what I was able to see with my eyes.
The thing that I thought was interesting in this whole process was that you’re not really encouraged to scratch under the surface. At least in our case, nobody was looking out for us as a young family and first time home buyers. Obviously the homeowner didn’t want us to look too hard, and our realtor didn’t want us to do prevent the deal from going through. Everyone just wants to get the house sold. There are also no laws about having to disclose anything about the house. If you think there’s something in there you have to pay a lot of money to get that unfortunate fact corroborated, so basically people are just living surrounded by toxins all the time and there’s no regulation about any of it unless you decide to spend thousands of dollars to figure it out on your own. This reminds me of everything in the world of toxic clean up when it comes to corporate America. The buck is just passed on and on and nobody’s really taking responsibility for it. We are all saddled with some last generation’s toxicity. So with asbestos you’re basically shouldering the burden of generations who knew that asbestos was bad but continued to build with it because it’s such a miracle product. Asbestos is amazing because it’s rot and heat resistant, so it was used for insulation and anything on the outside of a house.
We learned so many things from this experience. One of the most important things we learned was that as a couple, we share the same priorities with taking our health seriously, we learned that you have to look beneath the surface and that we are willing to do so even if it is inconveneint, and unfortunately at the end of the day, you have to look out for yourself. This concludes part 1 of our housing saga. Stay tuned for part 2 where we look at a ton more disappointing houses, the market takes a turn, and we walk away from another house!
