So it’s only been a week since I found the real estate investment of my dreams. It was in the location I wanted – The historical district. It has the brick walls, wood floors, all updated and new appliances and kitchen with a granite countertop. The numbers worked… It was a dream come true and I was ready to sign on the dotted line.
Inspection? I don’t need an inspection. I walked around and I’m a savvy home owner and I know my stuff… And walk around I did. Everything looked great!
Luckily, I was smarter and had an inspection with a home builder I knew and trusted. All of a sudden, all of the issues started coming to light. Not just little issues I overlooked. Major ones that I didn’t know to find.
The wiring out of the box looked brand new… Until you followed it all the way to a closet where it was just tied into a junction box and into the old vintage cloth wiring. The made the trouble to wire it that far, why not all the way? Either too expensive or started running into an issue they didn’t want to fund. I don’t need that to be my problem.
There was a nice porch, but the railing was done cheaply and not to code. If a renter fell through, that would have been on me.
Ceiling vents that went no where, a drier vent that was most likely a lot longer than it should have been
Back to the wiring. Since there was only two wires, all the GFI (ground fault) circuits didn’t actually do anything unless grounded to the box somehow. Oh, they looked good, but an issue. Basically the home was redone, but a lot of corners were cut – or just plain cheaply done aka hire the cheapest guy out there and demand they do a quality job.
Cheap, Quality; Pick one.
So needless to say we (and sadly I must admit) backed out of the deal. I had an inspection contingent on the agreement and have 14 days to do so and still get my money back. It’s only been 7 days. I sent the laundry list of issues we had (trust me it kept going on, you know that old saying: dying from 1000 paper cuts. This was it. All the little things just added up) and emailed it to our realtor so they could pass along the feedback.
Of course they came right back at me telling me they would fix or that I was nuts on a couple of them. Sure we might have been a little overly picky, but then again, I was going to own this problem of a building and they wanted me to pay top dollar. Hell, they wouldn’t even budge a few thousand when going to purchase it. Sure, I could have asked them to fix, but seeing all the corners cut, you think I would trust them to actually do it correctly?
So it was a hard pass.
Onward.
