The Big Move (B.M.)

My husband and I lived in the same townhouse for over a decade.  The place suited us beautifully for about seven of those years and was too small for the last three, but we loved it.  Last fall we moved into a new home, and though we are perpetually nesting (think Hobbits, but less hairy), we have settled in.

There should be a word gentler than schadenfreude for the emotion that overcomes me when I receive automated email real estate searches.  (I once tried to disable the search, but now I sort of enjoy the emails.  Similar, I imagine, to a woman who has just married a wonderful guy but still enjoys seeing the sad listings the dating service sends her.)  Each time I receive an email with an automated real estate search I have a mini-flashback to our recent three years of house hunting.  This is a re-post of what I wrote almost a year ago, when I was still flushed from the absurdity of it all.

I’ve been going through what I’ll call the B.M. It stands for “big move,” but it might as well stand for bowel movement. (If one more acquaintance laughingly tells me that “life is what happens when you are making other plans,” I might cry, or turn psychotic.) About a year ago, my family found a new home after a several-yearlong search. We had lived in our home at the time for a decade. It was the place where my husband and I lived when my father died, when our two children were born. My brother lived with us for a time, in the distant past, when a three-bedroom home was too enormous for my husband and me. It was the home where we were when we both made big career changes and major decisions. We’d once thought of Los Angeles, in general, as the city where we developed into actual, responsible adults. But it was our first house, in particular, where the change had truly occurred.

In early 2010, our family had outgrown our house by several iterations. We had every imaginable built-in added – bookshelves, closet organization, a window seat. We had lovingly remade a part of each room, one project per year for several years, as our finances allowed. Every room was a multipurpose room. And we had become a multigenerational household with a full-time grandparent, two young children, two dogs, and where both parents needed an office. We didn’t want to sweat the move to a bigger home. We like to believe that we’re mellow people, and the original plan was just to chill out until the right house met us on the right Sunday at the right West Los Angeles open house.

But by the spring of 2010, my husband and I had gone around the hamster wheel of real estate insanity several times over. We had just been screwed out of a house that we really wanted — a house that was still too small, too expensive, and with a minuscule “view” guaranteed to be obliterated when the dilapidated cracker box across the street was razed. And, like our well-meaning friends assured us, not buying the house was for the best in the long run. Even as we practically dry-humped the seller’s agent in our joy at believing we’d been blessed with a house, a part of me could see this house in a make-believe science fiction movie about humans as hive-dwelling clones. Still, it stung to be shot down by a dishonest realtor (complete with slick gray combover and Mercedes coup), even if his sliminess ultimately saved us from a life of Stepford-dom.

We finally settled on a house in the spring of last year. Negotiations and financial wrangling ensued throughout the summer (think colonoscopy-grade invasiveness, by people not skilled in the art of colon exploration). Finally, in the middle of autumn, we moved in.

Here is a (non-comprehensive) list of things I won’t miss about our real estate search:

1. Euphemistic real estate-speak (e.g., “has potential” = is currently a sh*thole, but with a lotta love and the GDP of a small country, it could be okay; “has city views” = is hanging off a cliff, right at the smog level)

2. The weird competitive nature of fellow buyers – sizing one another up, creepy sidelong glances and instant antipathy, particularly if you like the house.

3. Hating everything about a house except for its funky green, vintage toilet.

4. Being shown homes with lavender bidets and being expected to keep a straight face.

5. Huge hot tubs built into itty bitty decks, thereby insuring that you either must have a hot tub or spend thousands removing it.

6. Physical accosting by agents at open houses, eager to be YOUR agent.

7. Magical thinking on pricing.

8. Receiving counter offers that are <0.05% less than original price.

9. F&cking moronic advice from your ex-agents to list your current house for sale before you find a new place. Because being homeless is “fun” for the whole family.

10. Jame Gumb-like basements – “it rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it’s told…”

11. “Front yards” that are dense seas of ivy masking dog feces and litter.

12. Being told that having a cliff as the border to your backyard is no problem, you just train your toddler not to fall off it. Besides, having a boy, you “should get used to spending a lot of time in the emergency room.” (see ex-agents from #9)

13. Pools that look like oversized urinals.

14. Gorgeous, tiled San Simeon-style pools that take up 80% of the yard on homes that, in terms of both size and quality, resemble my grandfather’s outhouse.

15. Giant, caged trampolines that fill the whole, depressing yard.

16. Houses that are surrounded on all sides by steep hills, inducing instant claustrophobia. To quote the Jimi Hendrix song, “feel like I’m living at the bottom of a grave.”

17. Houses that are so high up the canyon, I feel like I need a diving bell in my car.

18. Stacks of adult magazines and/or framed posters of bare, Brazilian-waxed women in the bedroom.

19. Bad karma houses: post suicide, illness, divorce, and death. You know this because the agent is whispering it in your ear, or the bedpans (that no one bothered to remove) give it away.

20. Houses that are staged with glasses of wine, highly mannered furniture, and Miami Vice-style art. Subtext: your life would be a 24-hour, glamorous, coke-filled party if you lived HERE!

21. Disliking a house, yet putting in an offer because you think you have a chance of getting this one. Like an absurd form of dating.

22. Being filled with dread and ennui on Sundays and Tuesdays.

23. Properties so remote and covered with flammable brush that you can practically hear the rattlesnakes, where you are strongly urged not to let your pets outside because of the coyotes and owls. And yet within the city limits, with big city prices and taxes.

24. Being asked to review and sign hundreds of pages of single-spaced, complex legal documents in under an hour.

25. Houses that smell like one great big cat litter box, mixed with mold.