Spring Break and Property Purchasing

Yep, it’s Spring Break for the munchkins, but Critter’s got the week off so I probably won’t need to watch them. Bummer.

There is a serious lack of shooting ranges around here, I suppose because it’s so easy to go out in you back yard and plink. Most people don’t have neighbors as goofy as mine I suppose.

My landlord is really wanting to move the property. He’s offered owner financing to me for both units. He said he just doesn’t have the time to dedicate to them anymore, and that living here it wouldn’t be as much of a thing for me as it is for him. Plus he’s just bought a big patch of land somewhere else and he’s trying to start a hunting lodge, which in itself is pretty well a full-time job, what with managing the feed plots and getting trail cameras set up to find out where to put the feed plots, etc. I wish him all the luck in the world on that one, I think he’ll do well with it.

I stuck my head up in the attic of my unit, and everything looks pretty good. I was terrified there was going to be vermiculite but there wasn’t any. There aren’t any baffles to keep the blown-in insulation out of the soffit vents, but I can fix that myself in a few hours for not a lot of money. The plumbing vents are all tied together in the attic into one stack that goes through the roof. I’m not entirely certain that’s quite up to code but it’s working for now and it isn’t venting methane into the attic like I was worried it was. The vent fans, the ones that get moisture and other undesirable stuff out of the air in the shower area and toilet areas are vented with dryer hose into the attic space though. That annoys me, and confirms my suspicion that he didn’t pull any permits when he renovated the place. It’s a fairly easy fix though, and since I’ll have to get the roofs re-shingled in three to five years I can have it done then. The plywood sheeting for the roof looks good, even where it’s obvious (from the shingles and the plaster inside) that something has come through the roof in the front bedroom at some point. They must have just replaced that whole section of plywood when they repaired the hole, though if they went to that much effort for the sheeting we couldn’t see why they half-assed the stuff we could see is beyond me. So even with the lack of baffles and the dodgy vent fans there is no sign at all of mold on the sheeting, which means that the ventilation in the attic is at least adequate, but those things do need to be addressed.

There is one small concern though. Unless someone along the way has combined three lots into two and it wasn’t properly recorded at the Clerk of the Court’s office, it looks like the well house might be on the next lot over. Not that any of the lots on this side of the street (and I use that term loosely) are developed except for the two units I’m looking at buying and the house down past us that is currently vacant, but still I’d hate to be without a well five or ten years from now if it turns out someone else owns that land and decides they want to cut my water mains and re-direct the pump. I really don’t want to have to pay for a survey, but I might have to. I wonder if the required surveys were done when he bought the place? It’s only been three years, and you’d think someone as careful as he is would have verified the property lines before he re-built that pump house (it’s really nicely built and spray-foamed on the inside to boot, it never freezes). I’ll have to ask about that.

All that being said I’ll probably take him up on the offer if a) I can get a recent plot plan/survey clarifying property lines in relationship to the structures b) I can get brief access to the other duplex so I can do a quick once-over and verify they are in basically the same shape this one is in and c) he’ll roll the closing costs into the financing. My dad (who has bought and sold more houses than I can count) recommended not going more than a fifteen year mortgage. He didn’t realize when I was first talking to him about the possibility of getting them for the price I was quoted that it meant both houses and the land. He didn’t know the land went all the way to the river. It’s about five acres give or take and around three hundred feet of frontage on the river.