<p>Congrats on closing! And GRRRR on all the problems–I hope the resolutions go smoothly.</p>
<p>Oh cb, this is going to be fascinating!<img src=“Says%20VeryHappy,%20who%20is%20a%20comfortable%203,000%20miles%20away%20from%20the%20mess%20–” alt="/u"></p>
<p>Cb - do you get ownership of the car? </p>
<p>If he doesn’t want the piano you can probably get a few hundred bucks for it. Or at least give it away for free on craigslist.</p>
<p>Ownership of the car is up in the air. The elderly Seller has a specialist Fidicuiary Agent who has to make sure that Seller is not being taken advantage of in any way. I believe that he has the title pink slip for the car, but no one knows if it runs or not.</p>
<p>I received an email last night with a long list of people who are coming and going to check possessions, but for some reason the elderly man is not coming. Evidently a caretaker is coming today to get some ashes in an urn that are somewhere in there (thank God, could you imagine running across that while trying to clean out???). Then the Fiduciary Agent is coming on Saturday to look at the car. And then on Sunday, a caretaker is coming through the house (I sure hope she knows what she is getting into and wears a mask and gloves) to ‘tag’ items that I need to haul into pickup truck and deliver to some unknown (well, unknown at this point) location on Monday. I am going to refuse to let any large items like piano get tagged.</p>
<p>If the seller is elderly and is going into some senior living place, he probably won’t have room for the piano. Hopefully.</p>
<p>cb: Are you to just let anyone who comes take anything they want? Make sure you’re not going to be held “accountable” if Cousin George takes Aunt Matilda’s tiffany lamp that Dad promised to him 50 years ago. </p>
<p>Yeah, I would try to take pictures of what is taken. Or get some kind of signed release. Or just hope for the best! :)</p>
<p>@Coralbrook, you are a peach for doing these threads. It s just so fascinating! :)</p>
<p>Wow, this is going to be a very interesting project! It already reads like a real estate mystery novel. 
Fingers crossed that there are no skeletons in the closets! </p>
<p>(Our realtors once shared a story about a hoarder’s property that they bought and eventually gutted and remodeled. When they developed photos which they took during their walk through the property, they could see dead rats hanging from the ceiling tiles… They somehow missed that! Too late, they already owned the house by then! )</p>
<p>There is one person managing this guy’s estate. I looked him up on the Internet and he is fascinating. He is a Fiduciary Agent/Forensic Accountant that specializes in detecting elder financial abuse. managing elder’s assets and getting assets back that were taken illegally or unethically. So, I respect him and he is being very careful about accounting for everything and making sure nothing improper happens. He was the one that insisted that the house had to go up for sale to determine fair market value for the client. Slime Ball Listing Agent had some kind of scheme where his contractor friend was going to remodel it and put it back on the market and split profits with elderly man.</p>
<p>I am not clear who found this gentleman living in filth and unable to take care of himself and who moved him. But, he has been moved to a Board and Care Facility and then this Fiduciary Agent was hired to try to get some money out of the estate to pay for this guy’s living expenses. The elderly gentleman kept trying to ‘give’ the house to people.</p>
<p>The agent is personally handling the ashes in the urn and the car, because the car might represent some money that needs to go into the estate. He is coming tomorrow to inspect the car and determine if there is any value. If no value we are going to discuss alternatives which range from the estate paying to tow it away, trying to donate it or giving it to me at no cost, included in the property sale. Believe it or not, my contractor wants the car if it is ‘free’. I guess he’s going to go into the business of flipping cars!</p>
<p>This agent has designated the current caretaker at the Board and Care facility to drive Walter over to the house to get his personal items. The agent doesn’t care what he does or does not take because they have determined that anything left in the house belongs to me, the new owner. </p>
<p>So, they finally gave this caretaker my phone number and I find out that there has been a huge miscommunication! I was told that we could not throw anything away in that house and to stay out of the interior until Walter had been given an opportunity to retrieve his personal possessions. She tells me that she wants all of the trash out of there before she will come over and ‘tag’ the items. That makes sense but I asked her “How do I know that there isn’t some nugget that Seller wants inside these hundreds of bags of trash in this house”. Turns out that she has a very short list of only a couple of items that he really wants (ashes on top of piano!!) and he doesn’t even want the clothes or any other personal items. </p>
<p>Well, of course I did not have any crew inside the house cleaning out. Having trouble finding volunteers for that job, no matter how much I will pay them! Photos to come. I do have a crew that is trying hard to clear some landscape so we can actually get to the little back yard. Right now you cannot get to back yard in any way - it is totally grown over. Now I have to switch priorities immediately and get the trash cleared out of the house so that I can get some ‘closure’ to taking possession of this house.</p>
<p>My goodness. it is a good thing that this fiduciary agent is involved, or SlimeBall would have taken the old man to the cleaners, no doubt.</p>
<p>MY JOB IS NOT GLAMOROUS - OPENING THE FRONT DOOR!!!</p>
<p>Well, now that the saga of trying to purchase this is over, we are going to start the Flip Project. This one is a doozy. We opened the front door and took possession this morning and it went downhill from there. This one really really needs to be on a TV show. There would be no need for fake drama here.</p>
<p>I took a lot of photos this morning. I’m going to roll these out as a teaser, with commercial breaks between 
</p>
<p>We will start with the mysterious garage. We had to open up the house and get some of the painted windows pried open with a crowbar so that we could get an extension cord out a window down to the sidewalk. We used a grinder to grind off the padlock. The garage door is heavy and all the springs are broken. Someone has to manually hold up the garage door while others get inside. There is no way that an elderly gentleman could have pried that door open and driven in/out of the garage safely. That’s probably why that car has been stuck in there!</p>
<p>1999 Buick - this car is not bad! paint job is in decent condition and it doesn’t look horrible. And interestingly, it is not too long for the garage. So that special extension built onto the garage door was probably for a much older car from the 50’s or 60’s that was trying to fit into the garage. Using detective work (see pictures) we were able to determine that the car has been stuck in the garage since 2010. </p>
<p>Amazingly, the garage is built like a rock. Built out of concrete and concrete cinder block. I was fully expecting rotted wood, sagging beams and mold. And, there is not a ton of trash in this garage, just normal stored stuff. Neighbor ran over to make sure that we understood that these little garages that are built into the hill are ‘grandfathered’ by the City and we cannot make any modifications. Uhh, OK. I don’t have any plans to ever modify or rebuild a garage again in my life!!!</p>
<p>I HAVE STARTED OUR NEW FLICKR GROUP - CC FLIP PROJECT 3</p>
<p><a href=“Flickr: The CC Flip Project 3 Pool”>https://www.■■■■■■■■■■/groups/2710004@N21/</a> </p>
<p>Start at the bottom. The top photo is the teaser of opening the front door!!</p>
<p>I see a large green roly garbage can in the garage… is that a city can? Maybe your garbage can problem just solved itself.</p>
<p>Yes, I forgot to add that. Garage is actually larger than I thought and the City trash cans fit in there. There are two City cans in there. So, trash can be carried down to cans in garage and rolled out of the garage on collection day. But if that trash ever gets stinky (like my cans do) it wont be pleasant in there when you’re leaving for work in the morning :)</p>
<p>The townhouse project has been like an appetizer to keep us calm, but this one is going to be like a gourmet entree. You have your work cut out for you here! Thanks for sharing all of this, coral brook </p>
<p>^^^cb, that’s how it is for most of us, though, with trash bins in the garage. Smelly sometimes, but not the worst thing in the world. </p>
<p>It sounds like the caretaker has given you carte blanche to dispose of everything except the very short list of items Walter definitively wants, right? If that’s the case, I see a large dumpster in your near-term future. I hope you’re allowed to park it in the street.</p>
<p>Do you have a budget set up for this project yet? It may be too early for you to tell what might need structural fixes. I imagine the cost of the landscaping in the front, which will probably involve some masonry work, won’t be insignificant. But it should add tremendously to the curb appeal and functionality of the entrance. </p>
<p>Dumpster -
I called two ‘hauling’ companies to meet me at the property on Friday morning. Both of them just gagged when they went inside and wanted the moon to trash out the house. As soon as I did a thorough walk through on Friday morning and discovered the mess in the little shed in the back, then realized how much brush and yard debris there was going to be - dumpster needed bad!!</p>
<p>There is no place to put a dumpster on the property so the dumpster needs to be on the street. Unfortunately that requires a street permit. So, because I found out that the caretaker won’t come in the house until the trash it out, we have urgency for this situation. I had to rush down to the City and sit in line for 2 hours and get a Street Permit and then call around and get a dumpster scheduled for Monday. They won’t let you even order the dumpster for a street until you give them a Permit Nbr. Hopefully it will show up.</p>
<p>Good luck with the trash removal. Do you have some written document from the Fiduciary Agent releasing you from liability if the wrong thing gets thrown out? I’d get him to sign something when he comes to look at the car…something along the lines of “except for these items (if the can be found) all other personal property transfers with the sale of the house”. Just a little CYA…</p>
<p>The wannabe archaeologist in me says there could be some very cool stuff in there! :)</p>
<p>In my offer contract I stated that Seller has 10 days from contract acceptance to remove personal items. Buyer (me) will assist up to 8 hours with loading items into a truck, transporting and unloading to Seller’s selected destination. Upon expiration of the 10 days all remaining property on premises become the property of Buyer.</p>
<p>The 10 days expires Sunday night Aug 24, but since I was not aware that trash had to be out, I have agreed to extend it to Tuesday Aug 26.</p>
<p>Just met with Fiduciary Agent and he is very nice and very realistic. Many neighbors were hovering at the house worried about Walter. He had to explain to them that he cannot disclose any information about how Walter moved, where he moved to and how to contact Walter. But they know that Walter is coming to the house on Tuesday so I’m guessing this is going to turn into some type of Group Grope thing. I am not going to allow anyone into the house except Walter and the caretaker. Mostly for his privacy regarding the condition of the home and I also don’t want to get into a situation where a bunch of people are asking “Can I have this???” and “Can you carry this over to my house”, “Can I come get this next week” and on and on and on.</p>
<p>But I did find out that he has no relatives (obviously, or they would have figured out the situation sooner) and ‘law enforcement’ had to come into the house and take him away. Not sure who called law enforcement. And then I guess Social Services and/or Seller hired this guy to take over the situation. He was very grateful for my flexibility and my professionalism. Evidently the Seller just kept trying to ‘give’ the house away</p>
<p>I have made one of the best contacts of my business… he wanted my card and he plans to call me every single time he gets a property that needs to be sold out of the estate. He has tons of properties he needs to sell that are in similar condition with similar circumstances and he wants to work with someone who is ‘caring’ and flexible with these situations. If the property is inside a court action then it has to be sold on the open market (but he will call me and give me a heads up), if there are heirs involved then he must sell on open market (once again, calling me with a heads up). But, he gets a lot of cases where there are no heirs and/or the Seller has decided to gift the property to charity. In those cases he is allowed to call Charity and tell them he has an immediate buyer with cash at a fair price and I can get the house.</p>
<p>CAR in Garage</p>
<p>This car is a 1999 Buick Century, I believe. Agent tried to start the car and it will not start. According to the Seller it ‘blew up’ a couple of years ago (after he was taken to cleaners thousands of bucks to fix it) and it doesn’t work. Exterior and interior are in good condition. </p>
<p>So, our agreement for now is that I will have my crew push it out of garage and park it on the street. We will try to jump start the battery. If the car does not start the guys will try to see if they can figure out what is wrong with the car. If we cannot figure it out, or car cannot get operable, the Agent will hire a tow truck to take the car for donation to a charity. </p>
<p>If the car does start and seems to be running fine, then I will make an offer. Blue Book price is between $1,400 to $2,400 depending on condition. Since the car won’t start we cannot even figure out how many miles are on the odometer since it’s a digital odometer. I have several people that would like to buy the car cheap, but I don’t want to have anything to do with it if it’s not running. Don’t need any more headaches trying to get a car fixed! Knowing my luck it will probably be $2,500 to get it fixed somewhere.</p>
<p>We wrote a short document and we both signed it. I have keys, Agent has title </p>
<p>I did see some interesting things in there, but I am not sure the totality of what might be in there. I refuse to open every bag of trash… it’s going straight to dumpster. But there are figurines and stuff on shelves, some old radios, old piano and some really pretty old chairs that could be re-upholstered. Paintings and lamps. I might be seeing an ‘estate garage sale’ in my future. Oh boy, another weekend of hard work to make a couple of bucks </p>