Tag Archives: abandoned house

Ding, Dong, the Witch is Almost Dead

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champagne_houseI just realized that I haven’t filled you in on some exciting news. Remember my post about the vacant house next door? If not, please read parts one and two of the abandoned house saga here and here. Great. Now that you have all necessary background information, you’ll understand my excitement when I tell you that the house is finally FOR SALE!!!

I’ll back up a bit so you can fully savor this sweet victory with me. You may recall that, at the end of our last installment of the house drama, the owners’ daughter told us she was getting bids to have the house torn down in March. We were cautiously optimistic. It was no surprise, however, when March came and went and the house remained (barely) standing.

Despite being approached over the past few years by builders offering respectable sums of money, the owners’ daughter has steadfastly refused to sell the home. I can only assume she’s done this for some sneaky estate tax reasons. She actually told one of the builders that she was waiting for her father to die to sell the property. Charming woman.

The eyesore remained and we felt defeated. That was, until the day Ad Man saw a notice tacked up on the front door. It was a letter from the city informing the owners that they were overdue on taxes for a number of years. If they did not pay the taxes due, in full, by X date in August, the house would be sold at auction. This was great news!

I went back to work, reconnecting with the builders I’d approached about buying the property and others who’d expressed interest in it. I wanted to avoid having some schmuck we didn’t know buy it at auction and build a hideous McMansion on the lot. Yet, the weeks ticked by and still nothing happened. Well, nothing other than the owners’ son-in-law requesting to connect with me on LinkedIn. Huh? Um, no.

for_sale_sign_boo_radleyThen one day a couple weeks ago, I left the house to do what I like to call “Mom Circuit Training.” You’re probably familiar with it…you know, home to Target to Trader Joe’s to Whole Foods and back again. I’d arrived home and was unloading the car when something caught my eye. I wouldn’t have believed what I was seeing if our painter weren’t in the front yard to confirm that there was, indeed, a For Sale sign in the front yard of the Boo Radley house!

My first instinct was to walk up and down the block banging on pans like the neighborhood gossip town crier. Instead, I quickly sent off texts to Ad Man and a couple friends and wrote an email to the rest of the neighbors that began…”Good tidings of great joy I bring to you!” (See? All those years of Sunday School weren’t a total waste.) and closed with a proposal that we all get together the following weekend for a celebratory glass of Champagne under the gigantic tree next door.

Our excitement was tempered a bit when we found out the house was listed for $600,000. You read that right…six hundred thousand American dollars for a house-turned-wildlife-preserve that’s being held together with mold and cobwebs. Prices are skyrocketing in our neighborhood, but this was ridiculous! We were all concerned this meant the owners weren’t actually interested in selling the property. I was baffled as to how the owners’ daughter convinced a legitimate real estate agent to list the property for such an inflated price. My friend E called the listing agent to see if she was serious about the price (E honestly thought it was a mistake) and it was obvious from the agent’s response that she hadn’t actually seen the house before listing it.

Since my “Lipstick on a Pig” email to the owner’s daughter, she’s refused to communicate with me, instead sending all correspondence to Ad Man which we both find pretty damn funny. Most recently, she asked Ad Man to please, “tell your wife not to talk to any of my workers.” This was apparently in response to my chat with a couple 20 year-old guys with a moving truck she hired to take things out of the house. I said to one of them, “You know, you really shouldn’t be in there breathing that air without a mask.” He responded, “Yeah, I know. I just called my boss about it.” Unfortunately, they continued working and his partner told me that it was no big deal; he did this all the time.

I was apparently a troublemaker and completely out-of-line for being concerned about these young guys breathing black mold for hours on end in exchange for what was likely not much more than minimum wage. If you want to be horrified (and who doesn’t?), take a look at this web page for all of the potential effects of breathing in toxic black mold spores. Anyway, Ad Man responded to the owners’ daughter by saying basically…1) I don’t TELL my wife to do anything, and 2) If we’re concerned about a dangerous situation inside the house, we’re not going to keep our mouths shut.

The following weekend, a bunch of the neighbors enjoyed a lovely afternoon gathering on the lawn of the shanty next door. We drank cheap Champagne in plastic glasses while trying to identify the brown gunk oozing from the yard’s ancient, neglected tree. It was fucking poetic.

PS: Last week, the real estate agent finally came by to check out the local rattrap in person. The next day, the listing price of the house was reduced to $425,000 and designated as a teardown only. Anyone want a prime lot in Buckhead? You can build your dream house and the neighbors are awesome!

The Rathole Next Door

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swank_bhead_houseI know I’ve mentioned before that we live in an affluent neighborhood in Atlanta called Buckhead. The houses in much of the neighborhood look like this one. However, we like to say that we live on the wrong side of the tracks in Buckhead. Or, “Buckhead adjacent,” since it reminds Ad Man and me of living in Los Angeles where any structure within 10 miles of Beverly Hills is referred to as “Beverly Hills adjacent.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love our neighborhood and the homes are far from cheap. Well, I should clarify that they are not “cheap” unless you moved here from San Francisco like we did. (We spent the first few days of our house search running around all giddy yelling, “Holy crap! They’re giving houses away here!”) The difference is that the McMansions being built amidst the 1950s ranches in our neighborhood are far smaller than the legit mansions just minutes away.

When we were in the process of buying our home, there was a house next door that appeared rundown so we asked neighbors about it. We were told that the house belonged to an elderly couple who were poor health and didn’t have family living nearby. People in the neighborhood pitched in and took turns mowing the couple’s lawn. We thought, “Now, that’s the kind of neighborhood we want to live in!” But, by the time we moved in, the house next door was empty. Well, not empty, exactly. It was still full of furniture and personal belongings and curtains were hanging in the windows, but the elderly couple had moved in with their daughter a few hours away.

And, that is exactly how it has remained for the past seven years. We’ve met the couple’s daughter and her husband a couple times, and they’ve made a show of removing a stack of boxes every other year or so, but as far as actually doing something with the house, they’ve always appealed to our sympathy. They live far away, they both work and have kids, they’re dealing with her father who has dementia (the mother has since passed away), etc. They’ve alternately claimed that they were going to renovate the house and move in and, more recently, tear it down and rebuild. My requests for a timeframe always go unanswered.

front_door_trashWe and other neighbors have been more than patient. Others would have firebombed the damn place years ago. Instead, we’ve watched the house, which is on a large piece of property in a great school district, deteriorate to the point where it will no longer be salvageable, even if taken down to the studs. Imagine this…the home (which we’ve come to refer to as the Boo Radley House) has been un-air-conditioned and unheated for seven years. In Atlanta! Things are gross in the summer in Atlanta even with air-conditioning. We’ve complained to the city and it was condemned at one point a few years ago, but the homeowners just hired a yard service and had workers do some cosmetic fixes. That was apparently sufficient for the City of Atlanta.

Other than keeping the grass mowed, the house is again in a deplorable condition. Workers who were in the house years ago reported that it was infested with rats and covered in mold. And, to think, it’s right next door. Delightful, huh? It’s always a fun topic of conversation when we have guests over for the first time. Anyway, the reason I tell you all of this is because I HAVE HAD IT! I’ve decided to take on the owners of the house and the city like it’s my full-time job and I want to keep you updated on my progress (or lack thereof).

So far, I’ve done a bunch of research about the city codes and the Office of Code Enforcement records, which is the most I’ve used my law degree in the last eight years. I’ve also gathered documentation between me and other neighbors and the city, our city councilman, the code enforcement office, the homeowners and others. I’ve written a letter with the advice of a friend-of-a-friend who held a high-level position in the city and knows how best to get the attention of the people who might actually do something to help us. I’ve taken photos of the falling-down house and I’ll be walking around the neighborhood getting as many people to sign the letter with me as possible.

If all of the above efforts don’t work, I have a few other tricks up my sleeve. Stay tuned for updates. If any of my lovely readers has advice or a contact in the City of Atlanta Office of Code Enforcement, please let me know!