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.

The procurement of our new residence has been much more atypical this time around when compared to our last two home purchases. I would guess some of that has to do with being older, more mature, or just more of a jack ass. In any event, we went in this relocation process with a different attitude than the last two.

Let’s recap the history of how my wife and I engage real estate. The first place we bought in 2003 involved a shrewd middle aged female realtor. My wife, who didn’t have that title during this history lesson, and I were strolling around downtown Long Beach looking for a new place to rent. She and I had worn out our welcome at the shack which a friend and I rented in Long Beach. Apparently, it was time to stop living like a college kid. While walking around the Snoop Dogg’s neighborhood, we saw this not-so-engaging sign with the realtor’s disenfranchised mug on it. We thought, “Maybe we should buy something instead of renting.”

We were no where near a financial readiness to comply with such a commitment but we did it anyway. The long and short of this story is that we had little cash, cold called the realtor, looked at four properties, and bought the last one we looked at. I borrowed money out of my 401K for the down payment and we made it work. Our first home purchase, an impulse buy. And it worked, we bought low, sold high and subsidized our next home purchase significantly.

The second purchase was significantly different. The major difference in that purchase was my wife, who was now my wife, stayed behind in Long Beach while I found a job in Seattle and relocated without her. So we shopped by correspondence. I physically looked at 1,000,000 houses. Okay, maybe not that many. But I guarantee it was quite a few more than four homes like the first purchase. This agent was recommended by family. It was a better experience and I felt a little more educated and less pressured to ‘get my shit together’ like the first deal.

We looked at new, old, sheds, tents, shanties, and lean-to’s. Everything. Ultimately, we settled on new construction that was barely even framing when we found it. We were able to customize it. This was a far cry from the mid-80’s place in Long Beach. When my wife relocated, we got into contract and this new structure became our home. Similar to the LBC, we bought low and lived there as house prices soared in Seattle and enjoyed the mammoth amount of appreciation.

Then everything changed. The economy went down like a $2 hooker. We lost a lot of equity over the last year in that house. Despite the unfortunate turn of fate, we still were forced to make future altering decisions. Son #1 was heading off to kindergarten. The school district where the house was built had been great. Then, the city of Renton annexed the area. The new district sucked balls. We had to move in a rough, yet improving, economy.

To make things more complicated, we chose to sell this home outright and wait and see if we could find our dream home. This gave us the greatest financial leverage while exposing us to the most risk of being homeless. After a period of time which tested the miniscule amount of patience I had, our home sold. Not nearly the windfall from our last home. We made a tenth of the net proceeds that we received in the Long Beach sale. Suck. Because of the lack of a contingency, we got stuck renting an apartment while we continued to look for our next home.

And then, a foreclosed property came on the market. We looked once. We looked twice. Then we low-balled an offer to the East Coast bank which owned the property. The process of dealing with a bank owned property is nothing short of annoying and slower than watching grass grow in winter. After an offer, a counter offer, a counter to the counter offer, and a counter to the counter of the counter offer, and three weeks had passed, we were in contract for our next home. Inspection, appraisal, and waiting. We were told that the bank would tell us to pound sand if we found anything wrong with the property short of the roof sliding off or the spontaneous combustion of the siding. None of that existed so we were locked in and waiting for the close of the house. And that’s where it gets more interesting.


Our closing date was the day after our annual visit to the Mecca of downhill mountain biking, Whistler. Being out of the country makes it difficult to sign your closing paperwork. To counter our absence, the title company called to set up an appointment for signing the documents before we left the country. It’s a national company with no local office, so they offered me the ‘convenience’ of having a mobile Notary bring me the paperwork. Let me just say this; the mobile Notary was the biggest joke and most unprepared professional I’ve ever encountered.

Not only was she late, she was one and a half hours late, in disarray, and brought her disrespectful 11 year old son. She shows up, marches in, doesn’t shake my hand or offer an apology, and allows her son to plop down on our couch and launch On-Demand in search for his preferred programming. What the Hell? She then has the nerve to try to convince us that her creepy son can entertain our children


More excuses. The documents at the last signing were incorrect. Her printer broke and she had to go to Kinkos. Whatever. She clearly hadn’t looked at our documents before this. She thought we were refinancing the shoebox apartment in Renton we were living in despite the fact that the paperwork lists a 30 Year fixed loan on a property in Puyallup. Awesome. Page by page, she read the title of each sheet but couldn’t provide a description. I swear she was dyslexic based on here reading. Fortunately for me, I’ve been through this several times before and knew what to look for in the paperwork.

The Notary kept saying that there were forms missing and we would have to fix it before we left for Whistler. There was nothing missing. Keep up the good work, idiot. So I informed my realtor of the experience. Conveniently, the title company neglected to let him know the time of the signing so he didn’t get to experience it first hand. From what I understand, he had a ‘professional’ discussion with the escrow agent about their choice in notaries. I received a very apologetic voice message from the title company about it.



Despite the atypical process in this purchase and our experiences along the way, our loan funded Monday and the sale recorded with Pierce County. We are now proud owners of our new home in Puyallup. It feels good to have this chapter close and the next open. Now we just need to knock out the projects around the house we want completed before we move in at the end of September.

With our keys in hand, we dropped by our new home that was minutes old in our possession. It felt great to let the boys run the gauntlet of the rooms. This is it. The future. My groms will grow up here and become adults just minutes from where I grew up. And with any luck, they’ll move out and quit mooching off their mom and dad. In all seriousness, I'll miss the Renton house. It was our first house here in Washington after we lost family and our lives were shattered. We brought our two little babies home to it. Many, many memories. But our new home will be better.