Broke Urban Lawyer Falls into the Money Pit

There's a movie called The Money Pit (full disclosure, I haven't actually seen it, though many people have told me that I should), and the basic premise is that a couple buys a house, and things constantly break to comedic effect.

It turns out I bought that house.



I bought a house in an older neighborhood, but the house was recently flipped. I paid a little more for a flipped house because I wanted a turnkey solution. I don't have the time or patience for a fixer-upper. The inspection came back clear except for a few minor details like the back fence being broken.

As I mentioned previously, the water main broke the day after move-in, and the fence was in disrepair, and I had just discovered asbestos in the sub-floor. This is the conclusion to that drama.

I made arrangements for asbestos abatement in half of the master bedroom and two of the other bedrooms. With the exception of the other half of the master bedroom and the laundry room and bedroom on the other side of the house, which were additions after asbestos was banned, the whole floor had it. The kitchen, living room, bathrooms, and hallways are all tile, so it's safer to leave the asbestos undisturbed under the tile because the tile seals it in. But the asbestos under the carpet in the bedrooms had to go.

Asbestos removal was expensive, but I didn't want to have a carcinogen lurking beneath my carpet. So I made arrangements to stay at a friend's house, boarded the cats at a local kennel, and got out of dodge. The removal took most of a day. I got back home, and my bedrooms were stripped down to concrete floors. I was scheduled to have the laminate flooring installed a week later.

This happened on a Friday. On Sunday, I took a shower in my master bathroom. When I got out of the shower, I noticed a puddle of water on the concrete in the master bedroom. I dried up the puddle and called a plumber, hoping it was a backed up drain. The plumber came out and said that it was a cracked shower pan and that they couldn't fix it and that I would need to have the shower replaced. They said that I also needed a water damage restoration company to come out and dry the place out because the walls were wet.

The water damage people came out a few hours later and set up fans and dehumidifiers and air filters. My whole room was a loud ruckus, and the equipment made the place hot, so I moved into a guest room. (Mind you, the guest rooms were also concrete floored at the moment, too.)

I got a second opinion from another plumber, and he confirmed what the first plumber said. I filed an insurance claim and got started on the bathroom process. The restoration people discovered that the flooding was so bad that it had destroyed the subfloor in the master bathroom, and that the tiles would have to come up.

Remember the asbestos above that was safely sealed under the tile and could be left alone as long as the tile was undisturbed? Yep. I had to go through asbestos remediation again. The hazmat crew sealed off my bathroom and demolished it, taking everything out and vacuuming up any trace of asbestos.

Damaged bathroom after asbestos removal

Then the rebuild of the bathroom could proceed. I had to postpone the installation of the bedroom flooring, though I was able to install floors as planned in the other bedrooms. There were delays upon delays in the rebuild of the bathroom, and the whole process took a little over seven weeks.

Rebuilt shower

In that time, I also replaced the damaged back fence. And a storm blew through town that damaged 1/4 of my roof. Thankfully no leaks, but that's an added expense.

My insurance paid for about 2/3 of the bathroom, but all the other stuff was out of my pocket. I had to take out a personal loan to cover some of it, and the rest went on my credit cards. Fortunately just before this all happened, one of my credit card companies offered me a 0% for 12 months balance transfer offer. And I was able to get 0% for 12 months financing on the flooring, too. So while I had to shell out a huge chunk of change, at least I won't be paying interest.

I'm still glad I bought a house, though. I rent out one room in my house to a roommate, and the other two spare rooms are on airbnb. Altogether, my renters pay enough to cover my mortgage. If I divide out the cost of my repairs by 12, it's roughly comparable to what I would have paid to stay in the apartment I moved out of. So I'm basically paying an amount equivalent to renting for another year, but I'm one year closer to owning my house, and my property value will go up a little from all the renovations.

The roof was delayed and will be fixed on Tuesday. So, from start to finish, this whole process took 3 months. I feel like it's my very own version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, called If You Decide You Don't Like Your Carpet. Though, to be honest, I'm glad I ripped out the carpet because I might not have discovered the shower flood until much later, and it could have done way more damage than it did.

I'm looking forward to a reprieve from any more home repairs. Also, the tile in the rest of the house needs to last forever, because I don't want to dig up any more asbestos!