vituperation

Is there anything more stressful than trying to buy a house?

Every day it seems there’s something. Tuesday, it was the door on the side of the house:

This is going to be our computer room / office

There’s nothing out there but ground, you see. Some three feet below the bottom of the doors. The sellers planned to put a deck there but hadn’t when they put the house on the market. A deck sounds like a mighty fine thing to us, and we have the exact same plans. Plus, it’ll give me a chance to hone my non-existent carpentry skills. As responsible adults of moderate intelligence, we’re competent enough not to walk out the door while there’s no deck or stairs outside.

This, however, is not a good enough answer for the mortgage company, who breathlessly informed me Tuesday that there was no way no how they’d sign off on a house with such an obvious liability.

“But we’re smart enough to not fall out the door,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. What if someone came to your house and fell?”

“Trust me. No one will come to our house and fall out the door. We don’t know anyone that stupid.”

(coming in a few weeks: the entry where Fred falls out the door)

“You need stairs there, even if they’re temporary or mobile home stairs.”

“What if we put some 2×4s up, blocking the doorway? Then people would know not to go through the door.”

“No. What if someone took the boards down? Then someone could go through the door and get injured. The first place the insurance company will look is at the mortgage company, and why they appraised a house with a big liability.”

So began a frenzied bout of worry, something I’m especially adept at, having been genetically bred for it. I come from two long lines of chronic worriers, and appear to have picked up the best of both sides. Money worries? Sure, for the longest time, until we started saving the hell out of our disposable income. Now that we’re about to tap into those savings to make two house payments (yikes!) for six months or so, buy a tractor (woohoo!), a new car, a riding lawnmower, and an almost endless list of other things, those worries are already creeping back in.

Worries about the new house? Obviously. Why, what if that big pin oak tree snaps and crushes the house before we buy it? What if it happens when we live there? What if it falls on the house next door and kills someone? Won’t a house that’s mostly wood be easy to catch on fire? What if it catches on fire in the middle of the night and we burn up? What if we’re not there and all the cats die? What if they escape and get run over?

Health worries? You bet, but not for me. Mostly, I worry about Robyn and the spud. Waking Robyn up because I sometimes can’t tell if she’s breathing when I walk through the room in the morning; her off-color liver; fear that she’ll keep losing weight like the guy in Thinner; laying in bed at night, waiting to hear the garage door go up when the spud’s out and about.

Oh yeah. I know about worrying.

Fortunately, this particular worry may have been for naught (like 99.6% of my worries are, if we’re truth-telling here). I called the sellers, and explained the situation.

“No problem,” he said. “Do you want something permanent or something temporary?”

“Definitely temporary,” I told him. “We want to put a deck there too.”

“We should have something up by tonight.”

Sure enough, we drove by the house yesterday (because we’re dorks, and do that every couple of days) and there were stairs outside the door, so that’s that. Until the appraiser comes back and says they’re not good enough.

But, like I said, every day it seems there’s something. Today, I was talking to the mortgage company again about the house.

“Now, is the address 12345 Green Goblin Way or is it 12345 Eerie Green Goblin Way?” the assistant asked. The road the new house is on changes names a few times as it wends through the Alabama countryside.

“You guys had the street as Green Goblin Way, but it’s really on the Eerie Green Goblin Way.”

Insert the sounds of her fingers clacking on a keyboard here.

“Hmmm,” she said. “This says the house is in a flood zone. Did the sellers tell you the house was in a flood zone?”

My heart sank, and the familiar butterflies woke up in my belly as I saw the house deal crumbling before my eyes. To me, “flood zone” invokes images of Katrina victims wading through murky brown water with all their belongings piled on a piece of styrofoam.

“No, they didn’t mention that,” I said.

“Let me get the appraiser to double check and I’ll call you back.”

We hung up and I Googled around until I was on the FEMA site showing the flood zones in the USA. I couldn’t find any flood zones anywhere around the new house, but we all know how adept FEMA is these days. I called Robyn and told her the news.

“I know the house hasn’t flooded,” I said. “There’s no way the home inspector would’ve missed that.”

We bemoaned our fate for a bit, then I called my insurance agent and asked her what being in a flood zone meant and if it were a deal breaker, and if we were going to get flooded out every few months.

She laughed.

“It’s not a deal breaker,” she said. “It just means you have to have flood insurance.”

“Is that expensive?”

“The most I’ve ever seen is $700 per year. Floods are pretty rare. Quit worrying.”

She doesn’t know me well, does she?

I sat around and fretted for another hour until the mortgage company called me back.

“When the appraiser ran the right address, it came back as not in a flood zone.”

Lordy. I don’t think I can take much more of this. This damn house better be worth the worry.

So far, so good. Only the appraiser can kill it now.

Robyn had unexpected surgery last Wednesday, to remove her bladder of gall. The night before, we went out and had Mexican food, something we’ve been doing FAR too much over the last several weeks. She knows when I’m worried (first it was about her liver, and now it’s about her liver and the new house) I’m much more prone to be lax in my eating habits, because I still tend to let food be my comforter.

But that’s another story for another site.

On the way home for the restaurant, we planned to stop at Publix to drop off her Percocet prescription, but something in the food disagreed with her and she asked me to take her home first. I did, and of course I spent the whole trip to Publix worrying that I’d find her dead of some exotic Mexican food disease, lying in the floor in a pool of liver juice.

Not too worried to skip stopping by the bakery for a turnover or two, but worried nonetheless. When I got home, I found her still alive and kicking.

“How do you feel?” I asked, dropping the turnovers onto the counter.

“Better. I threw up, but all it was was phlegm. It tasted like cheese.”

“So it was like…snot-zerella?”

Her reaction served to prove that my comic genius is vastly underrated in our house.