Several years ago I stopped reading the Sunday real estate ads because it was too depressing, but now that real estate values are on the rise I’m back in the habit. I love the glowing descriptions of the properties and that every house in our neighborhood is a “tropical paradise” that is “close to shopping” with a “newer roof.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked my friend Barry, who is a realtor. “A ‘newer’ roof?”
“It means that the roof is not new,” he told me.
“Cool,” I said. “Then by that logic does that make me a ‘younger man?’”
“Depends,” said Barry. “Are you on the market?”
Despite the glowing descriptions, however, the one term that even the most creative copywriter will not use to describe our neighborhood is “friendly.” It’s not that the people here are unfriendly, they are just aloof. This is why, after two years in our house we are on a first-name relationship with exactly 1 neighbor: the lady next door who is very sweet but who, because of a huge ficus hedge, we rarely see.
Although I would not know my neighbors if our carts collided at Publix, they might be surprised at how much I know about them. This is because of the network of service people who regularly go in and out of the homes in the neighborhood and who, if offered a cup of coffee and a cookie, will spill their guts. Since our old house is in a constant state of disrepair, I keep the coffee pot filled.
While Rick the electrician was repairing the circuit breaker that kept tripping he told me about the house down the street was in foreclosure. His good friend Ray, the plumber, who was there to repair the toilet that flushed itself in the middle of the night, told me that the woman across the street was going through a divorce because her husband left her for a guy he met at LA Fitness.
Diego, who was there to fix our leaky roof gave me the rundown on the integrity of just about every roof in the neighborhood. While he and our puppy played tug-of-war with an old sock, he told me about the couple on the next block who bought their house from her brother, who never told her that the roof was disintegrating. “Didn’t that come up in the inspection?” I asked.
“It was a private sale,” said Diego. “They never had it inspected.”
Diego used this story to segue into a strong recommendation that we invest in a new roof for our house; when I protested that it was not in this year’s budget, he shrugged. “It will never survive the rainy season, ” he said darkly.
I quickly forgot about Diego after talking to Rocco, who was there to fix the sliding door that wouldn’t lock. He told me about the lawyer up the street who replaced his windows without pulling permits. “He almost got away with it,” said Rocco, except that the lawyer was representing a woman who was divorcing a city building inspector in a messy case. Somehow the inspector got wind of what the lawyer was doing and after the divorce, when the window project was 90% done, the inspector cited him for not having a permit. “What a mess that was!” Rocco said.
Just the other day I was walking the dog past a house that was up for sale because, according to the exterminator, its owner had made a killing in the stock market. I wondered if my neighbors knew how much of their personal lives was public knowledge. “So much for privacy,” I thought.
As I walked along, a guy I had never seen before was approaching, walking a huge German shepherd. As our dogs sniffed each other’s nether regions we chatted. “How’s your roof?” he asked me out of the blue. “Still leaking?”
I must have looked surprised because he laughed in a friendly manner. “Diego was at my place to fix my roof,” he explained. “He told me yours would never last for another rainy season.”