This Odd House

The plat drawing for This Odd House. This is one of the items obtained during the title search.

I “closed” on this house two days ago and am now the proud owner of real property.  After stroking my signature or initials in fourty-seven places in two dozen documents, a deed of ownership with my name on it is somewhere in the system, on its way to being officially recorded.

It is a strange experience, the process of transferring ownership of property from one person to another.  It is also a complicated process.  I have been through closings several times before; each has left me with disquieting emotions.  Most people will be a party to a house purchase only a few times in their life.  And because the amounts of money involved are so large– probably the largest we’ll ever personally deal with– you would expect that considerable attention is spent in understanding what the 47 signatures obligate us to.

And so it has always puzzled me why the process does not allow for me to review the papers before being asked to sign them.  Especially when the signature line has the preamble “I have read and understood the contents in this document”.

I would like to take the time to actually read the pages I am declaring I have read and agreed to. Instead, I am told these are standard forms and I should just sign them.  There is a closing scheduled for this room immediately after this one.  There isn’t time at a closing for me to read them.  I am not a lawyer, but I would think this process might not hold up if contested in court.  I don’t dispute the forms are standard, I appreciate the regulations that made them so.  I just want to be honest when I sign them.

A property transaction involves so many parties and so many complex documents, interactions and interests, that a specialized industry has been spawned to service the need to coordinate everything: the title company.  At a typical closing one finds the buyers and sellers, their real estate agents, representatives from their banks, possibly attorneys and builders.  Not represented, but playing a large role in the transaction are government entities:  cities, counties, states, and many departments of the federal government.  There is money to be transferred to or from or between all of these parties.  The title company becomes a clearinghouse for doing so and coordinates the paperwork and documentation to make a “clean title transfer” to the buyer.

I infer from that property ownership is hard to prove and easy to fake. So there is a service the title company provides:  they search the public records to ensure that the seller really owns the property and has the right to sell it.  The search involves the property register, taxes due, liens against the property, code violations, and other things that encumber a property.  If it passes all the inspections and requirements, it may be sold and the title transferred.

The fees involved for the title search are paid for by me, the buyer.  So I find it a bit annoying when I am offered “title insurance” to protect me from defects in the title.  It strikes me as buying insurance from a company to protect me from that same company screwing up, and not doing what I paid them to do.  Does this seem like a conflict of interest?

I was not offered a description of the title insurance policy so I could consider what it protected and what its value was.  Further, when I asked if I could purchase it the next day, the answer was “no”, it must be done right then, at closing.  I had not been informed what the title search had discovered, even though it had been completed weeks earlier.  I learned two days prior to closing (by my own phone calls to get public information) that seven years of back taxes were due. The entire closing process was very opaque.  It did not need to be, and I could have been reassured that the tax issue would be resolved and that the deal would succeed.

The bank buys title insurance, as a matter of policy, so that they can sell the mortgage to other banks.  I pay for it though, and the total premium for my house was $900, of which $700 went to the title company agent as his commission!  Does this seem like a good product?  And why isn’t there something better to deliver $200 of risk premium?

Title companies compete.  But I don’t see the magic of the free market working here.

A simplified rendering of my rooftop with solar collectors. Don’t worry, the real building does have windows and doors.

In a way, all those homes with conventional pitched roofs are missing out on certain house function opportunities.  Consider what many commercial buildings put on the roof:  heating, air conditioning, ventilation, skylights, and nowadays, solar panels and sometimes even live roofs.  All out of sight, quietly performing their respective duties.

Now that I have such a resource, I intend to place solar panels and beehives up there.  And instead of having  a ground level AC compressor, I can put it on the roof and avoid the  noise and heat from such a unit on the ground.  The backyard deck will be safe from its intrusion.

Innovative Power Systems (IPS) is the dominant alternative energy resource in our area.  There are many other solar energy companies now, but IPS has been around since before renewable energy became popular, and has established a solid reputation.  I’ve been following their projects for years and engaged them at the Living Green Expo in May.  They followed up on my inquiry and interest and I now have a proposal for installing an array of photovoltaic collectors on my flat roof.

It calls for 13 panels, each about 200W of peak power for a total of 2.5kW.  It looks like it takes 2/3 of the roof space, stopping short of that miserable chimney structure.  The estimate is that it will generate about 3 megawatt-hours of electricity in a year.

This sounds good, but still, I wonder.  I suspect that I have a large appetite for electrical energy.  I don’t have the calculations at hand, but I seem to recall that in my (large) Minnetonka home, I went through 13 MW-hours in a year.  I am surely more conserving today, but what about that electric vehicle in my future?

And why not generate more than I actually use?  The surplus is delivered to the grid and, with other solar installations, reduces the power drawn from conventional coal plants, and avoids the need to build new ones or add capacity.  I don’t know how the utilities feel about this; I suspect they would rather keep scaling their business and selling to the old model, but in progressive states like Minnesota, forward thinking lawmakers have required that utilities provide a minimum fraction of their power from renewable sources.  I’m not going to feel sorry for the utilities, I’m glad we have a path outlined to what will eventually become the norm.  Central power generation may never go away completely, but in these times of peak oil, a managed strategy for renewables to replace fossil fuels seems like a really good idea.

I knew it was likely, but the first roofing contractor confirmed it.

“The roof is shot and needs to be completely replaced.”  His matter of fact tone and manner, derived from years of roof installations and repairs, presented his diagnosis without ambiguity, and left no hope for a lesser remedy.

“And your chimney is crumbling too.  It’s only the membrane holding it together.  You’re gonna need that fixed, but we don’t do that type of work.”  He delivered it in a kind way, trying to avoid insult after injury.

I was prepared for this, and in fact had negotiated down the price of the house to account for it.  I had also realized that a good roof was a pre-requisite to my plans for installing solar collectors.  One does not want to de-install a solar array in order to replace a roof shortly after.  Do it before.  So the roof (and chimney) goes to the top of the list.

Common knowledge is that flat roofs will always leak, but the research I’ve done is not as clear.  All roofs will eventually leak.  And nearly all commercial buildings have flat roofs.  They can’t be all bad.

There are numerous options for flat roofs.  And there are design issues for insulation, energy efficiency, sustainable materials, and so on.  There are currently debates over the choice of “cool roof” versus “green roof” (also called “live roofs”), and the merits of white vinyl versus black rubber membranes regarding their ecological and health impacts.

The green materials issue compares vinyl, containing PVCs, with synthetic rubber, Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer, EPDM.  These both sound pretty unnatural and ungreen to me, but EPDM turns out to be stable and safe stuff compared to the health impacts from PVC.

The energy issues can be explored with an online calculator from the Department of Energy.  With the help of some additional references, I determined that for our location on the planet, there is not much difference in total energy use.  There are 8000 heating-degree-days in a year here, but only 630 cooling-degree-days.  The black roof gain in the winter matches the white roof benefit in the summer; it is essentially a wash.

Having decided on the technology, how to select an installer?  I found three high-rated roofers from Angie’s List, and invited them to give me estimates.  The first arrived in the morning, unloaded his ladder, and within a few minutes was back with the verdict presented above.

The second showed up, but his ladder was not tall enough (and there is no internal access to the roof, something I intend to change).  He said he would return later with his flat roof installer (I thought he was the roofer) to get a proper estimate.  I haven’t heard back, which is probably ok, since not having a tall enough ladder seems like a red flag for selecting roofers.

The third claims to have visited the house in my subsequent phone calls with him, but has not provided an estimate.  Maybe I dropped the ball somewhere, but I’m tending toward that first straight-talking roofer who followed up with an estimate in line with my expectation– just under $10k.

Now I can move on to figure out what to do about that chimney…

In this backyard jungle, there is a “water feature” (stagnant pond) to the left of the arbor, an obvious target to replace with a rain garden.

Rain garden is a new term for me.  My friend Rich introduced it to me a few years ago when he built one, but I promptly forgot what its purpose was.

I shouldn’t have.  This has become an important part of water management both in cities, where storm drains and sewers are at risk of crossing paths, and in suburbs, where paved mall parking lots and McMansion rooftops shed water onto a diminishing recipient green field.

And I have immediate family members with civil engineering degrees, one of whom wrote his master’s thesis on water percolation rates into soil.  How could I be so oblivious?

Well, This Odd House seems like a natural for making a rain garden.  The flat roof drains to a single downspout.  There is a former “water feature” in the back yard that through negligence, has turned into a mosquito incubation system.  My plan then is to convert the mosquito pond into a native planting that can take the occasional large influx of water from the roof.

It may not be this year (though the mosquito pond has to go).  And it is not really that complicated.  There are many resources on this.

And Rich promises to share some plants from his over-thriving rain garden.

My son reviewed the photos of This Odd House and declared it awesome.  What needs to be changed?  It is already distinctive.  How can it be made any more so?

After explaining my plans to replace the kitchen counters with material made from recycled glass, or cork, or walnut shells, he asked how this calculation worked.  What would I do with the old counters?  I’d recycle them, of course.  Well, why would you not recycle them by using them in their current form?

I had no answer.

The logic was obvious.  If my goal was to have a small energy and resource and cost impact, to meet sustainability and steady state economy goals, I could not in clear conscience take these perfectly functional surfaces out of service.

His solution was to double down on the chessboard theme and make chess piece objects such as cookie jars and containers to hold my kitchen utensils.   “The spatula is in the Rook at H1.”

Ah, but my goal is more complex than simply saving the Earth.  I want to make the space my space.  There will be resources and expense involved in this conversion.  The Earth will have to suffer somewhat as I make my artistic expression.  Can I do so in a minimal impact way?

With all the potential, all the visions and opportunities, and all the defects, what should I tackle first?

It seems that priority should be given to any safety or structural issues.  I will need to get that beam in the basement checked out.  And the roof, well, I know it will need replacing sometime.  Should I do it now, before installing a solar array?  It would be really annoying to have to dismantle it for a roof repair if subsequent leaks occurred.

And about those upper floor windows that are painted shut.  They really should be replaced.  And then there is the checkerboard kitchen to unremodel.  Can that be dealt with before moving in and needing it?  Oh wait, I have a backup kitchen.  I can do it later.

Still, there are things that should be done sooner and others later.  I will need to put some thought into what to take on first.  Any suggestions?

One of the realtors I have worked with assured me that every buyer has it: remorse.

Mine continues as a mild chronic condition.  I have long been torn between two desires.  On the one hand, I have been wanting to become free of house maintenance and the innumerable obligations of being a homeowner.  I was looking forward to finding a townhouse or condominium and simply paying the association fee so that someone else would be doing the maintenance chores.  I would be free to pursue my other interests.

On the other hand, one of my interests is in the design of the environment around me.  I have entertained notions of building or remodeling a house to fit my style.  The technical challenge to do it in a sustainable, green-living, energy efficient manner was an additional attraction.  Two of my friends have recently taken on new home construction projects.  My envy and pleasure in seeing their creative processes tilted the balance toward taking on this odd house.

That, plus the limitations of townhouse space.  I am not a dedicated woodworker in need of a full blown woodshop, but I do take on projects that sometimes utilize similar tools and working space.  No townhomes or condominiums could offer this; I needed to customize some space in a single-family house or garage.

And be in the city.  And be close to where I work.  And be close to the light-rail.  And not suffer airport noise.  And be in a residential neighborhood.  And…  All these constraints were met in this quirky house.  Which is a powerful antidote to buyer’s remorse.

And for the cost of the monthly association fee, I could hire my own maintenance workers!

“Consideration” is a legal term that refers to something valuable that is offered in exchange for something else, a property perhaps.

A purchase offer for a house often includes a contingency on a house inspection.  The buyer may rescind the offer if the inspection uncovers defects.  Or ask to modify the purchase agreement.  The inspection for this house was quite comprehensive.  Fifty pages of evaluation and photographic documentation revealed many defects– defects that were unmentioned in the city inspector’s truth-in-housing report.

Fortunately, most of the problems are rather minor, like a backlog of incomplete home maintenance projects.  Ungrounded ground-fault outlets, leaking faucets, defective bathroom fans,  I’m quite familiar with them.  A few others concerned me.  The age and condition of the flat roof was uncertain, and a support beam was starting to show structural weakness.

In light of this information, I asked for a price decrease and a roof certification.  I did not get the roof certification, but I got an even larger price decrease, “reconsideration”, if that is a legal term.

I have a feeling a new roof is in my near future.

A person’s home is a statement of who he is, how the world finds him in his native state, and how he chooses to live in the space he has selected.  The excitement of finding a house that meets some deep but un-specifiable requirement induced me to act.  I had surveyed the market and neighborhood for a long time, I was familiar with the offerings.  Was this the indescribable target?

I made an offer, a lowball one, thinking that no one else would be interested in this odd property.  I was informed that mine was not the only offer on the table, would I like to reconsider?  Having now concluded this was the rare site I was seeking, I now needed to claim it.  I boosted the offer to beyond the asking price.

It was accepted.