Assessing

Hell, I should just hop on a plane in California, land in Philly, and drive up to Bucks County. See if the house is a good purchase, not costing too much money or needing too much work!

But my husband refused to consider flying an option, since COVID raged on. Daily reports of people our age languishing in ICUs before succumbing. He ranted about the stupidity that it would take to travel on a plane filled with coughing, sneezing, infected strangers. I couldn’t shake the image of myself, having gotten sick after—and so presumably from—a flight, my last days spent in immobile in a guard-railed bed, intubated and so unable to speak, listening to him say he told me so.

The only way to vet the house, and a few comparison properties, was from a distance. I found a recommended realtor. He gave me the names of inspectors, a general one for the structure, for the septic, for the well, for the roof. Pennsylvania wasn’t like California, where we were selling a house newly painted, and completely cleared of any problem. In Pennsylvania, the onus was not on the seller to make sure there were not issues, which turns out to mean be completely honest, but on the buyer to not be cheated.

If I were there, what difference would it make? What the hell did I know about home inspections, anyway? We needed professionals. We paid for inspectors to come inspect. They did.

Every report returned with only minor problems, easily fixable. My husband’s brother went down from New York to look at that property and a few other possibilities. He found the horse facility property unfixable in its layout and the others not worth seeing. The farmhouse had “character” but the kitchen “needed work.” I was so eager for the move that I put aside his chronic rivalry with his younger brother, my husband.

Through our agent, we negotiated back and  forth with the seller, finally arriving at a price that seemed completely reasonable to us… but then we were moving from a place where housing was unreasonable. California.