No. 193 – Nutshell

Performer: Alice in Chains

Songwriters: Jerry Cantrell, Mike Inez, Sean Kinney, Layne Staley

Original Release: Jar of Flies EP

Year: 1994

Definitive Version: MTV Unplugged, 1996.

When Debbie felt as though she had “her house” stolen out from under her in April 1997 (good ol’ No. 464), she was in a funk for a while. She announced that she was out of the house-buying game, but within a month, she was back to looking through the want ads “just to see.” Soon after we were back with our real-estate agent looking at homes—none of which appealed to us in any way.

It was late May when I got the call at work. You’re never going to believe this, Debbie said, when she called me bubbling with excitement. I immediately knew what she was about to say.

As I mentioned, when the house that we liked sold the day we fell in love with it on first sight, Debbie gave the owner’s wife our phone number. The people who swooped in and bought it were transferees from New Jersey, and it’s possible that they’d be shipped off somewhere else in another year. Debbie expected never to hear from anyone again.

Well, it turned out that the folks who were transferred were reassigned, so they had to pull out of the deal. It was a mess, but the bottom line was, yes, the house was back on the market … just in case we might be interested.

I’m not a big believer in destiny, unless, of course, she wears an electric orange thong and a smile. Debbie always used to say—probably still says—that things happen for a reason. I say, as I might have mentioned, that things happen, period, and it’s up to you to determine whether there was any reason for it.

Well, I wasn’t going to argue over this development. I told Debbie, that IS our house. We were destined to buy it.

Right? I mean when does that ever happen, that you leave your name or number with someone regarding a house or a female or whatever, a message in a bottle if you will, and it pays off—aside from the movies, of course, where it happens all the time? It happened with us.

OK, so the house was back on the market. That’s great, but we still have to approach this soberly. The previous buyers agreed to the asking price on the spot, but I felt no obligation to honor those terms.

With that in mind, we retoured the house within a day. This time we went with our real-estate agent, and I’m sure that the minister and his wife were none to happy to see that we had “lawyered up” in the meantime. They knew full well that that likely would cost them a few dollars.

It was a more sober tour the second time. We didn’t want to show our hand too much, and only when we were upstairs did Debbie slip me a telltale smile. Yes, she still loved this house as much as she had the first time she saw it.

Our real-estate agent pulled up sales data for the neighborhood. We saw that $169,000—the asking price—was high. Yes, it was a desirable house, but it also was at least $10,000 above what anything else in the neighborhood sold for in the past year.

So within another day, we came up with an offer that we thought was fair. It was in line with the market and about 10 percent below the asking price. It was an intentionally low-ball offer to get the ball rolling, and it certainly wasn’t where we thought we’d end up. The idea was they’d counter, we’d counter and we’d end up somewhere around the price we were willing to pay. Besides, our luck so far had been impeccable. Why not roll the dice one more time?

Well, our luck ran out. Not only was the offer rejected out of hand, but the owner took our offer as an insult. He reminded our real-estate agent, whom he didn’t know and whose involvement he didn’t like, that the couple received their asking price once before. They had no problem keeping the house on the market in hopes of landing it again. No counteroffer was made.

I wasn’t insulted. I knew they wanted to move to Kansas City and wanted to sell, as in soon. It’s business; it isn’t personal. We still had plenty of negotiating room to reach our final offer.

Debbie took it differently, however. She was counterinsulted. Although she liked the minister’s wife fine, she didn’t like the minister at all and was pretty ticked by his reaction. When Debbie got her Scorpio scorpion stinger going, as she said, she could tussle with the best of them. She said her emotions had been through a roller coaster over this house, and she was done.

So we went to our agreed-upon price: $165,000. And, Debbie instructed the real-estate agent that this was our final offer, period. She loved the house, but pride was on the line here. The agent was instructed that if they rejected this offer, even for the purposes of a counteroffer—even for one dollar more—we were walking away, as in permanently. I was fine with whatever Debbie wanted to do; there are plenty of houses out there.

The real-estate agent took the offer to the minister and told him that it was firm and final—reminding him that we already had prequalified for a mortgage—and wouldn’t let him get in a word edgewise. If he had, she said, she’d be honor-bound to bring any counteroffer back to us. Here’s the deal: Take it or leave it.

He took it. In that instant, I became landed gentry.

Of course, as anyone who has bought a house knows, acceptance of the offer is merely the beginning of the buying process. In addition to the appraisal, there’s the termite check, the locking in the mortgage rate, the draining the savings for the down payment, etc. etc. etc.

The good part was that because the minister and his wife were retiring to Kansas City to be closer to their kids, we had leeway before the actual move, so we didn’t have to pack up our apartment in one day. We set a closing date of June 10, at which point they’d turn over the keys, and we’d take possession.

When closing day arrived, I took a couple hours of vacation time during work to sign all the paperwork. I must have signed my name two dozen times that day, at least. Buying a home is like being in a hospital: Everyone who has anything remotely to do with the process has a stake in the deal and therefore has to be paid. So there’s the appraisal form—sign here, please—and the tax documents, and the mortgage insurance, and the deed, etc. etc. etc. Finally, the smiling minister—it had been business, nothing personal—slid over the keys, and the deal was done.

When I got home that night, I felt giddy. I asked Debbie whether she wanted to go over right away, even though it was about midnight. (We both would take the rest of the week off from work to begin the moving process.) To my surprise, she declined at first but relented when she saw how much I wanted to go over.

The shopping process didn’t appeal to me, but the owning process did. I’d never owned a home before. I wanted to see my shiny new $400,000 (factoring in the interest) bauble.

We drove over in the dark and turned the key. It worked, thank goodness. We wouldn’t have the power turned on till the next day, so I took a flashlight. I also took over my favorite picture of Debbie from when she was about 2 and the size of a munchkin and put it on the mantel—our mantel. This was now our home.

I went out to the back yard and flopped down on the dew-covered grass. Even though buying a house had been Debbie’s thing, I felt elated, and my excitement reignited Debbie’s excitement about this house. When we drove home, she admitted that she was glad we went over.

We still had a lot to do ahead of when the movers would come for our furniture. The more boxes we moved ahead of time, the less time it would take the movers and the less it would cost us. The movers were coming on the 13th—Friday the 13th. What possibly could go wrong?