Selling the House – Chapter 1
Now that I have time to catch up on my blog, here are a few articles about the process of selling our house earlier this year.
The disclaimer form, required by law and painfully thorough, presented a long checklist of possible house defects observed within the past four years, with Yes, No, and Unknown checkboxes. And while “Unknown” was a possible answer to any question, it was not always the proper answer, either legally or morally. If the defect was known, if for example you had hired people to address the problem and then left behind a trail of signed contracts and payments by check, you ought to check Yes and explain yourself. There were only so many electricians and plumbers and pest control companies serving a town of 8,000, so you weren’t likely to hide the fact for long. Besides, the house was sixty years old, so a sheet stating no knowledge of any defects would have been highly suspicious. And we are honest people. Desperate to sell a house in a buyers market, true, but not so desperate as to prevaricate.
For example, we confessed that there had been carpenter ants. I wrote out a succinct account, a bare sentence or two, describing the removal of the rotting deck, the destruction of the nest by a professional exterminator, and the truthful, though admittedly unverifiable, fact that they had not been seen again since. I had fulfilled my legal and ethical requirements.
But that was not the complete story.
Four years earlier, soon after we moved in to the house, the foam ceiling tiles in the master bedroom began to loosen and fall off the ceiling. We removed them all and arranged for a carpenter to come and sheetrock the ceilings. He was not available for a month, so for weeks the dirty, gray attic insulation above our heads gave the room a disreputable air, but it was securely held up by clear plastic sheeting stapled to the ceiling joists which gently flapped up and down whenever a breeze whistled through the attic eaves. It was a temporary arrangement we were willing to live with.
Because we did not know about the carpenter ants. Because the previous owners did not disclose them (under pest issues on their disclaimer form, they had checked Unknown). It was late Spring and they were hatching in the rigid insulation of the outer walls. They are nocturnal, and at night they crawled into the house through convenient gaps in the plastic sheeting over our heads that we had provided. Hundreds of them.
A single ant is a symbol of insignificance, but a hundred ants exploring a house in the dead of night makes a sound to freeze your flesh and fill a lifetime of nightmares. The clicking of their mandibles as they prowled the house combined with an occasional nip on our legs or heads in bed lent a surreal horror to our now-insomnial nights. We kept all our food in tightly sealed containers and slept, huddled together, on couches in the living room, where they rarely ventured.
We could have doused the house with professionally-applied, chemical insecticide, and the ants would have been mostly gone in days, but our newborn Samuel spent much of his day indoors, and we did not like the idea of his developing brain tainted with poisonous petrochemicals. We opted instead for gel bait – a concentrated poison in gel form laced with sugar that the ants carry back to their nest. It is a safer and more effective than spraying, but it takes weeks to kill the entire nest. On the other hand, it does kill the entire nest, completely eradicating it, something the spray isn’t guaranteed to do. It had one other advantage over insecticide spray that we did not expect; carpenter ants cart off and eat their dead. As the dropped off one by one, the corpses disappeared almost as soon as they expired, leaving no mess for us to clean up. By the end of two weeks, the house was eerily, morbidly silent at night, and we moved back into our bedrooms, fatigue having overcome trepidation and loathing.
Four years later, when it came time to sell the house, there was not enough space on the disclaimer form to elaborate these supererogatory details.
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