"I'm with your mother now in a house she is looking to buy."
"Say what?"
That's right. After ten or more years of threatening to move out or get a separate apartment, my mother has finally put a bid on a house, about five blocks from their current house. From what I can tell, she isn't leaving my dad, simply, adding to her estate. I talked to her on the phone today for another reason, and she brought it up. She was very proud of herself, in fact. she guesstimated how much money would have to go into it because it's a foreclosure, and her dad, who has flipped government repossessed houses for 30some years went along to give her an accurate quote on remodeling costs. Based on her relatively accurate guess, and confirmation from her dad (her parents also exhibited hoarding tendencies, I only found out after my grandmother passed away two years ago...as my mother inherited 20 Rubbermaid tubs of yarn alone), she submitted a bid and put money down on the house.
I needed her consolation for the situation I was facing (yes, still dealing with insurance from my car accident in July), but a HUGE red flag went up and my brain started screaming "WHY?! WHY DO YOU NEED A SECOND HOUSE?!"
I'm not sure how I feel, or how I should feel. All of this drama is getting to me, and all I can think about is her buying the house, and filling it with shit or in her mind, "fixing it up." I don't know how much my dad plans on being involved. I can't imagine he would volunteer to fix up another house. He told her he was done doing renovations after they remodeled the attached garage into a family room and built a two stall garage. That was about sixteen years ago. At the same time, I don't know how my mother plans to do any "fixing up" of her own in a second house. How can she honestly rationalize this with the current state of her properties? Besides that, how can she afford to buy another house?
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| House |
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| Basement |
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| Garage |
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| Shop |
1300+ sq. ft. ranch house = ~50% functional
1300+ sq. ft. full floorplan basement = ~3% functional
780 sq. ft. two-stall garage = ~0% functional
1800+ sq. ft. commercial building = ~10% functional
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~5200 sq. ft. estate = ~63% functional
Is she ready to light a match and walk away from her current house? If so, why invest in a fix-er-upper? Why not find a practical condo that they can retire in? I'm lost in my thoughts, and they're racing so fast that I still don't know how I should react, or if I should respond at all. There is no way she could get her current properties in sell-able condition in under a year. I do not condone this unless she has somehow, miraculously cleaned out both buildings and has decided to just move to a different house, like a normal person. The unfortunate truth remains that my parents are not normal, they haven't cleaned up, and they're not in a normal situation.
This makes me want to contact my local housing authority and start a hoarding initiative in my county, and perhaps the one my parents live in. My boyfriend's parents have a neighbor in their area that lived with her husband in a house for 30+ years. Then she started filling it with stuff, and her husband left her. It got worse, and when the house next door went on the market, she bought it and moved into it. She now has two decrepit houses full of stuff to the point that the windows are busting out under the pressure. Is this my mother's future? At the same time...I just want to live my own life, work my own job, deal with my own stress, and not tear myself apart worrying about them.
Gaahhhhh....that's unbelievable. I want to own a second place to have as a rental property, but really? A second house just for stuff? She's not threatening to give it to you, is she?
ReplyDeleteShe isn't threatening to give a house to me, although she did try to convince my boyfriend and I to move to my hometown because "the rent is so cheap!" Problem is, that's the exact opposite of where we want to live. We crave a big city, with unbelievable expensive rent and a skyline view. It would have been counter-productive to move there, and have to commute almost an hour to our jobs.
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