Take my advice on this folks. If you’re ever trying to buy a house, and there’s a known problem with the porch on the back of the house, and there’s also a lack of building permit for the porch on the back of the house, and the sellers say, “We don’t want to deal with it, here’s some money… you deal with it,” I urge you to invite them to have sex with themselves.

It all SEEMED like a good idea. They give us money to deal with the deck problem. If the problem gets noticed by the town, we go about ripping off the deck and installing stairs to make the place legally safe. All of this is off to the side of the normal contract, of course, because i need the $$ to put on a new deck after we close and if the bank sees the seller giving up money, it comes off the purchase price. Money off the purchase price is nice, but a few grand in hand to work with gets me a much bigger deck than a $10/mo smaller mortgage payment. Anyway, it sounded like a good plan to make everyone happy and get us our house.

That is until the town sees the deck 2 weeks before your interest rate lock-in runs out, the toen notices the problem, and then points out that you’ll need a demolition permit before you can rip off the deck. Oh yes, permits are taking 2-2.5 weeks to get.

Yes, we need a demolition permit, to take away the deck that they say shouldn’t be there. And now that the issue has been brought to their attention, we can’t just sneak the porch off and hope no once notices… something about it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

The saga continues