If you’re buying a house in Knoxville any time soon, here are some tips you may find useful. I’ve learned this the hard way. Phone numbers listed are current at the time of this composition but are of course subject to change. If you live somewhere else, there are probably comparable agencies, and maybe it’ll be useful to you to know that such agencies exist. I had to do a lot of calling around and sleuthing to learn some of this stuff.

Realtors can pull tax data about properties you want to buy that will include information about things like quality of materials used for external construction. On one home I was looking at, the report my realtor gave me listed  construction quality as being below average. My realtor didn’t know what this meant and suggested that I call the registrar of deeds. They didn’t know anything, so I called the vendor of the report my realtor had showed me. They didn’t know what the rubric was or what all fell under the umbrella of construction quality. They did inform me that they get their data from the tax assessor’s office. I called there to learn that the line item in question likely applied to things like vinyl siding and shingle quality and not to things like stud placement or lumber quality, etc. They also listed the quality for the house in question as being a little higher than what my realtor’s report had indicated, and that was odd. In any case, you can call the tax assessor’s office (215-2360) to ask about this sort of information for a given property.

Next, I wanted to find out information about the builder of the house I was looking at. If he’s using below average materials, then I want to see if there are any negative consumer ratings on file for him. It’s not terribly hard to find out who built a house in a subdivision in Knoxville, though it’s an elusive enough bit of information that my realtor couldn’t trace it down easily and I had to do some sleuthing on my own. Luckily, Knoxville has a nifty GIS application with a viewer that lets you look up all kinds of information about property. I went there, did an address search, clicked the parcel icon along the top, and then clicked the “owner card” report in the right-hand pane. This lets you see the general history of the deed, and for houses in subdivisions, you can usually figure that the first or second buyer is the builder. In many cases, the owner name for the builder includes “LLC” or some other corporate marking, so that’s another hint. Now that you have the name and possibly the phone number and address, you can get in touch with the Better Business Bureau (692-1600) and the Knoxville Builder’s Exchange (525-0443) and the state Contractor’s Licensing Board (800-544-7693) to try to get more information.

The Knoxville Builder’s Exchange is a dues-dependent trade organization. They don’t make recommendations and will only confirm membership of a given builder. I imagine they recommend best practices for their builders, but my understanding is that it’s not necessarily a bad sign if a builder isn’t a member (they may just not have wanted to pay dues). I gather you have at least to be a licensed builder to join, and joining means that you’re trying to be a member in good standing of the area builder’s community, though it could also mean that you’ve screwed up somewhere along the line and this is just a way of joining an organization that seems to give you some credibility without necessarily actually requiring anything of you to confer that credibility. So next you’ll want to call the licensing board to make sure the contractor’s license is current. It most likely is, but you’re probably talking about spending tens of thousands of dollars here, so a 5-minute due diligence call is probably worth your time. Finally, you can call or visit the BBB to see if the builder has bothered to become a member and if there are any claims against the builder. When I called, I was told that it’s pretty rare for the BBB to get reports on contractors (these things tend to be sorted out in court), but that if there is one, you can bet it was probably a pretty bad case (then again, some people are just complainers). Still, I figure that if a builder has bothered to join, that’s just one more thing to check on to get some degree of peace of mind.

One of these agencies suggested that I call a builder to ask for references, but I’m not convinced that’s worthwhile. Who points people to their disaster case studies when asked for references?

If you want to take the sleuthing farther than I’ve managed, you could look for other public records pertaining to the property, or you could call the city court (and presumably the county court) to try to find out how you might look up litigation the builder has been a party to.

Believe it or not, this little summary of info is the result of a full morning’s worth of calls and call-backs and web searches and hair-pulling. I document it here for my future benefit and in hopes that some of it is useful to somebody else trying to do diligence before buying a home but just not terribly sure how.

These are some bookmarklets I’ve written that have come in handy.

• Knoxville MLS lookup
• IP Lookup

We’ve talked to Lennie a fair amount lately about the impending baby, and we’ve asked her at different times whether she thinks we’re having a girl or a boy. A month or two ago, she insisted that it was to be a boy, but she’s more recently changed her tune and generally says she thinks it’s a girl. We got an ultrasound the other day and asked the tech not to tell us what we were having. Mleeka has a hunch, though, as she saw something on the video while I apparently looked away or zoned out. Pretty soon, I guess we’ll divulge our suspicion.

In the mean time, Lennie has volunteered that the baby’s name is Simba. The name applies to a male character within my generation’s pop culture, but it’s got a feminine ending (at least in Romance languages), so it’s sufficiently androgynous as a placeholder for now. So without further ado, I introduce you in the picture link to Baby Simba. Click for a few more ultrasound stills (sorry, no money shot).

This morning while Lennie and I were reading a book of children’s poems that she had selected from her shelves, she took over the reading, running her finger across the page and beginning with the following story, the first of several in the same vein:

Once upon a time,
three princesses,
three mommies,
three daddies,
three Lennies,
three babies in Mommy’s belly,
six grandmas,
seven granddaddies.

We’re crappy parents these days in part because we’re often on the run because of showings of our house. It’s hard to work up the motivation to cook a decent dinner and dirty a bunch of dishes when you know that at any moment, the realtor could call to boot you out of your house so somebody can come poke around for five minutes of the hour that you feel compelled to stay away just in case they’re serious buyers. So we’ve been feeding Lennie lots of hot dogs and Taco Bell. Today, as she was using a spork to eat a chicken soft taco (we’re such bad parents that she knows the word “tortilla”), Mleeka asked her what the quirky utensil was. “Not a fork, not a spoon,” she replied, and that was that. Seems to me like a pretty darned good answer.

There’s been much ado of late about Google’s acquisition of YouTube. Many are referring to YouTube now as GooTube, and it’s clear from some videos on YouTube that some folk are pretty nervous about the acquisition, fearing that the video service will become a pay-to-play service or that Google will find some other way to ruin YouTube. My own attention lately has been directed largely to the preparation of my home for sale, and as part of those preparations, I’ve purchased a product, pictured here, that may be of interest to those worried by this new business partnership. I present to you “Goo Gone,” which in my experience is better at killing ants than it is at anything else. Apply to GooTube and rub vigorously. Results may vary.

A couple of weeks ago, we began major house-cleaning in preparation for selling our house. We made Mleeka’s siblings come over and do manual labor in exchange for pizza. I pulled an all-nighter to paint the office, only to have to hire a guy to come in and clean up the trim. I spent a day in the rain manually clipping weeds and grass from underneath my fence slats (don’t ever get a shadow-boxed fence if you want to keep it looking tidy without a lot of effort) and scrubbing vinyl siding slats one by one, and I pulled the master toilet up out of the floor to fix some wobbliness (broken flange) only to have to pay a plumber to actually fix the thing because the flange was cemented into the pipe. See to the left the picture I like to call “Stopper or Fuse?” that depicts my having shoved an old tee-shirt into the gaping hole of sewage to prevent us from dying overnight from raw sewage fumes (honestly, we never smelled a thing, and I even out of curiosity got my nose right down in the pipe and took a deep whiff, proving that, as we’ve been saying for years, our shit doesn’t stink).

So, the plumber came, puttered around and killed a bunch of time (luckily, he charged me by the job and not the hour), and eventually fixed my toilet with the help of a big power saw and some shims. He even caulked the toilet for me using some caulk I had on hand, saving me the effort. I was satisfied with the work, if not terribly happy that it cost me $300 (though the guy cut me a break by not charging me for parts, even though he wound up buying a new flange when the one I had gotten wasn’t one he was familiar with). Now flash back for a second to all the hubbub of siblings scrubbing and polishing the house, furniture and appliances and toilets strung out all over the place, a very rainy day (the rainiest I’ve seen since moving to Knoxville), and fatigue on my part. I failed to notice that the plumber had spilled some purple stuff on the floor behind the toilet and in the middle of the kitchen floor. When I did notice it a day or two later, I figured it was the sort of thing that’d come up and didn’t attend to it immediately. And when I did try to clean it up, it wouldn’t budge.

I called the plumber’s office, which informed me that it was PVC primer, which doesn’t come up (why in holy heck do they make it purple, then? the plumber’s office told me that there’s also a clear variety!). They’ve said they’ll fix me up, they’re supposed to have an area manager (it’s a big service company and not a three-guy shop or anything) come out this week, and have generally been pretty responsive. But I’ve been dreading having to get a new floor, even at somebody else’s expense, while trying to sell my house. My dad was in this weekend, and he cleans stuff for a living, so he knows lots of tricks, and even his fancy gadgets and chemicals wouldn’t get the stuff up.

But today, the day of an open house during which we sure hoped to provoke an offer on our house, I tried one last thing to clean the junk up. And I triumphed (partially). The trick was using SoftScrub with a Ceramabryte scrubbing pad and plenty of elbow grease. I’ve briefly and visually documented the cleaning experience here (uh, it’s not riveting or anything). This worked in the kitchen but not in the bathroom. The floors in the two rooms are different, and my guess is that the finish on the bathroom floor is either sturdier to begin with or just less worn-down, the area behind the toilet not being a terribly high-traffic area and the affected spot in the kitchen one of the highest-trafficked spots in the house. Before you try anything like this yourself, beware that it actually seems to remove the finish from the floor. So instead of purple spots, I’ve got slightly duller spots on my kitchen floor. They’re hard to notice unless you know what you’re looking for, and I imagine there’s a wax or substance of some sort that folk less savage than I am treat their vinyl floors with routinely anyway, and that’d probably take care of it.

Anyway, I can’t say enough about how pleased I am with SoftScrub and Ceramabryte, which have saved me a lot of hassle and possibly a bit of money.

These are second perhaps only to the Mr. Clean magic eraser, the existence and magnifigence of which makes me wish that I were some sort of celebrity so that I could do a gratis endorsement because this invention has saved me at least a grand in painting and generally just leaves me in awe.

I found this linked on a site I read pretty regularly that deals in feminism. It’s got a lot of dildoes (er, educational demonstration devices, I mean) in it and at least one swear word in a joke Molly Ivins tells at the end of the clip, so you might want to steer clear if either of those is likely to bother you. The movie highlights the absurdity of laws that seek to legislate what consenting adults can do alone or together in their boudoirs.

Tonight, we went once again to the house we’ve put an offer on, to get a look at the attic that we were previously unable to get into. The attic has precious little storage space, but that’s not so bad because the basement has plenty of room to be built into family space and to include a big storage room that would comfortably hold more than my current attic will hold. Our brother-in-law came along with us tonight to look around. He worked for a while as a supervisor for our contractor uncle, so he knows better than we do what sorts of major boo-boos to look for. Unfortunately, as we were walking around out back after looking at the basement, he noticed a large crack in the foundation that had escaped our attention. If I recall correctly (I was too freaked out to remember to snap a picture), it ran vertically for maybe four feet and then shifted over a couple of inches and ran vertically again for another foot or two. In other words, it wasn’t just cracked mortar (which a stairstep pattern might have indicated) but was evidence of cracked cinderblocks. We’ve already turned away from one house because it had a “repaired” cracked foundation. You just have to wonder how one can really repair such a fundamental problem confidently. If you know a local structural engineer who works pro bono, let me know.

It’s going to be very hard to turn away from this house. I tried to go to bed two hours ago but can’t sleep because my head’s spinning over this. I glanced over around 50 houses in online listings tonight and found none that measure up to this one. We’ve got a question in to the owner’s realtor about the history of the crack (she says she didn’t know about it). I guess it’s possible that we could amend our offer to require a foundation assessment and repair, but I’m awfully skittish about purchasing something with this type of flaw, both because it freaks me out in the short term and because it’s the sort of thing you have to disclose when trying to sell in the long term. So we’ll see.

In selling news, we had people look at our house on Friday and Saturday. I can’t really express what a raging pain in the ass selling your house is. First, you have to actually do a thorough cleaning to pretend to potential buyers that you’ve lived the last X years like a civilized human being who wouldn’t dream of, for example, just squirting a big circle of dish soap around a bunch of ants to corral them rather than addressing the actual problem (e.g. mopping the floor to eradicate whatever invisible food trail brought them in to begin with). Then, once you’ve put on this charade of having lived a little less like a savage than you’ve actually lived, you have to actually continue to live less like a savage because you could get the call at any minute that somebody wants to come poke through your underwear drawer and turn their nose up at your beloved abode in the next few hours. This means making your bed (a stupid practice if ever there was one), vacuuming daily, worrying about what window your two-year-old has smudged or what food she’s smeared on her kitchen chair, dusting — get this — dusting your fucking plants (!), wishing you had never used your kitchen sink because the water that naturally spashes from time to time has caused the wallpaper the previous owners foolishly installed to curl up a little (shhh, don’t tell anybody), having to call the plumber who spilled some purple gunk that’s impervious to all cleaning materials right in the middle of your kitchen floor to ask him for the phone number of the witch who knows a hoodoo spell to get this crap up, actually having your vacuum cleaner break (I think a pin or sprocket fell out of the power switch, which now waggles back and forth loosely rather than toggling with a click) and writing a baleful and near-grovelling note to Eureka asking for some kind of help because you’re losing hair over how much money you’re already hemorrhaging and you really don’t want to blow another $100 on a new vacuum cleaner when you just bought this one a couple of months ago, burning through about seventeen very large candles a week so that people don’t have to smell your own dead skin or that of your pets (until you move out — muwhwhaahahaa), and finding excuses not to spend much time living in the home you love anymore because you for damned sure can’t leave behind any sign that any human being currently lives or ever has lived in your home.

Ahem, so we had two viewings this weekend and were on alert for a possible third one. The first viewers thought our home overpriced for the lack of upgrades, compared to the other one-story homes in our subdivision. The only other one that’s not low-balling does have wood floors, but it’s also got powerlines sparking (I imagine) in the back yard and is very nearly under the weaving road that goes by our subdivision. Plus I hear it’s haunted. They don’t call it the old Marswell place for nothing. This is my insincere but embittered wish that if the first viewers buy that home, some careless driver finds himself crashing through their living room on their first day in their fabulous upgraded new home (it has laminate flooring throughout). (We have a fence and a better yard, for criminy’s sake.) The second viewers had a more favorable opinion of our house but were early in the home-buying process. The possible viewing today never materialized, and we lived like higher mammals and burned candles and stood stock-still and barefoot on our tip-toes in one spot all day and locked our child in a stain-resistant box for no good reason at all. Our realtor offered this evening to go ahead and do an open house on Sunday. So if you’re in the market, ignore that stuff I said about living like savages (is it too late to claim artistic license?) and come on by. If you’re not in the market but are curious about my living circumstances, I guess you can show, though I hope you won’t dillute the open house and will bring an interested friend, at least.