Homebuying Part I: Choose your neighborhood wisely...

Disclaimer: We love our neighborhood. It is very nice and has many friendly, caring people and some young children too! It even has four cul de sacs, which are really good for kids riding their bikes, etc. But this story is about the one negative that we have encountered.

We actually bought our house just before we got married, knowing that we were going to be staying in the area for a while after we signed our job contracts. There will be another post about not buying at the top of your range, but that's another story.

The point of this blog is:

If the previous owner will still be in the neighborhood, don't buy the house! Even if they are nice! They will never truly let go of "their home," and you always wonder what they're thinking about what you've done to the house.



The Problem:

In addition, they will want to leave furniture in the house that they do not plan to take so that they won't have to deal with selling it or whatever. The previous owner of our house had been so nice, seeming to really want to help out a brand new married couple. She had asked if we would like to keep an upholstered chair, a bamboo chest, and a dinner table and matching chairs. When we said "Sure, we'd like to have them," BOOM! She dropped the hammer: "Well I think about $500 would be about right." Uh....m'scusey? So being naive and feeling unable to somehow back out of this corner, we had agreed to pay when we could, after a couple of paychecks.

Well, wedding week comes, and the cookin' of the pig for our rehearsal dinner barbecue took place at our place. The air conditioning was turned down really low to keep the cooks cool. After our wedding, Eric and I spent two nights in a bed-n-breakfast in Siler City. We came home to a broken A/C unit. Happy wedding. All of our wedding cash, gone to an A/C unit part. So I'm guessing this is where we lost sight of having to pay for the furniture. We've been financially behind ever since!

Fast-forward three years, we have a baby, one master's degree each, and more bills to pay than we know what to do with. We come home one Saturday to a note written on a grocery list pad in our mailbox...asking for the money that we "owed" after moving into "their" house. Shoot me in the face.



The Solution:

I was literally shaking after reading the note, and had no bearing in my usual environment of good communication skills. Eric wanted to just cart the furniture over to leave in their front yard. But we knew we had been in the wrong, and at least needed to do as close to the right thing as possible for my own conscience. I called my mother, who of course had exactly the words I needed to say to the previous owner to begin rectifying the situation. I called, and stated that we were so sorry that we had forgotten about this, that I wished we had put something in writing, and that this in no way should reflect on how grateful we had been at the time for their generosity (paying all closing costs!). I did mention that I thought we had said $400 at the time. "(Laugh)...We said $500, Kathleen, but $400 will be fine."

Well, that was humbling. So...luckily Eric gets paid for two weeks of marching band camp in the summer on top of our September paycheck. We truly needed to be allocating that money elsewhere, but I really wanted to be done with this. We wrote a $400 check as soon as we could and delivered it. I have since then documented all of the correspondence, and printed out a copy of the scanned in check from the bank showing it had been deposited.

I can't say that it was $400 well spent, or that I feel good about the situation at all. It's probably just my own paranoia, but I still feel like we are being watched and I hate that. Hopefully this will wear off soon and I will be able to feel good about my neighborhood again.