House Hunting- #2 Hunter's Lodge

House#2 at first glance is perfect. New wood floors throughout the house. 3000+ square feet, 5 rooms, 4 bathrooms, another perfect room for photography studio, private deck off the master bedroom. 5 acres and plenty of room to play. HUGE garage with workshop. But something at the back of my brain kept setting off a little alarm bell. The house felt (dont laugh) sneaky. Like it was hiding something.

After 2 trips through (and 140 some pictures-we photograph each house we look at so we can look for issues or remember details) we asked a favor of his cousin (he's a builder) to com do an informal inspection of the house. If he didnt find anything, we were going to make an offer. OUCH, did he find things.

1/2 this house doesnt even meet the building codes. The section including the garage and up is all new addition. They got the permits to build but never had it inspected again (on purpose I believe) the roof is improperly supported, an unprotected gas line, not properly insulated and protected according to fire codes just a few of the biggies. Our cousin's rough estimate if we had all the work professionally done was around $80,000.00  

We could probably get alot of this done for less cost (we know alot of people in the biz) but we just couldnt get around the "not to code" issue. Our loan appraiser would never approve the loan if the house wasnt even to code and since this owner MUST be aware by now (his house has been on the market a little over 2 yrs) we were certain that we couldnt get him to bring it up to code before buying it. Obviously (he has 2 mortgages on the house) he is out of money or he would have finished the job right. So another one we walked away from. This one hangs out in the background though...if the price comes down drastically, we may consider it again depending on the status of the code issues.