Moving has its perks and has its drawbacks. One of the perks is having a fresh start and forming new memories. One of the drawbacks is moving to a place which was a foreclosure and inheriting the skeletons in the closet from the previously booted owner. The great thing about foreclosures is that you can literally steal a deal from the asset manager from the bank trying to unload the property. But like I said above, there’s the unknown of what you might find in the closet. A new discovery has prompted today’s entry.

Our new home has been a great change of pace. While it was built in 2004 like our last home in Renton, we aren’t the first to live here. From what I can gather on the overall knowledge of the sale/purchase of this house, it has only been owned by one other family. And, it looks as if the home was purchased on the upswing of the market a few years back. I can only estimate that the value of the home at that time sky rocketed upward. Purchased on the way up, there was no where left to go but down in during the recession.

We experienced this with our previous home. But the difference there was that our home was reasonable in price, and while its value took off only to drop like a set of concrete shoes, we never lost enough value to negate our investment. We were always on the positive side of equity. I can only estimate that the case was the opposite for the last owner here. The value dropped, placing the previous homeowner in jeopardy with negative equity and also not being able to make their mortgage payment.

Research revealed that the previous owner was in the financial services industry as a consultant. I don’t know about you but I doubt I’d take any financial advice from a financial consultant who has lost their home to a foreclosure.

Their loss is our gain. But what we learned through the purchase of this house has been very valuable and not without a set of surprises. When we walked through the house, we really liked the layout. It was similar to what we had in Renton, just a lot bigger and in a better school district. Because the previous homeowner lost the house, it was obvious that they had let maintenance and care for it go. The home needed some serious TLC. However, it had huge upside.

But for all of that good stuff, there was some bad stuff.



The carpet was worn and dirty; walls were painted hideous colors from dissimilar palettes; window treatments were missing, the air conditioning unit was hacked out; the water heater had a blown thermal expansion valve; the furnace had not been serviced since it was installed; the central vacuum system was gone; there were large gaping holes in the drywall; the toilets were filthy and barely attached to the floor; there were bird nests in the external ducts; there was a dead rat in the crawl space vent; the house needed pressure washing; the gutters had small trees growing out of them; mice droppings under the carpet; vehicle tracks in the back yard; and water significant damage to the hardwoods because of a leaking water supply valve for the refrigerator.

We marched through this semi-complete list of shit above to get the house to our requirements for livability.

We are now reaching a plateau of activity with the final few things like window treatments. This week, we’ve been selecting and purchasing the window treatments we want for selected rooms in the house. Coincidently, we received a piece of mail with no return address. My wife and I opened it to find a small note hand written on yellow ruled paper addressed to us as ‘Homeowner.’


As I’m sure you’ve guessed, it was the previous homeowner sending us the note. It goes on to explain that they conveniently ‘took’ the custom window treatments and blinds from the house with the intent on using them again. ‘Custom’ and ‘using them again’ are mutually exclusive in this instance. The previous owner goes on saying that the window treatments are Hunter Douglas and were purchased at Costco for $4,800. Our previous home was brand new when we bought it and required window treatments. My receipts indicate that we spent approximately $1,700 then. Nothing close to the figure listed above. They then go on to say that they were going to sell them on Craigslist. But out of courtesy, they thought they would offer them to us for $1,500. What the hell?

You don’t pay your mortgage, you lose the house, you steal the blinds, vacuum system, and air conditioning, and then you try to sell the blinds back to me? Moreover, the note has no name, no return address, just a seven-digit phone number with no area code. Call us if you want the blinds. Bull shit. I’ll make you a deal, bring back what you legally lost due to your inability to plan and act responsibly and I won’t beat you senseless.

In any event, the previous owner won’t be getting my hard-earned duckets. I’m a firm believer in people get what they deserve. One more skeleton in the closet; the previous owner’s liberation of the window treatments. We don’t care; we’re doing our own thing anyway. Based on the interior color choices from this previous owner, I can only surmise that the window treatments might be pretty-princess-pink and/or blind-butthead-brown.