Ridding ourselves of abominations

I hate liver. I mean, I really detest the stuff. It is ugly to look at, disgusting to handle, foul-smelling when being cooked, and has a nasty taste and vile texture on the tongue. It would be safe to say that I consider it an abomination.

How anyone can eat that gross, repulsive substance is beyond me. Aside from being horrid to look at, an assault on the nostrils when being cooked, and revolting in the mouth, it’s not even healthy to eat! It is full of cholesterol and, if you consider what the purpose of the organ is in the body, eating it is like eating a filter full of toxic chemicals! Yes, I know it is high in iron, but so is just plain old red meat…not to mention modern science has come up with a host of ways to supplement your iron without ingesting lots of cholesterol along with a cocktail of toxins that are trapped by the liver but not excreted by the body, plus antibiotics, hormones and pesticides to which the animal was exposed. It is also very high in purines which can lead to gout, an exquisitely painful form of joint inflammation, and kidney stones.

One would think that, having such an aversion to liver, I would stay away from it. Believe me, I’ve tried. But I am forced to view its disgusting presence in the supermarket, pictures of it fried and plated on menus, and even watch people eating the disgusting stuff. I have had liver forced on me repeatedly as a child, and in adulthood, people have actually tried to seduce me into eating it through subterfuge and outright falsehood: “Oh, but it is pâté, not really liver. Here, try a bite! It doesn’t taste like liver at all!” (Yes it did!)

I don’t know what is wrong with these hepatophiles that they can’t keep their abominable predilections to themselves. Those of us who don’t share their penchant shouldn’t have to share it, not even by observing it or being seduced into participating. Not only is it patently disgusting, it is a health hazard to eat the stuff, and people simply should not be allowed to do that…especially in public!

Think about it this way…oleander is a lovely, hardy plant sold in nurseries all over the world. But its sap is highly toxic and it is not sold as a food or even as an herb or food additive. Just as the unhealthy qualities of oleander are known, so are the unhealthy qualities of liver…high cholesterol and purines, repository for toxins…well-known. So, why is one allowed to be sold for human consumption and the other is not? Why are parents allowed to force it on their children? Why is it sold and consumed openly, despite the disgust and revulsion it generates in a majority of people? If people are going to be allowed to compromise their health by eating this toxic stew, shouldn’t it be behind closed doors and without the explicit consent of the community? Are we not, after all, our brothers’ keepers?

I think the public sale and consumption of liver should be banned. It is for the good of the health of the community, good for us as a whole and good for the individuals who are merrily poisoning themselves with this noxious stuff: by making it unavailable in the market place it will be easier for them to abstain and to even convert to healthier choices in food. And that, after all, is the goal: a healthier community through healthier individuals. We cannot allow this small faction to indulge their aberrant gustatory fancies at the expense of others, and the health problems brought about by ingesting high cholesterol, high purines and retained toxins ultimately costs us all in lost man-hours in the workplace and higher medical costs.

What of individual freedom of choice? Well, there is plenty of precedent in law that prevents people from indulging themselves at the expense of others or even at the expense of common decency. There is no right to eat liver…you won’t find it in the Constitution anywhere. And if the government can ban other substances and behaviours under the banner of “for the common good,” then banning the sale and consumption of liver is well within the scope of the government’s rights. And if the government can prohibit people from walking around naked on city streets or having sexual relations on the courthouse steps or marrying their dogs, then it can prohibit them partaking of a substance that most of the rest of us find absolutely disgusting.

So, when the petition arrives asking you to support a bill banning the display, sale, preparation and consumption of liver, please sign it. It will benefit you not only in saving you from having to look at the repulsive stuff and having to watch people actually put it in their mouths, it will ultimately cut down on sick days taken from work and the cost of treating their self-induced ailments (which raises your health insurance premiums). It’s a win-win situation for all of us. We can’t let a small coterie of deviants continue to hold the rest of us captive to their ghastly tastes and practices!

[/sarcasm]

How to lose a long-term loyal customer in 2 brief emails…

I haven’t had my hair done since December, what with all the drama surrounding the move and all. It is now getting unmanageably long and the dark ribbon of dishwater blonde hair…my roots…is starting to become entirely too obvious. Monday was a public holiday, which meant that people with non-retail jobs were off work and the retailers had extra customers…or at least in theory that’s how it is supposed to work. It doesn't, but that's a tale for another time.

Before we left Cape Town, my hairdresser gave me a business card with the formula for my hair colour written on the back of it. My hair has a large amount of red in it (even though it is not visible to the naked eye) and requires an unusual amount of toner added to the colour to keep me from coming up with orange roots. Most hairdressers don’t believe me when I tell them this and, afraid of my turning up with purple hair (what you get when you use too much ash toner), they go conservative the first (and even subsequent) time they touch up my roots. The result is blonde hair with a brassy orange stripe along the hair line. My Cape Town hairdresser took about six months to come up with the right formula (which uses an unusual amount of ash toner) and for the past 5 ½ years we’ve rubbed along famously. My natural hair colour is not dramatically different from the blonde shade I ordinarily wear, so even having it grow out a month or so isn’t a problem. But it’s been more than three months and it is time to find a salon that can touch me up.

So, despite my feeling like hammered horse hockey (I was coming down with this flu), we trundled all over town looking for a hairdresser that carried the brand of hair colour I have used faithfully for nearly six years. It is a German brand and virtually every salon in Cape Town carries it…imagine my surprise at arriving home yesterday afternoon, still shaggy and two-tone. We went to several independent salons and three malls, and not a one of them carried the brand I was seeking! I was shocked, as I expected it to be as ubiquitous here in Joburg as it was in Cape Town!

When we got home, I got on the web, looking for a salon that used this brand…no luck. So, then I searched the brand name and came up with their website in Germany…apparently they don’t know their product is used in South Africa, as this country was not on their list of countries they serviced! With a bit more sleuthing...and a fever starting to cloud my vision…I came upon a South African site for the product line and decided to ask their customer service for a list of salons in my area that used their products, expecting a quick response with a list attached. That’s not exactly what I got…
________________________________________
From: Sweet Violet
Sent: 05 April 2010 02:19 PM
To: Customer Service, HairCare Division
Subject: HairCare Enquiry - General Enquiry

I moved to Joburg from Cape Town in January. I have been unable to find a salon in the Sandton/Morningside area that uses your hair colouring products. I am so desperate for a touch up that I am considering switching to Redken or L’Oreal just so I can get rid of the contrasting stripe down the middle of my head.

Please advise how to find salons in my area that use your colouring products ASAP.
________________________________________
From: Customer Service Liaison
Sent: 05 April 2010 07:31 PM
To: SweetViolet
Subject: HairCare Enquiry - General Enquiry

Dear SweetViolet,

Thank you for contacting us with regards to your enquiry.

Are you referring to HairCare Salon products or HairCare Retail products (Spectrum Hair Colour available at local stores)?
________________________________________
From: Sweet Violet
Sent: 06 April 2010 06:19 AM
To: Customer Service Liaison, HairCare Division
Subject: HairCare Enquiry - General Enquiry

I am looking for a salon in Sandton, preferably near Morningside, that uses HairCare hair colouring products. My hairdresser in Cape Town uses HairCare exclusively. When I moved to Joburg she gave me the formula for my hair colour, but I cannot find a salon in Joburg that uses your products. I thought perhaps you would have a list of salons in Joburg that stock your products.

Thanks for your time
________________________________________
From: Customer Service, Hair Care Division
Sent: 06 April 2010 09:21 AM
To: AnotherPerson@websiteforanothercompany.com
Cc: Yetanotherperson@yetanotherwebsite.com; sweetviolet
Subject: HairCare Enquiry - General Enquiry

Hello,

Could you please assist with this enquiry?

Thank you kindly,

Customer Service Liaison
________________________________________

In the meantime, while I am still waiting for the company to provide me with a list of who in the area stocks their products, two of my friends have found salons where I can go (at malls near their homes). Gee, if I didn’t already have friends here to pull their bacon out of the fire, if I was newly moved here with no prior local contacts, the company would have lost a loyal customer, someone who ordinarily spends about R500 every six weeks ($66 USD) or so on her hair…a good bit of which goes for the purpose of buying their hair colour!

I dunno…I’ve been contemplating going red lately and there apparently is no salon using these products near my new house, so I just may bite the bullet and try something new…whattaya think? Red? or stick with the old faithful, blonde?

Let me know what you think…

Success at last!

We have a house!

Here is the link if you want to see it.

Don't you love it when an estate agent actually listens to you? We found a house on the internet and went to see it. It wasn't right for us, but the estate agent really paid attention when we answered his "what are you looking for?" question.

"I've got one coming up" he told us. "It sounds just perfect for you." And he was right...yes, it needs work and renovation...quite a bit, in fact. But we made our offer with that in mind and, while the seller was balky at first, after a show house (open house) that produced no results, the agent presented our offer and said "These are serious, pre-qualified buyers and this is their best offer." Unlike the owner of the Eichler-style house we liked (which is still on the market and now has new agents because the owner is unwilling to accept the reality that nobody wants his house at his price), this guy is obviously reality-based and really wants to sell his house. After a little straight talking from the agent (i.e. "How long do you want to stay on the market?" "Your first offer is often your best offer" etc.) the man decided that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and said "yes!" Now the paperwork starts and, if we are lucky, we'll be in our new digs by end of June.

What a great birthday prezzie for my husband, who celebrates another year on the planet tomorrow!

Vermin

I bought my first house in 1975 and for 35 years have been the mistress of my own domain. Aside from the positive emotional aspects that owning your own home brings you, there are undeniable practical advantages, chief among them being you are not at someone else’s mercy when something goes wrong.

Hubby and I own rental property in Cape Town and we have always tried to be the kind of landlord we would hope to have, should we ever have the misfortune to be renters. Well…the misfortune happened in January and, unfortunately, we did not end up with a landlord like us.

We are renting a relatively new (less than ten years old) house in what is known around here as a “posh” suburb. I don’t know about you, but there are certain things I automatically assume in such areas, among them a relatively high degree of safety and security, cleanliness, privacy, civility, and well-kept properties. These are things I am willing to pay a higher rent to have…and in my rental house, I do. Problem is, I’m not getting what I am paying for.

Our landlord gave us a paper with useful numbers on it when we moved in…they live in Cape Town now, so we need numbers of people to contact for emergencies. It seemed a little odd to me that there was the number for the person who repairs the motor for the automated driveway gate…there was no number for the garage door opener guy or a plumber or a drain company…why the driveway gate? But with the stresses of moving in, I thought nothing of it and focussed on more immediate concerns.

One of the first things I noticed were the flies…omigod, the flies! They were everywhere! Hordes of them! I found them in my refrigerator (apparently sneaked in while the door was open) I found them in the oven door, between the two sheets of glass. I took to using more kitchen towels to cover exposed food that I used for drying hands and dishes. I could not cut a slice of bread without the flies swarming me, demanding their tribute. My landlord professed ignorance when I lodged a complaint.

The mosquitoes were awful…I am allergic to mosquito bites and the bite that makes a little bump on you and itches uncomfortably for a day or two gives me a red swelling two or three inches across that itches like my skin is on fire for ten days or more. But mosquitoes are a fact of life in Africa, even in expensive, posh suburbs, because nobody here has a clue about screens. Instead, we plug little aerosol misters into the wall and they emit a toxic vapour into the room to kill the little buggers if they come in. Unfortunately, the lure of my pale, plump, succulent flesh seemed to overwhelm even their death throes, and the little buggers continued feasting on me, even after we had installed two different brands of mosquito vaporizers in the bedroom.

Then, a couple of weeks after moving in, I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night only to find a rather large cockroach gazing at me from the front of the toilet tank. Before I could raise the alarm and kill the little monster, it fled behind the tank, doubtless wondering what the feck I was doing up running around during what should have been his personal time. It was not long before I was finding roach droppings and eggs in the bowls and pots…I grew up in a roach-infested house near the beach in San Diego…I know ’em when I see ’em!

The bites got worse…some of them healed in a couple of weeks but others turned blackish purple and after the blister in the centre broke, a deep pit formed. Today, nearly three months after moving into this house of horrors, many those bites still have not fully healed…they are shrinking in size but a nasty purple scar remains. We began spraying a moat of insecticide on the carpet around the bed and spraying the bed and mattress each time we changed the sheets, thinking maybe it was something actually in the bed, but when the maid came to me with similar bites, and her bedroom is down the hall (and we don’t share bedding) I knew it was something else.

And then, outside under the patio cover, we spotted it…a large spider nest that was open on one side…there had been a spider hatch just below the main bedroom balcony, to which there are doors and windows from the bedroom. We actually suffered three successive waves of these biting spider attacks, the maid’s room only being attacked in the second one, so I suspect there were three spider nests that hatched within weeks of each other, the spiderlings taking refuge from our great bird population by coming indoors. These, then, are the purple bites with the blistered centres…spider bites, most likely yellow sac spiders. We keep them out of the bed by spraying every time we change the linens, but I see little spiders on the interior walls of the house almost every day.

The Yorkie has spent most of the last three months fretting at the baby gate at the front door, frantically beseeching me to open the gate and let her out to chase down the rodent she was convinced was hanging around out there. While we were still unpacking, the maid found rodent droppings on the patio where they had chewed their way through a trash bag full of packing paper, and we found evidence of the beasties on the front doorstep. But a few weeks ago, while standing in the driveway, I saw a rat run out from under my car and disappear into the hydrangeas beneath the scullery window. And where there is 1 rat, there are more.

So, a few weeks ago the landlord was in town and he stopped to visit. My first concern was the insect life in this house but I was totally unprepared for his blasé attitude: when I said I had seen cockroaches, his reply was “Oh, yes, you will see roaches here.” Excuse me? The man knew the house had roaches and he let us move in 1) without warning us and 2) without spraying for them? What?? Now my belongings have roaches…I moved in here roach-free (we had our house sprayed every 6 months or so…we lived near a marshland and roaches are common in such places) but I’m afraid I may not move out in the same condition.

He professed puzzlement at the fly problem, saying he’d never noticed much of a problem. Well, I guess he’s never bothered to look at the light fixtures in the kitchen and scullery ceilings, which are literally full of dead flies! And I don’t think he believed me about the rat at all. But he promised to send out an exterminator company to do a quotation.

Three weeks passed and the company came, did their assessment and went. Still no exterminator. Meanwhile the driveway gate goes on the fritz, necessitating a call to the gate guy on the list…ten days, three call outs, and multiple parts swaps later, we find this is an on-going problem in this house, and that is why his name and phone number are on the list. This particular motor was installed last November, a replacement for another, even less reliable motor.

We have had a terrible problem with the doors and locks. On the day we moved in, one of the furniture movers got locked in the guest bathroom because the lock doesn’t work properly. He had to hand the key out the bathroom window to Hubby, who was able to unlock the door from the outside. The door from the dining room to the patio would not close properly…it had to be slammed…which knocked a sensor for the alarm system off the door and broke the interior of the lock, leaving us with a door to the outside that could not be locked and an alarm sensor precariously reattached with tape. The front door had to be shouldered open and the doors to the balcony could be opened, but it took my husband and his 100kg+ frame to pull them closed enough to latch and lock. Our landlord instructed the handyman (who lives next door) to come and fix the doors, which he almost did…he fixed the front door, he half-fixed the dining room door, and didn’t touch the balcony doors at all. This last, however, may be a good thing because, when the landlord was out there with his father just recently, a wasp took umbrage to their close proximity to his nest…right beside the door!...that it stung the landlord’s father. That could have been a tragic event if it had been me, as allergic as I am to stings. It would have been nice if we had been forewarned that this was a possibility, however, so that I could get a bee kit!

Power is a bit of a testy topic in South Africa these days, and I was dismayed to find my electricity unexpectedly going off several times a week. We weren’t sure if we were putting an undue strain on the house’s electrical capacity and ultimately asked the man across the road who told us that reliability of the electricity supply was poor in this area. So, for nearly three months I am enduring unexpected power outages of unpredictable duration several times a week. Ya think the landlord might have warned us about this?

Then there was the hot water heater’s repeated boilovers when we went out of town ten days ago. My poor maid, who was left to housesit (which she loved…she got the big screen all to herself for four whole days!) called me at noon on Saturday to report “water is everywhere!” Do you think the landlord or his wife answered our frantic telephone calls or SMSs? Not a one. Ultimately the maid got the handyman from next door to show her how to shut the thing off and when we returned on Monday…after more futile attempts to reach the landlord…we called his mommy who called a plumber for us and got the mess sorted out.

But as we pulled into the driveway on Monday afternoon, the car boot full of groceries, to see a wall of steaming water cascading off the porch roof…and the driveway gate choosing just that moment to again fail…I finally lost my patience. The following day Hubby and I drafted a letter to the landlord enumerating our complaints and, basically, saying that if he didn’t take some swift action, we would either fix the problems ourselves and deduct it from the rent or we would start looking for another rental. Amazingly, the man who could not return our telephone calls or respond to our texts for a week or more, got back to Hubby in less than half an hour after the email was sent! It was all a big misunderstanding, he says, he’ll look into it…

And so now the gate seems to be fixed…and the handyman will be here Saturday to fix the doors…and tomorrow the exterminators are due to arrive.

Just in time, too...last Saturday morning when Hubby went out to feed the dogs, there at the bottom of the steps was a very dead and thoroughly chewed rat. Pretty little Candy, who looks like a dainty white poodle, is part Jack Russell and I suspect this rat’s attempts to help himself to her bowl of midnight snack kibble wasn’t exactly to her liking...and she let him know it with deadly effect.

So, by tomorrow evening our house should have received a radical verminectomy…bug spraying and rodent traps should help a lot. But I am a loss as to who to call to help us with that landlord…

We have an offer out…

Last week we put an offer on a house we like. Unfortunately, it suffers from much the same problems we seem to encounter everywhere…it has some expensive problems that the owner has failed to correct, but he’s pricing it as if those problems had been resolved.

This particular house has a cottage on the grounds that will bring in rental income, and a studio that, when the half-done kitchen is finished, will also bring rental income, so we can actually offer a little more money for it, since we’ll have some income to offset the higher monthly house payment. But, there are significant…and costly…problems with the place.

Real estate agents use a thing called “comps” to help people come up with a price for their houses. This is a survey of recently sold nearby properties, their size and selling price. That would seem to be a good way…if the house across the street has the same footprint on the same size lot, then the prices should be proximal, yes? Well, no, actually…because the comp doesn’t take a lot of important differences into account.

Let’s say the house across the road has been renovated inside…it has a professionally designed gourmet kitchen with a large gas stove and first rate finishes including real wood cabinets…plus a generous scullery with room for three appliances. And perhaps the bathrooms have been renovated into luxury spas with Jacuzzi tubs and slate-tiled walk-in wet rooms instead of prosaic showers. And that tiny, almost useless fourth bedroom has been repurposed into a huge walk-in closet and dressing room. The back patio not only is covered, but it has a ceiling in which there are dimmable lights and it is surrounded by stacking glass doors that can be closed in cold weather. Maybe there is air conditioning and underfloor heating, gas fireplaces, and costly natural wood floors. And none of this is visible to the neighbours because the house still retains its original appearance from the street.

Now, your house may be in immaculate condition…nothing is broken, nothing is shabby, nothing needs fixing. But your kitchen is original, complete with the cheap melamine cabinets and counter tops, the old white enamel electric hob and miniscule oven, and space only for the smallest of refrigerators. Your washing machine is in the kitchen, and there is no place for a dishwasher or tumble dryer. Your bathrooms are original…30 years ago, when brown fixtures with orange accents was the rage, they were the height of fashion…today they are in like-new condition, but they are still brown and orange. Your patio is paved and a few timbers covered with shade cloth is your patio cover. Space heaters take care of the cold, big fans take care of the heat, and your spotless floors are the original tiles with the house, beautifully preserved, if 30 years out of date.

The comps cannot take into account the differences between the two houses, only the basest of the similarities. And while comps are useful in determining a range of prices in an area, they are useless in determining a fair price for a property simply because the differences in property amenities and condition cannot be factored in. Ok, so the estate agent is supposed to be the arbiter, the person who adjusts the comp figures in order to bring the asking price into line with specifics of the house. In theory this is correct, but in practice…well, the owner is actually the person who determines the selling price: if the agent won’t list the house at the price the owner wants for it, the owner will simply shop agents until he finds one who will.

What does the owner use to determine his price? Well, there are numerous answers to that…back in the States, for example, I knew a man who was in the middle of a divorce and had to share the proceeds of the sale of the family home with his soon-to-be ex-wife He had spotted a house he wanted to buy and determined he needed $90,000 to his pocket in order to be able to buy it. So, he calculated what the house had to sell for in order for him to realize his $90K and that was the sales price he settled on. Other people will take the comp as gospel…the house across the road sold for X a year ago, so my house must be worth X+the rate of inflation, never mind that my house hasn’t been painted in 10 years, the kitchen cabinets are falling apart, and the bathrooms are original with the 30 year old house.

We are seeing a lot of the latter…they look in the newspaper and see that a 3br, 2ba house in their area is on the market for X and immediately assume their house is worth the same, and that is not only the price they list it for, it is the price they insist on receiving. Instead of viewing the listed properties, taking into account the upgrades their house will need to be comparable and either doing the work or reducing their expectations by the cost of the work, they somehow perceive the cost of making their house truly comparable as belonging to the pocket of the person who buys their house. And so the houses sit on the market and buyers like me gnash their teeth in frustration.

I have seen some beautiful houses that are priced right for their size and condition…many of them, in fact. But they were not suitable for our needs…the rooms were too small for our furniture, there wasn’t space for the maid and her family, or something. But the houses themselves were beautifully updated and tastefully decorated and priced fairly for their size, condition, and location. Unfortunately, the few houses we have found that are suitable for us in terms of size and accommodation are sorely in need of renovation, and the owners have fallen into the comp trap…they won’t reduce the price of the house to take into account the necessary renovations to bring the house up to current architectural standards: modern bathrooms, open plan kitchens with good finishes, updated exteriors and, in some cases, necessary repairs.

And that brings me to the house we presently have an offer out on. Our offer is R300K below the asking price because the owner, nice man that he is, is asking “renovated and modernized house” price for a house that desperately needs some very costly work. The house is large and it is lovely, but even the estate agent says the owner’s expectations are out of line with reality. Originally he wanted to list at R3mil and the agent refused to take the listing. The man came down to R2.5mil and the agents took the listing, but with the knowledge that the seller would likely not get offers at that level (nor would the house likely appraise for that, making it difficult to get a mortgage).

We have carefully assessed the property and found numerous deficiencies: two of the brick boundary walls are in bad condition: one is a security risk, the other a safety risk. They will have to be taken down and replaced. Since we recently extended a brick wall at our house in Cape Town, we know this is going to cost in excess of R50K. There are no gates at the end of the driveway, which is a security problem in Johannesburg. To put in the gates and remote control for them will cost handsomely. The bathrooms have not been touched since the house was built: pea green fixtures and rose pink tiles! We had an estimate to upgrade our small bathroom in Cape Town: R20k + the cost of fixtures and tiles. The main bath in this house is quite large, so to update the two bathrooms, we are probably looking at R100K (the main bath has a Jacuzzi bath, also in pea green, that will have to be replaced, and the whole shower must be torn out and rebuilt).

To give the sellers credit, they did redo the kitchen. Unfortunately, they did the wrong things to it. It was an open plan type of kitchen and they sealed it up! They also removed about a third of the cabinets by removing the wall between the kitchen and the scullery! We have a copy of the 1980 house plans (when an addition was put on the house) that shows the original kitchen, so we can see what the layout was. Now, instead of stepping out from the kitchen and going directly into the living room/dining room, you have to step out of the kitchen into the foyer and walk through the foyer and then up three steps into the dining room…all this carrying heavy, hot pots of food and piles of dishes, both clean and dirty. The kitchen will need returning to an open plan design…separate kitchens are very much out of fashion and they make houses difficult to sell because open plan is what house buyers want. And returning this to open plan is not going to be a cheap proposition since it will mean taking out walls, moving electrical work and cabinets, etc.

There is a studio flat attached to the house that could be rented out except for one thing: they brought in the pipes, drain and electricity to put in a small kitchen but never finished the job. So, at least another R30K to buy and install cabinets, countertops, sink and taps, and a kitchen stove.

Some years ago houses built of facebrick were very trendy here. “Facebrick” is a kind of exposed brick that is neither painted nor plastered over, and comes in numerous colours and textures…and is now so out of fashion that some areas actually prohibit the building any new houses with it! And this huge house is not the only facebrick on the property, so are all of the garden walls…and the entire driveway and what should be the front yard are also paved with bricks. Not only does this outdated exterior drive the price of the house down, it is expensive to remedy…it is doubtful we will live here forever and it is essential that we take the difficulty in reselling this house into consideration: if we don’t want to linger on the market, we will have to employ an effective…and costly…program to either paint or plaster over (or both) at least a portion of the brick, remove some of the paving bricks and install plantings to soften what is now an monolithic expanse of bricks, bricks, and more bricks.

Then there is the fact that this house is on a corner…not a good thing in Joburg. The perception here is that a corner house has two boundary walls exposed to criminals and is therefore twice as vulnerable to being invaded. Also, this house is in a boomed area, with only two entrances a neighbourhood of 250-300 houses, and one of the entrances is on the road that runs beside the house, making for a relatively busy street just outside the main bedroom. Now, the wall has electric fencing on top of it and there is an abundance of plantings between the house and the wall to soften traffic noise, but potential buyers will still see that the house is on a corner lot…and a relatively busy one at that. This, of course, drives the desirability of the house…and its value…down further.

So, knowing all of the above and being aware of the costs of necessary repairs and bringing the house up to modern architectural standards, we made an offer on the house that was R300,000K below the listing price. The owner has until Tuesday evening to respond.

And so we wait.

Are we expecting too much?

With yet another unsuitable house viewed yesterday afternoon, it occurs to me to wonder if the problem is our expectations: are we expecting too much?

In terms of an agent we expect the following:
1) Don’t waste your time, our time, or the time of the sellers. Show us houses that fit the criteria we give you;
2) Don’t be selfish or greedy: share with your colleagues and show us houses they have listed if they fit our needs, even if you have to split the commission with them;
3) Recognize that the upper limit of our budget is for a “perfect” house: i.e., a house that needs no immediate expenditure for work to make it ready for us to move in. That means if the house is listed at the top end of our budget and the bedroom wall needs to be pushed out two metres just to get our furniture into the room, we cannot offer full price for it, we have to offer full price minus the cost of pushing out that wall or we simply cannot buy the house;
4) Respect our needs…don’t tell me I “have too much stuff” when I say the house is too small or that I need to “downsize” my collection of pots, pans, and utensils when I say the kitchen isn’t big enough or that “the owner likes it this way” when I opine that something is not to my liking. Just listen, take the information under advisement, and use it to refine your next recommendation;
5) We have R2mil to spend, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Don’t condescend or treat us like paupers…it is a generous amount of money and it will buy us a decent house…we have time, we are preapproved buyers, and we will keep looking until some estate agent wises up and shows us the right house at the right price. If you want a percentage of that preapproved chunk of money our lender has promised us, go find us a house that suits our needs…don’t try to shove us into just any old house you are eager to sell. I want to buy the brick-and-mortar equivalent of a gently used second-hand Mercedes ML, not a brand new Ka.

In terms of a house, these are the inflexible minimum requirements:
1) 3 bedrooms, one of them large enough for my large, heavy bedroom suite of six pieces of furniture;
2) 2 bathrooms, one of them en suite with the master bedroom and with a shower, preferably larger than a 1m x 1m cubicle;
3) Either generously sized staff quarters or a granny cottage on the property. Our maid came with us from Cape Town and we need sufficient space to house her and her family. I do not consider one room barely bigger than a double bed and an outside toilet to be sufficient space for even one person, and some of these sellers should be abjectly ashamed at the conditions in which they expect their live-in helpers to reside! It is this requirement that has us looking at more expensive houses, as only they have granny flats or staff quarters.
4) No cluster houses, no houses on panhandle lots, no houses backing up to a freeway, shopping centre or industrial park, no houses on busy roads.
5) Adequate security, please! That means a functioning alarm system, security gates, locks that work, and intact boundary walls at minimum.
6) Fireplaces, pools, air conditioning, water features, covered patio and other amenities are nice, but they don’t make up for the lack of a large shower, space in the kitchen for a double fridge, automated garage doors, remote controlled driveway gate, or room for a washer, dishwasher AND a tumble dryer, and we don’t consider them necessary. We won’t turn down a house because it doesn’t have a pool or the patio isn’t covered…we will turn it down if the fridge won’t fit into the kitchen or there is no shower in the en suite bathroom.
7) Please, no houses that don’t have at least a modicum of decent room flow! I don’t want to open my front door into the dining room; I don’t want to walk through my closet to reach the bathroom; I don’t want my mother-in-law to have to walk to my room to get to the guest bedroom; I don’t want to carry a hot, heavy pot of food down a hallway, through a dark “TV room,” and around a corner to reach the dining table; I don’t want to pull into my garage on a rainy day, the boot of my car full of grocery bags, and have to lug those bags, in one of our torrential downpours, across a courtyard or lawn, down some steps, past the pool, through a security gate that I must stop and unlock with a key, and then up to the front door which must also be opened with a key, all in order to just get the groceries into the house. I want a house that has had some reasonable consideration to traffic flow put into its design…I will have to live in it every day for years and I simply do not see myself living happily in a house in which the rooms have been stuck randomly together!
8) An adequate-sized kitchen is not negotiable. It doesn’t matter if it is poorly laid out or has insufficient cabinet space…I can sort that out with a good kitchen designer. But if the room is too small, we are talking major money here to add on foundation, walls, roof, and plumbing in addition to new cupboards, counters, appliances, fixtures and flooring.
9) Trees. I want a mature garden with trees to shade the property. This is Africa and it can get bloody hot here, and trees are cheaper than a/c, they filter pollutants from the air, give off oxygen, and look beautiful. I want shady trees and I simply will not buy a house that doesn’t have them.

So, a 3 bedroom, 2 bath (one with shower) house with large kitchen, adequate space for our live-in maid (newer American homes often have “in-law suites” which would be perfect), double garage with automatic door openers, adequate security, and a quiet, tree-shaded location…that’s the bottom line. It sure doesn’t seem like too much to expect for a couple of million bucks, now does it?

More houses…more estate agents…more disappointment…

While the process of buying a house here is largely like the process in the US, there are some differences. In the States, for example, once an offer on a house has been accepted, the marketing of the house ceases. The buyer and seller have a contract, usually with some contingencies included that could result in one of the other of them being able to back out of the contract, but if you accept an offer from me for your house and somebody comes along a couple of days later offering you more money…and in cash…you are out of luck unless I am unable to secure a mortgage (bond) or sell my present residence (assuming the sale was contingent upon selling it) or some other such circumstance.

Not so in South Africa. If you accept my offer for your house, unless I have offered you cash, you still have options open. A contingency sale, for example, can derail if you get a cash buyer, even if you have accepted my contingent offer. In such a case, I get 48 hours (used to be 72) to come up with enough cash to cover my offer to you or I lose the house to the cash buyer. There are certain other conditions under which an accepted offer can be invalidated as well, so even after your offer has been accepted, the owner and the [real] estate agents will continue to show the house to prospective buyers until your bond is granted and the money is in the hands of the seller’s attorneys.

Buyers here are greatly at risk. The estate agent works for the seller, as do the conveyancing attorneys. We don’t have escrow companies here, so the money and paperwork transfers (such as deed registration) are handled by specialist law firms…who are engaged by the sellers, not the buyers. We also do not have title search companies, but the deeds registering office is supposed to make sure the property is free of liens prior to the transfer…and if there are liens, it is the job of the conveyancing attorney to clear them from the funds he has received from your lender prior to handing over cash to the seller. The conveyancing attorney acts very much like an escrow company in the US, but with one notable difference: in the US, escrow companies are, by their nature, objective in their dealings; here, the conveyancing attorneys work for the seller and sometimes that works to the buyer’s detriment.

So, knowing that the estate agents and the cash-and-document transfer specialists are in the employ of the sellers, we approach our house hunting with great caution: we’ve been burned once by an unethical, thieving seller and shafted by both her agent and attorneys…we aren’t going to allow it to happen again. We therefore take agents’ ecstatic waxing about houses with a lump of salt and expect very little…for a great deal of money.

Houses here are sold “voetstoots,” an Afrikaans word meaning “as is.” This can work both for and against a buyer: on the one hand, the house must be in the same condition (and have the same fixtures) as when the buyer viewed the house (items specifically noted as exceptions excluded)…but if there are defects in the house that the buyer failed to notice, he’s stuck with them. Yes, there is a clause for latent defects (i.e., the roof leaks, the seller knew about it and concealed it), but activating that clause is prohibitively expensive (I know, I sued that unethical, thieving seller a few years back). But if your seller is moving out of the country (which is common around here), the latent defects clause is just pointless…even if the house collapses around your ears, you have no recourse. So, we are very cautious about houses that look like they will need work, especially with regard to drainage, foundations, plumbing, electrical work and roofing.

Last week we called an agent about a house in Paulshof, a nice upmarket suburb within easy commuting distance of Hubby’s job. She took us to two houses, neither of which met our requirements, and neither of which were the house we called about! Leafing through her book of open mandates, she flipped to the page with the house on it and I stopped her…“That’s the house we called about,” I told her. She seemed surprised but promised to set it up and call us back.

Well, for some reason she turned it over to her partner (miffed that we didn’t like the houses she showed us, even though they clearly did not meet the requirements we gave her?) to show us. The internet ad showed a neat brick house and the description fitted our needs. It also included two rental cottages and river frontage. The only thing that bothered me was the lack of interior photos, but I know that sometimes that happens because nobody was home the day the photographers came to take the pictures.

Well, I should have listened to my instincts. The house was shabby, both inside and out. It was a panhandle house, reached by a narrow, twisting driveway and located behind one house and bordered closely by another house and a huge apartment complex overlooking the garden. The view to the front was a rubble pile backed up by the house in front, the view to the right was the roof and windows of a neighbouring house less than two metres away, the view to the left was a multi-story apartment complex with at least two floors of windows looking directly down into the front and back gardens, and the view to the back, which should have been inviting river frontage, was that of a cliff as seen from behind a massive snarl of razor wire. Oh, there was a river, all right, and you could hear it flowing…but you couldn’t see it because it was at the base of the cliff, masked by the razor wire barricade.

Inside, the house had once been attractive, but now it was just shabby with age and neglect. The owner, a frail woman who looked to be in her eighties, was just no longer robust enough to keep the place up. A kind of dingy grey overlaid everything, from the paint to the windows to the carpets to the furnishings. Most of the rooms were of a generous size, save the living room which was amazingly small, none of the bathrooms had seen renovation since the construction of the house, and the work that had been done to renovate the kitchen had left it a dark, disjointed, poorly designed and shamefully executed space (the lower kitchen cupboards, for example, were so out of plumb that it was obvious to the naked eye!).

The garden was a wreck. Oh, it was planted and neatly trimmed, but there was a huge gouge in the earth, nicely covered with lawn, that would doubtless fill with water during the rains and become swampy, as it had no outlet to the river’s edge or to anyplace it could drain. Evidence of neglect was everywhere, from the peeling paint on the window frames to the threadbare garden to the scummy shower tiles. But the shocker was that she had wanted to list the property for more than R2mil and only settled for R1.95mil when the agent simply refused to list it for that.

Looking at the work the place needed, especially the fact that the back garden would need a visit from a hydrologist to work out proper drainage for that gash in the earth in the back garden, and the fact that to give the place even a semblance of privacy the front garden wall would have to be raised at least two metres and tall trees put in to screen the property from the prying eyes of the apartment building, we figured the place probably needed close to half a million in work. This figure took into account the need to completely re-do the kitchen and renovate the bathrooms, install a security system, and relandscape the back garden as well as haul away the rubble in the front of the house and landscape that area which, presently, is nothing but bare sand, piles of construction debris, and a lone tree. At the end of all that expense and work we would be left with a small house with a tiny garden…perhaps a hidden jewel, but even then, barely worth the nearly R2mil she was asking for it.

We asked the agent if he had explained to her the fact that, no matter what a buyer wanted to pay, the lender would send out an appraiser who would value the property and the lender would not lend one rand more than the appraiser’s estimation. He said he had. We then asked if the woman was aware that the properly could not possibly appraise for her asking price and, in fact, might not even appraise for the R1.5mil we might consider offering, in present condition. He said he had…but she was immovable.

And so, we go to see another house today…we’ll see how that one goes.