"Hmmmm.... darts...."

[captainsblog]

It’s funny, the memories of thing that stick with you. Sometimes memories of nasty pointy things:



Our refinance has been trucking along this week. We spent a good part of Tuesday running the numbers, and making our regular bill payments necessary to keep things current and even reduce some of the closing payoffs a little so we will have more cash out- but in the middle of it we got a call from the appraiser. He wanted to come by the house on Wednesday, aka V(accination)-Day for me.

In terms of scheduling, it wasn’t a problem, because Eleanor was off all day, but it was still weird in a sense, because I don’t think an appraiser had been inside our house since an FHA refinance we did way way back in the oughts. The others we did after that were either strictly online appraisals, or, with the last one, the guy just did a drive-by. Eleanor wanted to know if there was going to be a laundry list of things we’d have to paint, fix, or otherwise clean up to get the loan approved, since that is what FHA appraisers make you do.

Me? I was thinking about the darts.

——

I have never been much for having people check my work, especially when it comes to things like taste, style and cleanliness. My first real experience with this was after our sophomore year of college, the first one we had an actual apartment for, where we put down a security deposit and had to get the place back in shape before we moved out before the start of our junior year.

Officially, I lived with two guys, but by the end of that year, one of them was essentially living with his girlfriend elsewhere, and my other roommate’s girlfriend was essentially living with us. The latter obviously helped in terms of things like taste, style and cleanliness. I was the only one that stayed that summer, the other rooms being rented out to an English and an Asian graduate student, but their money wasn’t on the line. We got to the second week of August, the summer guys moved out, and I essentially was put in charge of ensuring that we got our deposit back. The two of us, plus the third guy, a.k.a. “The Missing Link," already put our deposit down for the new place months before, so this was essentially the money we needed to live on for the start of our junior year.

As college kids generally go, we weren't the worst. No tiny livestock, no pyramids of beer cans, and we were relatively serious students and/or working jobs so we weren't around that much to trash the place. Still, the fridge had some science projects going in the back, Jim's bar of Irish Spring soap was mighty strong (but Jean used it, too;) and it had peeled the paint off a shelf in the bathroom, and then there was the closet door.  The one with the dartboard on it.

Let's just say our aim wasn't that great.  A minor galaxy of pockmarks surrounded the circle on the door where the board was, and even extended a bit onto the surrounding walls.  We removed the board from sight and did the best we could do with Spackle to cover up our barroom blitzing, but then, just before key turn-in, came the white glove inspection by Fuck You Don.

----

Don P was the nonresident super, living either at a real Ithaca home or in one of Norm's nicer-than-ours apartment complexes. We got along fine with him; the epithet came from the back of a lowboy dresser for one of the furnished bedrooms, which some prior tenant had spray painted, three drawers high, with those words. Probably Don had gotten into it with a tenant over some indiscretion like not changing the lint filter of the single dryer in the Building One basement; we always did, but one day there was a sign on the dryer door saying IF YOU DON'T CHANGE THE FILTER I WILL DUMP IT ON YOUR FRONT DOOR. (To this day, I always empty the lint filter after each use, even more reliably than Eleanor does, and that threat from F-U Don is top of mind even though he's probably long deceased.)

Don knew we were semi-harboring a stray cat; he didn't care. He knew it wasn't our fault when the ceiling caved in over our first floor kitchen that was clearly caused by the leak in the second floor kitchen above it. So I wasn't expecting TOO hard a time from him when he came round.  I'd done my best, cleaning corners of bathroom and closets that likely had last been touched in the Kennedy Administration, if then. The knock came, Don walked in, first checked the clean(ish) stove and empty refrigerator to the left, eyeballed that all the Danish modern furniture was still in the living room, and just as he started to walk down to the three bedrooms came the official pronouncement:

Hmmmm.... darts.

Guilty as charged. I hung my head in shame. Is there anything else we can do, Don?, I asked. Not now, he replied.

Days went by, and after we were in the new place, the call finally came that we could either have our deposit mailed or pick it up at Norm's downtown law office. I practically ran down the hill to pick up whatever was left of it after deductions for door replacement, new moldings, de-Irishification of the bathroom shelf and who knows what else?, and....

Returned in full. With interest, even.

----

I would move to at least seven other rentals after that, some sublets not requiring a deposit but at least three or four taking my money, and it's a point of pride that, despite my Oscar-like tendencies, the Felix in me got every penny of every deposit back. But I still felt the embarrassment of Appraiser Dude finding SOME defect in how we've lived for going on 30 years- the peeled paint around the bathroom vent from before a kind neighbor plugged it up a year or so ago, the laundry tub that started backing up just when the guy was scheduled, and, of course, hmmmm.... catboxes.

In the end, he didn't seem to care about any of it, and probably 95 percent of it would be the same if we were Taj Mahal or Tatal Disaster. It's all comparables, and the biggest problem he said he'd have is there just aren't that many of them on the market.  (The other five percent is math on how much our solar panels will enhance the value; that's what Eleanor was working on while I was flailing around with fire trucks and missing wallets Wednesday.)

It should be written up and submitted today. If we go to commitment, we'll probably celebrate with some food and some drink. But no sharp objects.