"I will sell this house today"
Spoiler: I did
For the past 70 days I have slept, eaten, and breathed houses. The Redfin app on my phone is largely to blame, as every 45 seconds it pushes through another blaring new listing notification: “YOU SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT FINDING A HOUSE RN :-D”
Reader, I would have bought the unappealing house that Annette Bening was peddling in 1999’s American Beauty. Sure, I would have ripped up the carpet, redone the kitchen, and tiled the pool, but other than that? Good bones! Stone fireplace!
Of course, that’s the problem with assessing real estate in Los Angeles at the present moment, with a historically low inventory since the 1990s. After being outbid six times, I finally came around to my realtor’s initial suggestion we find a place that’s listed low and needs work, that can be “easily enough” turned around. Sure, it’s a dump, but is it my affordable dump? Can coats of paint, fun wallpaper, and a great contractor make this house a HOME? (Maybe.) Do I want to cook off of a hot plate for my toddlers and wash dishes in the bathtub, scooting foam letters out of the way, for 60-90 days and nights while this gross-ass kitchen is being renovated??!?! (No.) Our house sold a week ago, to a lovely young couple from England, so there is a veritable ceiling on our timeline in this house. If These Walls Had An Expiration Date is our current real estate reality series, and we are being actively outrun by faster, richer, ruder people.
And so, we descended upon a Glendale home on a lovely, quiet street. There were 7 blurry photos in the listing and my realtor got intel the seller only wanted barely over asking price (instead of this current market where everything is under-listed by around 200k). For a one million dollar price tag, we were met with…this fluorescent-lit abomination:
The seller had lived here for 40 years and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Here is her self-titled smoking room:
And here is the actual color of the walls of her house, beneath infinite layers of toxic tar-laden fumes she had exhaled all over it for four decades:
GASPING, UNREAL LEVELS OF HORROR!!!!!!! In Amsterdam, they call the older pubs “brown cafes” because the cigarette and cigar smoke has stained the walls brown over the centuries, but that’s involving 30-60 men per night converging in there over hundreds of years. This woman did it solo. And yet…nothing about this house felt European. Odd!
Our realtor assured as that this house was far too depressing to buy, plus you can’t ever really get cigarette smell out of the walls of a house like that, no matter how many layers of paint you apply over it. Not that I could have ever, even using my best childhood imagination, considered myself living there for a single second. My friend told me on hot, windy days, the smell of cigarettes waft through her parents’ house despite no one smoking in there since the ‘80s.
In the end, we threw our shot out at one last perfect, perfect house. One whose arched windows I dreamed about for nights on end, sent pictures of to my friends. One with a pool so perfect, I woke up with my feet paddling like paws, my face turning to the side to take snoring breaths. So beautiful I can hardly even conceive of a world in which I’d be lucky enough to swim in it every day. It felt too luxe, too native-Californian, too richesse, too highfalutin!!! Who do I think I am, the QUEEN OF SHEBA?! Why does this Midwestern girl get to have a POOL? (Every house we had looked at, I had eyeballed the yard for an EVENTUAL pool construction, but…ONE ALREADY BAKED IN?! Nigh preposterous.)
Two nights ago, just after losing out on a Tudor chimera that went half a million (that’s right: five HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS) over asking, we were given a terrifying, exhilarating counter-offer on the English pool house. The house that, once we had explored every nook and cranny at the open house and Zoe had taken a s**t in the ADU bathroom (file under: things completely acceptable for kids yet absolutely psychotic for adults to do), she threw herself on the primary bedroom floor.
“I. DON’T. WANT. TO. LEAVE. DIS. HOUSE. I. WANT. TO. LIVE HERE!!!!!!!!! She was red-faced and sweaty with anger at me for not allowing her to go back up to the play-room attic to touch all the staged toys again, but I had to laugh because…well, I agreed.
We joined Rowan and Tyler outside, where Rowan was peacefully selecting a handmade cup from a neighbor’s ceramic sale. When Tyler paid the maker on Venmo, his business name came up as TLC — which are Tyler’s initials.
Two weeks later, hours after sending in our counter-offer, sweating with anticipation during another bad yet exceedingly watchable Selling Sunset episode, we got a call from our realtor. We got…the English dream house? With a POOL????!!!!! We don’t have to buy….a dump???????!!!!
45 year-old Sheila Heti writes of middle age in her new book Pure Colour as “the party is happening behind a closed door.” To drag a metaphor to the literal, I can’t believe my luck that these are the doors behind which I have the outrageous providence to transition into this blessèd next phase of life. Once our mouths stopped hanging open in shock at the news, I told Tyler that we must do a lot of good in the world to make up for the fact that we get to live in this house…this grand, old, magic, 1924 house.
We open escrow tomorrow, and while any number of things can fall through, if everything goes right, I’ll be swimming in my own pool come mid-April. And yes, you are invited to come swim. All of you.
What paying subscribers got last month:
An interview with two Los Angeles realtors, and an illuminating inquiry into the utter madness that is the current real estate market:
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Big 1924 magic castle congrats on the house!