The Garden Room

It took us a long time to find an ideal place to live here in Connecticut. The biggest issue was a lack of available homes for sale, and competition had both driven up prices and made it nearly impossible to be the lucky person who ended up with a new house. It was normal for twenty offers or more to be in the queue for consideration the very day any decent house was put on the market, and those offers often were in excess of twenty percent over the asking price, and the beginning asking price was already high. To be considered, the offer had to be straight up cash with waiving of inspections and acceptance of an “as is” clause. To add insult to injury, the homes for sale had not, as a rule, been well kept; all had significant delayed maintenance issues that the seller was shifting to the buyer. Take it or leave it.

The sellers seem to lose all perspective and manners in their rush to cash in on the largesse of their home’s value in a market that puts them totally in the driver’s seat. All told we tried to put offers on a half dozen places or more, none of which were in excellent condition. Even those that had been totally renovated had major problems with low-quality materials for construction and a lack of quality workmanship. I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world a young couple could manage in this market. It would be so easy to be duped if you didn’t have personal experience with home or building construction. You wouldn’t know what to look out for.

The first place upon which we placed an offer that was accepted was a little house on two acres with a barn and a little garden shed, located in a fairly remote area. The house was too small, really, but at least the first floor had been decently renovated. To win the contract bidding we had to offer an amount way over the asking price and skip inspections. We didn’t agree with the process but knew we wouldn’t even be considered otherwise. There was plenty of outdoor space for me and my outdoor inclinations, we liked the barn, my doves could live in the little garden shed, the house had just enough space to place Kev’s piano, and the kitchen needed a bit of work but was expansive and well organized. There was not space for a library and the bedrooms were all too small, but we just decided we would have to figure out what to do about that later. The owner of the place was a landscaper, so they had a lot of things to remove from the property. The closing date was thus made three months down the road.

Ten days before closing we flew out to do a final inspection with the sellers, which I insisted upon. The seller had done a lot of work on the place himself, and I wanted him to explain to me how the house functioned, especially all the mechanicals. It was during this tour that I noticed the basement floor on one side of the main room, one wall, and the foundation of the fireplace in the basement had all been reconstructed. None of this was mentioned in the disclosures he had filled out (all foundation issues are required by law to be revealed in CT). He then told me about the years of trouble they had with the basement floor being cold and “sweating” all the time, and how they discovered, when they added a small living room addition to the house, that there was a large underground stream running under the basement floor! He went on to explain how they had “fixed” the problem, though he didn’t really know whether or not the stream was still running under the basement.

I made a mental note about this and finished the tour. Afterward, Kev and I discussed the findings of the day and over the course of about twenty minutes concluded there was no way we could close on this house. That night we cancelled the purchase and explained to the seller’s agent that there had been no disclosure about the river under the house or the foundation work that had been done to mitigate it, thus voiding the contract. We expected our deposit to be returned, but no – the sellers said they would not return it without a court battle. We went back and forth for two months, and I finally countered with a threat to sue them for fraud if we couldn’t come up with a fair disposition of the deposit. This brought them back to the table. The cost of doing battle in court would have consumed way more than the deposit, so both sides gave in a little and we all walked away annoyed with the outcome. They had, of course, sold the place to someone else for the same price the day after we cancelled the contract. They were hoping to make an even bigger profit by keeping all the deposit; and never mind the fraud.

Another place, on the Farmington River, came on the market a couple of months later. It had many attributes but needed a ton of work. It was small. Cool location though, with big boulders and a steep slope going down to the river. It could work. The seller had bailed out of the first contract he got because he said the buyers were “too demanding” because they asked him to fix a bunch of things before they took possession. He had just built a four-million-dollar house down the river a ways, so he didn’t care how long it took to find a buyer that he could push around. He’d left the place a mess. We made an offer taking into account the results of the inspections which had been insisted upon by the previous buyers. It was turned down. The house stayed on the market for three more months and two other offers were turned down. We resubmitted our offer, and the owner accepted it but would not sign it because he wanted to wait just a few more days in case someone else came along with a better offer. It had now been eight months since the house had been originally listed. It was quirky in many ways, had no yard, had a steep driveway, and had only two bedrooms – thus the paucity of offers. We didn’t think anyone would swoop in with a better offer. But lo and behold, three days later a buyer came in with a slightly higher offer and the owner jumped ship and signed a contract with them. So, that was that.

At this point we decided to give up and see if we could find an apartment and just fly back and forth every six to eight weeks as needed to help with our granddaughter, the reason for which we were house hunting in the first place. The next time we went out, we searched diligently and found an apartment we thought would work well. We decided we would put our house in Iowa on the market again in the spring and sign an apartment lease in Connecticut in the summer. If we didn’t sell our house, we would stop searching and just live in both places. If we did sell our house, we would put our stuff in storage and live in the apartment until the housing market was behaving better.

All of this happened between August of one year and January of the next. In February we put our house in Iowa back on the market. There was an initial flurry of interest and one offer, but that failed. The day before we flew out for our granddaughter’s birthday, however an unexpected buyer appeared and made an immediate offer. We signed a contract to sell. The next day, in Connecticut, we had arranged to see two houses with our real estate agent. Neither one was okay, for all the same reasons as usual, plus locations on busy roads. “There’s one more that isn’t yet on the market I think you should see,” our agent told us. “I think it might be perfect for you two. The owner is away in Florida for the winter, however, and it won’t go on the market for two weeks yet. But we can go look at the property and you can look in the windows. I’ve known the owner for many years.” So, off we went, over the mountain and through the woods, and pulled up to a little ranch style house. It was perched on a near-precipice overlooking a little pond, surrounded by massive white pine trees and forest. “I already love it,” Kev said as we leapt out of the car. Our agent knew all about the property. One acre, house built in 1960, renovated in 2006. She’d been in it many times. It was locked, so we walked around and peered through the windows. I could see it needed work but saw nothing that looked serious. It was, indeed, perfect for us. A little room for the piano, an open main floor, two bedrooms, an art studio in the basement that could be a library, and a garage big enough for our little car and the motorcycle. The setting was idyllic, and it was on a long cul-de-sac, so there was no traffic.

And then, there was the garden room. “You have to see it,” our agent said, before we got back in the car. I was imagining some sort of greenhouse with lots of windows. “It has a door without a lock. It’s under the master bedroom.” Strange, I thought, to have a garden room under another room. How would it get light? We walked across the poorly maintained brick patio outside the art studio. There was a deck attached to the master bedroom there with a cement patio and porch swing underneath. A simple door stood there in a blank wall. We opened it and walked in. It was just a dungeon. Cement foundation walls on four sides with just one tiny window high up on the wall in the southeast corner. A prison cell, really. It was cluttered and dusty. Four dim bulbs with individual pull strings dotted the ceiling. We turned one on. Lots of garden tools came into focus, scattered about. A massive bureau was against the front wall. The ceiling rafters and insulation were exposed, as were all the pipes and electrical. Two supporting Lally columns were under a beam going across the middle of the room, one completely rusted. There were spider webs and tv cables snaking everywhere. “The owner’s husband watches a lot of tv,” our agent sighed. “He has at least one tv in every room in the house. Fox News, you know. He can never turn it off.”

I studied this dark, dank dungeon of a room for a few minutes. It was big. It would always stay the same temperature, I knew, being underground on three sides. It opened onto the patio which overlooked the pond and attached to all the gardens. “Perfect,” I thought. A perfect room for potting plants and overwintering dormant plants, perfect for my tools and gardening equipment, perfect for keeping all the outdoor stuff I would need to take care of a place like this in the woods. Perfect for taking off muddy boots and clothes. Perfect for hip waders and oars and for making birdhouses. And that tiny window over there – perfect as an exit into an outdoor aviary attached to a little dove cote I could build in here. It was, indeed, a perfect spot for us; a perfect house for Kev, and perfect gardens outdoors for me, with a garden room to boot. The whole place was just right for indoorsy Kevin and outdoorsy me.

We asked Carol, our agent, to contact the owner and see if we could buy it before it came on the market. We had only a couple of days, as purchasing beforehand isn’t allowed within two weeks of the planned offering date for the property. We barely had time. She took us back to our son’s house and dropped us off.

We walked into the house, thrilled to see the kids and our little granddaughter. Diana was looking unusually bright-eyed. We chatted a bit, and finally, she told me to read our one-year old granddaughter’s shirt. It said “Big sister.” I stared at it. “What,” I thought, “is going on?” There was no plan for another baby yet – the kids had to do in-vitro for that, and I knew they hadn’t started that arduous process again, not this soon after the first. “Is this a joke?” I asked. “No,” both Diana and Sam said. She held up an ultrasound image. “Is that an old ultrasound of Maeva? I asked. “No,” they both replied. “What?” I said. “How … what … is going on?” I was confused. Sam was wrought permanently sterile by chemotherapy a decade ago. Or so we all thought.

It turns out that sometimes men become fertile again a decade or so after a massive chemo regimen wipes out their fertility, and so it was with Sam. It was just an accident of fate. I cried, of course, because I cry about this sort of thing. Surprised, happy tears.

Then my phone rang. It was Carol. “The owner told me to go ahead and let you in the house to look and see if you really want it. She’d rather not go through the nightmare of listing and showing the house if you guys want it. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

Once again, over the mountain and through the woods we went, in great anticipation, in shock from the kids’ news. We went in the house. Perfect size, perfect layout. Everything was wrong with it, though. Just a mess of foolishness. Mismatched window openers, crooked corners, improperly done trim, kooky doors; tv cables everywhere, including inside a closet, mismatched light bulbs, a stove that was broken, a dishwasher that was literally disintegrating, crooked drawer handles, mismatched light switches, and just tons of delayed and ignored maintenance. The basement had old, smelly, exposed insulation in the ceiling. Upon close inspection, the place was really, really dirty. It had been totally jury rigged. Nothing was quite right. There were trees growing in the gutters! And yet, we both knew it was the right place for us. We made an offer, and the seller took it, pending inspections, which proved to confirm that there were at least a hundred things that needed attention, but nothing structural.

The sellers knew they had us over a barrel. We really wanted the place. They insisted they get five months to move, an outrageous demand. They knew such an arrangement would leave us homeless for three months. Not their problem. They had no intention of making any repairs or doing any maintenance in the interim either. More things fell into disrepair while we waited. In the two months following possession, I lost fifteen pounds from the effort of attending to all of the things wrong with the place. Kev, who can’t afford to lose any weight, still lost ten. We ran back and forth to spend time with our granddaughter and relieve some of the pressure on the kids. Diana gave birth to little Ruby. It was a whirlwind of drama.

Now, already, the place is as we imagined it – magical, like a grandpa’s house should be. Everything is perfect. It’s organized, clean, properly painted, and pristine inside and out. The piano room looks lovely. The library is a place of comfort. The kitchen is perfect. The chipmunk nest has been removed from the dryer. Everything matches; everything is as squared up as it can be. Everything that was wrong has been fixed. The trees are trimmed. The gutters are covered. The gardens are cleaned up. Trees have been planted. Wildflowers have been sown. The forest edge has been softened. The pond has been cleaned, and the brook has been turned into a series of little pools and waterfalls. Next month I’ll be making a wood duck box in the garden room to put in one of the big pines by the pond. There’s a little dinghy on the pond now, the oars are hanging in the garden room with Maeva’s little life jacket which she’ll need in the spring when we row across the pond to have a picnic on the big rock by the spillway. Yesterday, I introduced her to the new doves in the garden room. She was exactly as thrilled as I hoped she’d be.