Life

I’ll preface all these stories by saying that I ended up rejecting the house that I had put in an offer for, and withdrawing my offer near the end of the week.

On the Sunday at the very start of this week, so Oct 27 2024, I went down to my new potential house with Mom, Dad, and Jon. Oscar, my realtor, had kindly come down too even though it was Sunday — his girlfriend and baby were down there too and they sat in Oscar’s car and waited for about 30 to 45 minutes or so while we went around the house.

Well, at least, Dad and Jon went around the house to look. Mom was still recovering from her stroke and heart surgery and could not use the stairs — she actually stumbled on the steps coming in (Jon had to catch her so she didn’t fall entirely and scrape a knee), and remained downstairs in the living room while I went around upstairs to take a quick video of the place for her. That tripping was a huge red flag and initial bad omen about the house, though it was not a direct factor for me rejecting it. It definitely came up when I brought it up to Dad when we were talking after the inspection two days later though. But for this day, the biggest red flag was Mom not being able to walk up the stairs at all.

Yet, overall from this visit, the family found that the house was actually fine, and everyone seemed to have a relatively positive outlook on it, with the exception that there were a lot of things that needed fixing. No one was outright warning me against the house yet by this point.

Dad said that if I bought the place, he would be by to cleanse any negative spiritual energy with the place if/once I bought it. I remember Ah Ma doing something similar to me a couple of times back in Singapore as well, in her Bishan place, she’d stand me just outside the house and take a wad of talismans and run it up and down the front of my body. I imagine it’d be something similar to that but on a larger scale.

Dad, who was a former realtor himself (back in Singapore for many years), did ask me to ask the realtor to tell the sellers to clear up and remove all their items though, especially in the backyard. There were two tables and four chairs and various toys (like deflated sports balls) and about 30-something flowerpots and a child swing and a pile of wooden planks and several other things back there, plus random little decorations and stickers all around the house and several paintings (as the seller was a couple and the woman in the couple was a painter) stacked up in the basement. But the realtor said no when I asked on Tuesday — the house was being sold “as is”, which I had no idea about, so no cleanup and no renovation help either.

On Tuesday, we had our home inspection. Oscar had also gotten the key to the back shed so we looked into that — it was, well, a normal shed. Brendan and Ben from “Buyer’s Choice Home Inspections” came by to inspect the house proper, then took some time to show me the photos that they had taken, explain what I was looking at, and what all the little things they had highlighted meant, and emailed me a nice, long report that same evening. They were very, very thorough. They had also got a sewer line inspector from the city to come out since I had paid extra for that service. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, this cost just shy of $900 in all — $300 for the sewer line inspection and almost $600 for the rest. I think this was worth it as it looked like they did a good job and the peace of mind is worth it, and I will do this again for any future house I look at.

They say they didn’t find anything major, though one thing they did highlight, which really, REALLY pissed me off, was that the furnace was from 2010, and not the “5-7 year old” furnace that was stated. The hot water tank was a little over 4 years old, which was on the very tail end of the “2-4 years” that the sellers had stated. The other “2-4 years old” roof they could not prove a date for, of course, and no receipts were available. This was where I started to get huge red flags about the sellers and their dishonesty and their seemingly hurried speed that they wanted to sell the house with, as they had already moved out so quickly to the point that they had left food in the fridge and they refused to come back and clean up the house like decent human beings.

Although there was nothing immediately wrong with the house, there were two separate small, but active leaks and signs of water damage in one of the upstairs bedroom ceilings, and some minor problems literally everywhere. Though I was more or less expecting the latter, and I loved that the report sorted things to hlghlight those that were more likely to become a problem and that they recommended fixing before other problems. Funnily enough, while doing the report, the inspectors themselves managed to break one of the toilet lights, which wouldn’t turn on again once they tested the other switch in the bathroom.

The furnace was not only much older than disclosed, but the thermostat was also broken (it could be turned down but not up apparently), and with winter coming up at that. Based on that furnace problem and some electrical problems on top of all the other things, I inquired with Oscar on Tuesday itself whether I could negotiate a lower price from the sellers, since these were things that we could not tell from the offer made from the walk-through. Oscar got back to me a little bit later though and said that they had also already received a backup offer for the house, so it was unlikely that it would work.

On the flip side, I had also looked into prices for chair lifts and had seen that they were basically about $3,750 CAD per strip. And since the house’s stairs did a U-turn while leading to both the upper level and the basement, that would have been another $15,000 to make the house accessible for Mom to get around. Unlike painting and such, that purchase would not have to have been “immediate”, but there was no way I was ever going to save up and afford it with all the things that the house needed doing.

Oscar also had a painter contact come in at the same time as the home inspection and appraise the place so that he could give us a quote on how much it would take to spray paint the house walls and the kitchen. The idea was that we could then put this cost onto the mortgage as well. The cost of this turned out to be just shy of $10,000 though, though $3,000 of that was for house baseboards, which I asked to be added so I could see how much it was after he said it was an option, just to see how much it was, so it would have been closer to $6,500 or so. The house itself was $3,900 to paint the entire interior of, all three storeys, whereas the kitchen cabinets that I had asked for was $2,200 to prime and paint, and then there was hefty tax on top of that. The original estimate for all that had been about $4,200 for the interiors and the kitchen together though, so that one also came out far above budget and I was not happy with that. Oscar was shocked too.

This is where I need to interject at how mildly annoyed I am with all the people — friends, realtor, painter, inspectors, and all — that tell me “Oh, you can just repair/paint/fix this yourself”. I mean yes, in an ideal situation, but that sort of thing is nothing I know how to do right now, and I can learn it but I could also make mistakes that make it even more costly to fix. It would take a lot of time to learn, and everything is broken in a different way so it’s a different skill to pick up and learn, and materials and tools cost money to buy too, and all that adds up, even if each one only costs a small amount. Or the reverse, “Yeah, you can call someone in to fix it, that’s just a couple hundred bucks”. That obviously isn’t feasible either, since that adds up even faster. It’s all very easy to say when it’s for someone else’s home, not your own.

Anyway, it’s one thing to fix up all the dozens of lingering issues the previous owner of that house left me with, but there will also be new ones that crop up, and my intuition was telling me that there were other problems hidden around the house that were not revealed by the inspection yet, because the house felt so neglected. For example, I was told that the ground needed to be sloped away from the house and to add dirt around the foundation so rain and water would flow away from it — but to me this, plus the lack of a sump pump, implied that the previous owners had done nothing about this for years and years, and who knows how much damage there might already have been. Is this actually true? I have no idea, it just felt that way to me, I don’t know what I don’t know and there was a limited amount of time in which to pass the current offer or leave it on the table.

My family had also completely changed their tune by this point and highly suggested that I didn’t get it — and as part of the reason for me staying behind instead of going to Japan and aiming to get a house was to have a place that my parents could move to in the future if they wanted to, I had this horrible bad feeling about the house and the purchase that I had been nursing through Tuesday and Wednesday. After talking to my parents, who warned me that the house had too many problems, and eyeing my finances, I decided that I would not be able to afford the house and all the repairs and risk that it needed, so in the end I heeded this call as well and told Oscar that I would be retracting the offer. The idea of buying that house at that point had taken on a significant amount of “taint” in my eyes and I was risk averse enough that I was not going to bite.

Well sort of, he tried to warn me that the house had a good inspection report, this was a price point and a location that would be very hard to find another equivalent house for, he felt that I was getting a good deal and should not let it go, that he had seen this many times before and that this was “fear”, and so on. I do think he was coming from a position where he was trying to warn me and make sure I understood what I was saying no to, and I think he was looking out for me, but it did feel like he was coming on a little strong, to the point that it took a nearly hour-long talk over the phone before he accepted me saying that I would think about it for one additional day and then reject it if I still felt the same way tomorrow. And when I told him the same thing tomorrow, he still waited about 12 hours or so before finally giving me the cancellation form to sign. It was signed by the end of the week but I haven’t received the downpayment refund yet.

I did tell my parents that I would probably look for a single-level house without an upstairs and a basement (maybe one of them but not both, and ideally neither at all), and I warned them that this might be outside the more “desirable” areas that I had been primarily looking at, and they said that that was fine. Oh well. At the end of the day it’s yet another application of The Rule of Two in my life, I guess. And now I’m armed with a better knowledge of the process and costs involved. And ultimately, I felt a palpable sense of relief once I had rejected the house, so I think this was the correct decision in the end. Although I think if my parents had been supportive of me getting the house still, I would have pushed through with it despite any misgivings. It is also possible that no matter what kind of house my first attempt to purchase one had been directed to, it would have failed just due to cold feet and needing to see the process at least once (and thus partially why The Rule of Two is a thing). I don’t know this for sure though.

A good part of this week and last week was still viewed through the lens of “this might be my last couple of weeks here” though, so it was a very almost nostalgic feeling to know that I was, for a bit there, going to soon end the apartment living phase of my life and move into a home ownership phase. I even got as far as picking up a Notice to Vacate form from the rental office, but didn’t use it in the end, of course.

I did find a little extra money this week by redeeming my PSA from my workplace benefits early — this is $1,250 a year (taxable) from Sunlife and I claimed it using my internet and phone bills from January up till October this year. It looks like the process has changed and been simplified a little since COVID — now it’s enough to fill in the claim form PDF and email that and the receipts to a provided email address instead of uploading them onto an awkward claim website (old process) or printing it out and mailing it in (even older process).

I also had a notification this week that one of my outstanding packages, the Ranger plushie from Backpack Battles that I had ordered a couple of months ago to support the developers, was being shipped by Makeship this week as well and should be here soon. I wonder if they’re going to put out any more plushies soon.

Here’s a sunset picture this week from 6:33 pm on Wednesday as the sun starts to leave the canvas of the sky earlier and earlier each day. Daylight Savings Time takes effect this weekend too, which means that sunset will start an hour earlier than it has been taking place so far, taking it to before my stream start time. Actually, don’t ask how I got this picture since I’ve been streaming from 6-9pm my time daily.

The first snowfall of the year came this year on Nov 02 2024, when Edmonton woke up to a white blanket outside the windows.

Everything’s so.. white! I always consider Oct 31 2024 as the “average” day that the first snowfall of the year comes, although this is more apocryphal than backed up by any sort of data other than a feeling from the years that we’ve spent in Edmonton since the turn of the century.