Hello Takoma Park: The Closing

I feel like Martin Sheen when he rises up from the water in Apocalypse Now. That is right, people, I have been in the shit. I entered Thunderdome.

Doubt me? Just ask any of the 8 people who were around the table with us today at our house closing. I've seen things, man, and now I can say I have seen a man go to a dark place over $35.

First off, let me go on record and say that as house owners, we were damn nice to the girl who bought our condo. As a sign of good faith (and also because we agreed to do so), we cleaned that condo head to toe, had everything packed up and gone the day before closing, and even went so far as to leave a nice bottle of wine for her and some dog treats for her pooch as a "welcome to your new home" gift.

What we received from our seller on the new house was nothing short of the all you can eat poo poo platter.

First off, the sellers insisted we go with a closing/settlement company that is perhaps the dumbest on the planet. I'm honestly thrilled that we got through both processes without blood being spilled. We'd get documents from them (questionnaires, forms, etc.) that would have mistakes strewn throughout and glaring omissions. Hell, at one point they sent us forms to sign saying we were buying a house in New Jersey. I mean, this was, as the wife would say, "Kendra levels of incompetence." And these people were in charge of overseeing almost $2 million worth of home transactions. It was a bit ridiculous.

But don't let that overshadow the main entertainment of the day ... the seller. First off, the sellers are a family of four. Instead of all participating in this glorious event since they are buying a new house for the first time in 15 years, they decided to mix it up. And I mean mix it up by saying that the wife took the two kids to France and left the husband to handle everything by himself. This poor guy man be the salt of the earth, and by all means he seems to be, but this is like leaving me in charge to wrestle a python while also using the pythagorean theorem to solve landing a cat on Neptune. Bad things are gonna happen.

He was supposed to be packed up by this morning; he wasn't. The house was to be empty by 11 a.m. for our walkthrough; it was chock full of nuts and furniture. He was supposed to be at the closing by 1; he wasn't. In fact, he showed up more than an hour late. For those of you unfamiliar to the house selling/buying world, this is a really big no-no unless Christ has returned to give mankind some advice. No apologies, nothing. He knew he was late, but he just played right through it as his realtor shot "you're frickin kiddin me, pal" beams from her eyes.

The best was yet to come. He, like myself, is clearly not the financial guru of the household. So that put him in an apt position to be managing the power of attorney for his wife and also checking over all the financials for the closing. Shame everything was no in hieroglyphs, because I think it would have made little difference. He questioned things that weren't even on the documents. But the coup de grace was when his movers called during the document signing. They were holding his furniture hostage because he failed to pay them up-front and therefore could not unload the truck (which was too small) so they could go back and get all the other furniture that remained (four hours after the place was supposed to be empty).

Again this guy seems like a completely nice guy in real life, but he was out of his element and within seconds, "saw white" as the wife put it and went to the dark place. In front of eight other people, this guy let loose a tirade into his cell phone that made Howard Beale look like a 5-year-old catholic schoolgirl. I cannot overstate how insane this guy went. It was so loud and abusive that the owner of the settlement company came from 3 rooms away to check on us because she thought the guy was screaming at her employees or, worse, us.

The real kicker was that all of this was over $35. He just hit a wall and all of the sudden nothing made sense to him anymore, and this extra $35 charge to move in his stuff was where the line was drawn. Yes, after our closing he left to go close on his $950k-plus house, but this $35 ... well, don't fuck with him over his $35. That is all I am saying.

Now proud owners of the house, we went there to discover that a whole slew of furniture and trash was strewn throughout the rooms of the house. And the "cleaners" he pre-paid to clean the house must have dug Ray Charles' body from the grave to do the work. We left our buyer a clean condo, a bottle of wine and treats for her dog. Our seller left us 13 pounds of dog hair, two crusted tennis balls, four bookshelves and a big middle finger. Instead of relishing in our first big house purchase, we spent the next four hours cleaning the place and shoving all this family's crap into the front yard for him to pick up later.

He stopped by and was totally chill and we actually helped move some of the remaining items to his new gigantor house ... which is only 7 houses down the block from us. Oh yeah, I didn't mention that, did I? Crazy McCrazystein completely took it to 11 on the dial of public insanity and now he lives 7 houses away.

The first thing we are doing tomorrow is making a very important phone call. We're getting all the locks changed.