Dazzled Buyers Can Be Stunned by Problems They Missed
By Stephanie Cavanaugh
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, April 9, 2005
Ken Jarboe thought the big old black walnut tree hovering over the sweet, if barren, back yard of his newly purchased Capitol Hill home was just splendid. It would beautifully complement the Japanese garden he envisioned, complete with a few cherry trees, a dogwood and a meandering white stone path, "for a river effect," he said.
"I didn't have a clue."
Who would think to ask the sellers why the back yard was so bare? The logical assumption would be that they weren't much for gardening.
Wouldn't it?
"The problem is it's a black walnut," Jarboe said. "And black walnuts have a tendency to do two things, both having to do with tannic acids. They stain -- you know black walnut stain? And they kill everything underneath."
Including, in his case, all three cherry trees and the dogwood.
The black walnut also attracted squirrels, which would sit chittering on the fence, cracking nuts and spewing shells into the path "where they became embedded," Jarboe said. "The white gravel looked like a smoker's teeth. Instead of a nice river effect, it's the Anacostia on a bad day."
It's curious what excites people about the houses they buy, what they notice and what they choose to overlook -- or neglect to thoroughly investigate in the emotional crescendo of the moment.
Sometimes buyers don't even know the right questions to ask -- until it's too late. Elinor and Harry Sachse would confirm that. Their story dates back to 1976, but still gets them heated up.
When Harry Sachse first saw the big Cleveland Park Victorian with its wraparound porches, the Louisiana native was reminded of a riverboat. "What he forgot to take into account was that you have to take the boat out of the water every year and scrape the bottom," his wife said dryly. "Old houses are expensive."
But she was taken with it, too. There were the leaded glass windows, particularly the oval one in the stairwell, the three fireplaces, the nicely scaled rooms. On the downside was the tired kitchen with its elderly appliances and hideously patterned paper, the basement with its dirt floor, and a front yard that resembled "Tobacco Road," she said. Those they could change easily, she figured.
It didn't have central heating. That had been ripped out by the owners once removed: They were a pair of maiden sisters who, preferring to heat just the few rooms in use, installed individual electric room heaters.
"It was an unusual system, to say the least," Elinor Sachse said.
The Sachses thought they knew what they were getting into, however. They checked the electric bills and found that the current owners, an English couple with several children, were paying Pepco $99 a month on an installment plan that averaged the usage over a year's time. Steep for 1976, but doable.
Two months later a bill for $670 dollars arrived. "There's a big difference in how the English tolerate cold," she said.
What the Sachses found out, too late, was that the sellers ran those electric heaters only five or so hours a day. "The children had a rule that they were not allowed to turn on the heat until everyone was home, meaning they were anxious not to be in the house in the afternoon."
And did the wooden house have insulation? "Oh good God. There weren't even storm windows -- and not one window is square, which meant custom storms," she said. "We didn't ask the right questions. If we had known about the previous owner's pattern of living, their lifestyle, we would have known we were in for problems."
Needless to say, they lived with the kitchen a few years longer than expected and quickly installed central heating instead.
It's predictable that buyers are in for some aftershocks when they move into a new home. "People probably spend an hour and a half or less in a house. They're just looking at the bones," said Don Denton, a branch vice president of Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corp.
Even focusing on the bones can be difficult when a house has been groomed to sell. Denton recalls a couple of agents years ago who were "masters of decoration." He said, "I felt sorry for buyers who went back when the furniture was gone. It will never look as good again."
Decorating sizzle can be particularly effective in a market such as this, where "a house in the $350,000 to $700,000 range is going to get a dozen offers," said Denton, particularly if it's attractive. "Buyers will give you their firstborn for the house."
"People are so hungry to buy they can't even see the flaws," said Alice Wilson, the designer and manager of Antique and Contemporary Leasing Inc., an Alexandria-based company that provides interior design services and furniture -- staging, as it's called -- to real estate agents and for model homes.
While Wilson says she never deliberately covers up a home's less appealing features, her job is to make it as attractive as possible. "If there are four similar houses on the market for $2 million, but one is furnished beautifully and the others are filled with grad student furniture, which is the buyer going to choose?"
Staging often includes putting down lovely oriental carpets, which can hide problem floors, piling logs in a fireplace that may or may not work, and teasing the eye away from awkward features such as oddly placed beams, ugly air-conditioning vents and less-than-superb craftsmanship. It's nothing that a buyer with flair, or a good interior designer, couldn't replicate.
Still, said Wilson, she has seen buyers "cry when they walk through before settlement and the house is empty."
Denton cautioned, "You have to see beyond the furnishings. Go in with your eyes open."
Tell that to the Elys, who bought their Silver Spring house with blinders firmly in place.
"It was like a movie set," Kathy Ely said. Out the living room window was the husband, lazing in a hammock, while behind him a pack of deer twitched their noses out of the woods behind the house. "Cue the deer!" she said with a laugh.
The setting was gorgeous and the neighborhood so perfect that Ely and her husband chose to ignore an oddity that should have made their internal radars scream.
Each time they came to look at the house the children were in bed and the would-be buyers could do no more than peek in at their rooms. "They were 6, 10 and 12," Ely said. "So it was a little bizarre. . . . I couldn't believe these children were always sleeping."
Luckily, what the owners were hiding "wasn't anything egregious, simply unremovable stickers everywhere," she said. Nothing that endless scraping, door replacement and painting in the kids' rooms couldn't cure.
And didn't they know what a nuisance deer could be?
"Anecdotally, yes," she said. "But until you live through it. . . . They eat our hostas and we're not too thrilled. But I still like seeing them."
Curiously, a dollop or two of extremely bad taste can be as big a distraction to the home buyer as a boffo decorating job.
When Susan Kuhn bought her condo in Kensington, "literally, there was a moment I made the decision," she said. "I was sitting in the kitchen at the counter with the windows behind me and a beam of sunlight came across my lap. I thought, 'It would be so lovely to sit here and drink tea in the afternoon.' "
The place has a lot to love. Four floors up and above the treetops, the two-bedroom, two-bath apartment has 2,000 square feet of living space and a wraparound balcony. "It feels like a house," she said. "I look at the lawn but don't have to mow it. I can grow anything on the balcony because I have every exposure. Full sun, shade. It's lovely to be in. It's like . . . heavenly."
Fabulous, but for a few problems, nothing she couldn't overcome, she believed.
"The potential," she said, "was clearly there."
But . . .
"For some reason the guy who owned this place before did the den in shake shingles put up with tar -- and the occasional nail." Outdoors, such shingles weather to a nice light gray, she said; "indoors, they just dry out and crack."
The effect he was going for? "Ugly-male-no-taste. He loved it."
She didn't. "In order to take it down I had to get goggles because the tar would fly off, and a crowbar. And then of course, the nails." She paused. "It's really hard to get nails out of this stuff."
Then there was the bathroom. "In the 1970s, wallpapering the ceiling of the bathroom was popular," she said. "The other day I decided to take off the purple floral vinyl wallpaper that matches the lavender tiles, only to discover that the paper was hiding three square feet of severe mildew above the toilet, which matched the little spots of mildew near the bathtub where the shower from the neighbor above me occasionally drips through -- nothing against the neighbor."
Yet to come, or go, is another toast to the 1970s, dark brown cork tiles on one of the long living room walls -- also stuck on with tar. The temporary fix has been to cover the wall with fabric, but at some point the tiles must come down. And, she suspects, "even a crowbar won't help."
Kuhn said: "I still love it here. But it turned out to be a little more daunting for a first-time home buyer than expected -- and more expensive."
Sometimes surprises come well after you think you're immune.
The U.S. Marine Barracks on Eighth Street SE, as its Web site puts it, "is home to the most dramatic military celebration in the world."
Through the fall, winter and early spring the barracks, smack in the middle of a Capitol Hill residential area, is quiet. But come May, "suddenly the cannons go off," said Jarboe, whose house is a few blocks away.
Every Friday evening from late spring through Labor Day, the parades bring busloads of tourists, scant parking and plenty of John Philip Sousa from the Marine Band and the Drum and Bugle Corps.
"Unless you bought a house in the spring, you'd never know about it," Jarboe said.
On the upside: During the daily morning practice, you can weed to the rhythm of "Stars and Stripes Forever."