#NerdsUnite: I met my husband on @PlentyOfFish (Infestation and Leo the Cat)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Jessica. She and I met through this loverly site, and by her reaching out to me asking if she could write for us. Really rad chickie, she provided a lot of insight into my childhood for me (something you don't get every day from someone!!) - andddddd she has quite the life story. Like did you know she moved cross country for love? ORRRR that she found out her ex cheated on her by reading it on Facebook? ANNNNDDDD she even married a guy she met off of Plenty of Fish! Yep, true story! This is life as told through her eyes, and through the keyword of the nerd. HIT IT JESSICA!!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @ItsJessWeaver
So, the house hunting thing has been interesting.
We were all set last week to start the process of buying this house we found, a house we loved. I felt like I had been kind of impulsive about it, and went by the house after work to look around—I guess to reassure myself that, yes, I had made the right decision. I noticed a few cracks in the mortar around the foundation and I got this BAD feeling. I guess it was a sinking in the pit of my stomach, saying, if I hadn’t seen this crack, what ELSE hadn’t I noticed? My intuition told me I’d better get the house inspected soon, maybe even before we did anything else. Basically, my brain just started itching, and I had to scratch that itch. I knew what I loved about the house; now it was time to find out what was wrong with it.
The inspection itself was five hours long. For a 1500 sq/foot house, that is a pretty long inspection, but Mark, the inspector, was especially thorough. We were newbies at house-owning and house-buying and house-maintaining; Mark knew that. A lot of the inspection was him pointing out little things here and there we might want to improve about the house over time. We got a ton of super great advice about insulating the crawl space, rerouting the water heater drain pipe, and maintaining the heating/cooling system. We even got to go up onto the roof, which was a special thrill for me, because I am such a klutz responsible people usually don’t allow me to do things like that without a helmet or a harness. At first, nothing major popped out. By hour 4, however, things changed. I had been taking notes on my tablet, and it was time to go up into the attic, so I set the tablet down and prepared to climb up into the open area above the ceiling and insulation.
I should point out that I had googled the shit out of home inspections. I had focused for several days on foundations, because those cracks really scared me. I read site after site and forum upon forum of people’s inspection and home-buying nightmares. The pictures were horrifying, and the stories about the efforts of homeowners to fix the lemons they hadn’t thought they were buying…they were discouraging. I was nervous all day before the inspection began, and when Mark told me that the mortar cracks appeared to be superficial, I breathed a sigh of relief. It’s ok, I thought; the foundation is fine. Nothing prepared me for what we found in the attic.
As I climbed up into the attic rafters, I looked around at a sea of insulation and a network of wires and cooling/heating ducts. The ducts each led to vents that opened up into the house, pumping, at the time, heated air into each of the rooms. The first thing I noticed was the smell. It smelled rank. And then I saw the fecal matter. Everywhere I could see, there were rodent droppings and urine trails. Every piece of insulation was covered in rat or squirrel poop, dirt, and urine. There were traps up there, rodent poison, and a few discarded pieces of wood and junk. Tim and the inspector were further in than I was, and they were commenting on the extent of the contamination. It was disgusting. Picture a giant rat cage that hasn’t been cleaned out in weeks, and then seal it—there’s your visual. Worse than that, the A/C ducts were torn open. Big holes were chewed into them, and the rodents had been treating the A/C ducting like giant hamster habitats. Mark picked one up and shook it, and we heard the sound of debris (rodent shit) bouncing off the walls of the tubing. THIS was what the air had to travel through before coming out of the vents, into the rooms below. THIS was what we had been breathing as we innocently opened doors and tested appliances.
The final straw was the wiring. Every inch of it was chewed, some parts down to exposed copper. It was cris-crossing at the bare parts and laying over pieces of wood, like so many random bunches of string. The fire hazard from that alone would have been a deal-breaker; the entire house would have to be re-wired. We left the attic; we’d seen enough. Already my dream house was starting to feel a lot like a nightmare.
A few more points of the inspection had to be covered. We looked at the bedrooms and the bathrooms, and the final parting thought came from behind the trim in the bathroom. I looked at the floor along the bathroom wall and noticed some dust that seemed to be coming from the underside of a decorative chair rail halfway up the wall. I hit it with my fist and more dust came out. I called Mark over and he stuck his screw driver up to pry the trim away from the wall. As he did so, the half-shells of little roach bodies tumbled to the floor; underneath the trim the wall was speckled with roach excrement—a lot of it. At one time, this house had been home to quite the colony of roaches. As we know from our own Jen Friel’s roach experience, a heavily roach-infested house doesn’t ever really get roach-free. I started to get this creepy feeling that the investor who re-vamped this house painted over quite a few nasty things in his quest to flip the property for a profit. All we had seen made me wonder what was hiding inside the walls, waiting for the house to come back to life with warmth, furniture and food.
Ultimately, we decided to kill the deal. We terminated the contract and ground to a halt all the work we’d put in to becoming homeowners, and we started over. It was disappointing, but there’s a bright side: we went to visit the house several times and during the inspection got to meet a very curious and friendly kitten. He seemed hungry and cold, and we wondered if he belonged to someone nearby. We almost took him home with us, since he seemed too skinny and dirty to be anyone’s pet, but because he was so friendly and social, we decided to let him back out and see if he had a home to go to. He disappeared, and we left. When we came back one last time, we found him wriggling out from the crawl space of the house, and took him inside. It was clear to us that he’d been living under there, fending for himself for no telling how long, but that at some point he had been someone’s pet, or at least had contact with people. And now he was alone, in a creepy, empty house. Tim picked him up and we could all hear this intense purring as he let Tim scratch his belly; at that point I knew we’d be taking that cat home.
We did, and when I took him to the vet she said he was malnourished and a pound underweight, but otherwise healthy. She vaccinated him and prescribed kitten food at regular intervals for weight gain. He likes sleeping on pillows and will eat pretty much anything that can fit in his mouth. We named him Leo.
(Of course, I uploaded his picture on facebook as soon as I could. Everyone loves him. He’s a star.)
#thatisall
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