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I forgot - Story 3
This is somewhat unfortunate, because I think the buyers did the right thing, so not really funny, but relates to house purchasing.
Another home on our street just sold a few months ago...well, perhaps as long as a year ago. It too was on the water.
It was purchased by a younger couple (I say this because they are around my age, and the older I get, the more willing I am to consider early 40's to be young...and that goalpost will change further the older I get - just full disclosure there).
Anyways, they did their due diligence as far as I can tell, this was to be their cottage so they aren't going to live here year round, but the home inspection revealed that there was a small crack in the retaining wall that was between the pool and the boathouse.
So, they got an engineering firm in to look at it and they estimated it would cost about $50,000 to fix. The buyers then went to the sellers and as part of the sale price, negotiated a further $50,000 off to remediate the problem which the sellers were fine with and so everyone signed the purchase agreement and the home gets sold.
No more than a year later, the sellers are firmly out of the picture and the crack has widened a bit and so the young couple gets the engineering firm out to do the fix. No surprises here I'm sure, but of course the engineering firm goes "Oh no, this is much worse than before, it will cost a lot more to fix this properly".
So the firm comes back and says they have two options - they can either pour another wall by the existing one, but they can't guarantee that it will hold or that it will last for any length of time - be a bandaid fix at best and will likely cost $100K ish. But basically, no guarantees and might have to excavate the old and new wall if it doesn't work.
To do it properly though, they would redo the retaining wall (which apparently means they would have to tear down the boathouse and rebuild it because that is in the way of the retaining wall) the cost was going to be $1,000,000!
We heard the story from them and were just shocked - I mean, going from $50K to $1M in a year is kind of absurd, especially since they did most things right. Though I think fixing that crack as soon as they took the keys would have been my number one priority in hindsight...I can see why they didn't, because $50K probably didn't make it seem like any major issue.
Anyways, I don't know what they are going to do, be interesting to see. Wouldn't be surprised if they move, but at the same time I think they like it on the street so they might pay to stay.
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