DECEMBER 2011 Real Estate Ten Ways To know You’re Living In The Wrong House By Thomas Harding I met a friend for a drink the


other evening. Over scotch he told me he was looking for a new place to live. I asked him why, as he lived in a beautiful home with tons of space and a superb view from his back deck. He said that while he liked the house, and despite spending the past five years fixing it up just the way he wanted, there was one thing he just couldn’t stand: The basement didn’t have a walkout. He went on to explain that every time he wanted to go for a bike ride, he had to carry the darn thing up the basement stairs, through the kitchen, onto the deck with the beautiful view, and then down some more stairs to the yard. He just hated it. My friend asked me to find him a new house, one, of course, with a walkout basement. He wanted to move as soon as possible. With that in mind, I started


thinking about all sellers I have worked with over the years and the things that made them re- alize that they were living in the wrong home. Here’s a sum- mary: The kitchen doesn’t work.


This is a big bug bear for a load of people. There isn’t enough room for two people to work at the same time. The fridge is too far from the range. You have to walk through three rooms to carry the groceries from the car to the pantry. There is no pan- try. There aren’t enough outlets for all the cooking gadgets you were given for your birthday. The counter is too wide, too small, the wrong color. And so on.


The garage sucks. This also


could be . . . there is no garage, it is too small, it faces the wrong direction, it dominates the view as you pull up to the house. Vari- ations on this theme include: there are two up-and-over doors and you want one because your car is so huge it won’t fit in the regular single door; the garage is too dark; and particularly true of Shepherdstown, it is virtually impossible to get planning per- mission to build a new garage so you have to live with the shack that came with the house when you purchased it. There are not enough bath-


rooms. Many of the older hous- es in Jefferson County have only one or, if you are really lucky, one-and-a-half bathrooms. These may be located on the first floor so you have to traipse through the house in your tow- el, past Aunty Sue, or worse, cousin Jimmy visiting from Ohio, and up the stairs to your bedroom. I once bought a house that was advertised as having two-and-a-half bathrooms, and the half was a broken toilet bur- ied in an unpainted, concrete- floored closet in the basement. You may also hate the wallpaper in the WCs (actually this is not so hard to fix), the lead pipes that are furred up like a highly cholesteroled artery (harder to fix), or the 1,000-poun iron tub that is bolted to the master bed floor and looked cute when you bought the home but is totally impractical—especially for your six-foot-eight husband (almost impossible to fix without break- ing your back). The roof leaks. That’s a simple one. Fix the roof. And if


you can’t afford it, rent one of the rooms out to a nice lodger, charge them a reasonable rent, and then fix the room. The view of the Potomac


from your living room is stun- ning, but you worry that your two toddlers may explore the hundred foot cliff at the end of the garden. This is a common problem for riverfront prop- erties in the county, and the only solutions I have seen are a) move house, b) build a very solid fence, or c) permanently fasten a harness and rope to your chil- dren.


The house is so huge (eight


thousand feet with the bonus room above the garage and the fully finished basement— including the mini-gym cum media room cum supercharged man cave) that the heating bills are as big as the national debt. This is a big problem for all those who purchased McMan- sions when house prices were high and developers were hand- ing out incentives like candy to a class of kindergarteners. The neighbors are terrible.


You didn’t check to see if there was a sexual offender living next door, despite the clause in the purchase contract urg- ing you to do so. Or, you didn’t realize that the factory behind your home was going to be so noisy because you viewed the home on a national holiday. Or you just don’ t like the adjacent property owners: the party- crazed Frat House, the old witch with a penchant for poisoning little kitties, or the family with the cute but rather roguish boy that you don’t want your teen-


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age daughter hanging out with. The house has a bad feel-


ing. Call it bad ju-ju, terrible feng-shui, or the slightly bolder, “the house is inhabited by bad spirits.” This is a lose-lose prop- osition. Lose because you really can’t fix the problem, and, lose because even if you have, who can prove it? There is no . . . fill in the


blank. There is no dining room, there is no mud room, there is no office for Dad to pretend to work while watching Monday Night Football, there is no bidet (really, I have heard this), there is no butler pantry, or —some people find this a non-negotia- ble feature—there is no kitchen. Okay, you may think that all homes have kitchens, but I have sold a home without one—it wasn’t easy! Perhaps the buyers liked take-out. The grass is greener. This


can take many forms: I liked our old house. I like the home that the Smiths just purchased. I like that home in the magazine. That rock star has a nice home; why can’t ours be as nice? Little to say to this one, except . . . We all live only one life, so work out what kind of home you like, chase it down hard, get it, and then really enjoy it. I saw my friend again a few


days later and I asked him about his house-buying endeavors. He said he had spoken to his wife, and she had told him, in no un- certain terms, “over my dead body.” My friend has resolved to solve his basement problem by locking his bike in the garden shed.


Thomas Harding is Broker/ Owner


for Greg Didden Associates, a licensed realtor in W.Va., and can be reached at


Thomas@GregDidden.com.


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