Usually, Kathy T is like a real estate sherpa. She walks into a situation, instantly finds her bearings, and can expertly guide you around.
But yesterday, we saw a house so ridiculous that I came into the living room to find her sitting in a dazed confusion.
They wanted one-thirty for the house, in a nice, but not too nice, neighborhood in East Nashville, kind of near the greenway. There were three big pot-holes in the driveway.
The two front rooms were so charming you about couldn’t stand it. And even the kitchen tile was dated in a way that was on the verge of coming back into style. But we started to make a list of all the things you’d have to do to make it possible to live there–make it so the kitchen cabinet doors shut, peel off every inch of wallpaper in the house in order to keep it from falling on you in the night, either carpet the floors or finish pulling off the tack strips, redo the bathroom, or at least the floor and the tub, replace the missing light fixtures and fix the remaining ones, replace all the rotting linoleum. And that’s just what you’d have to do to get in there and be able to live. It was going to need a complete kitchen overhaul very soon among other things.
Anyway, I think what stunned Kathy into shock was that the wallpaper was just curling off the walls. It would have been nothing to take it off, because it was coming off on its own.
We also looked at a house on the river, in a neighborhood near some gasoline containers, with only one way in and out of the neighborhood, near those gasoline containers, which means, I suppose, that, if there is a fire of some sort, you’re in trouble.
I’m afraid I’m about at the point where Kathy’s going to say “You will live here and you will like it” at the next remotely plausible thing we find.