I was installing a new Genie garage door opener one Friday evening on my very first house back in 1980-whatever. Basking in ‘pride of ownership’ and eager to….
Pause.
Deep breath.
Now, let’s be honest Mr Petro… (inner voice)
Okay. Let me begin again:
I was spending an entire weekend trying to replace an old Genie motor with a new one I had purchased, on a dump I never should have bought in the first place, with just a screwdriver, a hammer and some vice-grips; the Holy Trinity for those of us born without the dominant handyman gene. This was back in a time before Fixer-Upper actually meant Tear-Down but I was a young insurance salesman born with the recessive sucker gene so what did I know? Rookie sales guys are the biggest suckers. Everybody knows this. My Realtor certainly did.
And to this day I’m still not sure if she was actually my Realtor. She shanghaied me from her Open House I’d happened upon one Sunday, hustled me into the back of her 2-door Caddy (the passenger side front seat was stacked with MLS binders the size of phone books, briefcases, and boxes of direct mail envelopes. Piles of loose, legal length paperwork and blue carbon sheets rose from the floorboard to the glove box) and shot me over to another, much cheaper Cape Cod on the northeast side of Baltimore, blowing cigarette smoke in my face the rest of the afternoon and staring me down in silence until I signed the paperwork in her office and wrote an initial earnest money check to her brokerage firm. I was nowhere near my car or I would have run like Updike’s Rabbit but like I said earlier, I was shanghaied.
Truth is, had I hung on to the place (I shuffled it off to another sucker 24 months to the day later; old tax code) it would have been paid off a few years ago and worth about $350,000 today for the land value alone. I paid $65,000 and almost cried every month the $495 mortgage payment was due. Now, I do cry every Read more
