GUUUUUURL it has been a WEEK!

1. Dr. BooPaw Charles in Charge went to the vet Monday because he wasn’t eating and was puking.
2. Tots, the outside girl suddenly stopped eating Monday afternoon.
3. Taco had kidney recheck at vet Friday.

And this is all in addition to life, which is generally chaotic and weird. I also thought I was getting sick Monday and Tuesday, but apparently it was pollen. But the husband got actually sick which he never does. But onto the cats.

BooPaw, who I am considering re-naming Menace, has perked up just fine. He is now owning his whole space. He still walks funny sometimes and shakes but I’m not worrying about that just yet. Eats like a horse. A menace on my keyboard.

Panic steadily grew all week about Tots, because while I fully expected her to just disappear one day, as stray cats do when they go to die, she was apparently going to languish and die in my front yard.

So when the vet called me about BooPaw’s stool sample on Thursday, she said I could bring Tots in with Taco for his Friday morning appointment. Stool sample is fine, btw, but she wants me to keep the two insides apart for at least another week… and in a perfect world, TWO MONTHS to recheck for FIV and FELV.

Part of me worried about how to get Tots into carrier and what if it’s rabies (yeah, I’m crazy) and the other part of me worried about money, because I already know I’m in for 3 bills just for Taco’s quarterly bloodwork to keep him alive. As it so happened, she got in with only a bit of resistance, and off we went with two cats whose vocal cords operate just fine.

Tots is old AF. Dehydrated. Assumption kidney disease, since she’s been drinking a ton of water. We were just going to give her fluids and an appetite stimulant and see how she did over the weekend, but she ended up being a candidate for a appetite drug trial and earned herself a free stay at the vet hotel and free bloodwork. THE ONLY CAT THAT DOESN’T GET ROOM AND BOARD IS THE ONLY ONE BRINGING HOME ANY BACON.

Long story short, Taco’s kidneys are good, Tots’s bloodwork does not show what they would expect in advanced kidney disease to everyone’s surprise, and she’s eating. They’ll run thyroid test but overall, she’s coming home today and while she still may not have that much time left in this world, she’ll make it a bit longer.

I need a vacation, but I traded my birthday vacation for a cat, so here we are.

His name is sort of a work in progress. It’s Boo, and I like Boo, but I’ve never had a cat where I kept the birth(?) name. And frankly, as I have opined on many a time, I never call any cat by their given name 99.9% of the time so what’s the point, really?

But as it happens, I am rather obsessed with drag queens and BooPaul just fit. That morphed into Boopaw, then the husband called him Dr. Boo Pinsky, and now I have, without any sort of permission or authority, designated him as Dr. Boopaw Charles the Second. I must note for posterity, however, that the husband has already nixed any rendition of Boopaw and suggested we wait to see what name he belongs to. At this particular moment, that name would be “Hello am terrified pls let me curl up into nothingness.”

As the insane cat person I am, I have been extremely anxious about his arrival. Taco thinks he’s the only cat on the planet and barely tolerated Moosh – despite Moosh having been here first. And, of course, let’s not forget about the elephant in the room (and by elephant I mean Taco) who is…let’s just say…a whole damn mood. Any incoming cat must not be rushed into Taco’s sphere.

The last time we got a new baby was 12 years ago (and by baby I mean the elephant), and we lived in a townhouse with not one, not two, but THREE bathrooms. Sweet baby jesus, I miss having three bathrooms. I would kill someone for just an extra half bath. But that is not the cards we were dealt whence purchasing a home, so we have one rather small bathroom. It’s not suitable for new cat enclosure. For him OR us. And due to whatever moron remodeled this house, or series or morons, we essentially only have three rooms that can be closed off. One is bathroom, already off the list. One is bedroom, the smaller of the remaining two rooms, but it has less windows, which, if you don’t know, is most conducive to sleep. The other is the dumb second bedroom that is really just one room attached to another room that clearly at some point was a sunroom, making for a large but awkwardly separated layout. Too large, I decided, to be a comfortable, safe enclosure for Dr. Boopaw Charles the Second.

I bought a pet tent. This was actually a wonderful idea. He’s in the closed off room but has his own little space with mesh walls where he can get used to smells and sounds but still feel snug. Now, I know that I’ve already mentioned that he is a bit anxy, but I did kind of think that once he was home he’d be “oh, lovely, I’ve arrived, I won the kitty lotto.” Ah, delusions.

He did not speak a word in the car, he did not want to snuggle when he arrived and was freed from the most hated of all devices, the cat carried…he got in the pet tent and purritoed himself into the blanket and said NO THANK YOU DO NOT WANT. So I did what any loving mother would do, and I stole Taco’s scratchy hidey hole thing and put it in there so Dr. BC2 would not need to smother himself to hide. And hide he has.

So that’s where we are. He did warm up slightly today and allowed belly rubs and chin scritchies and even purred, but he still is very much not ready for any of the world outside of his hidey hole. It’s a whole nother post to tell you about Taco/Elephant, but suffice it to say that he doesn’t actually know there’s another cat here, because when he saw the cat carrier he immediately hid under the bed because he’s Taco and the world revolves around him and obvs he must be going to the vet. He is not happy that he’s not allowed in the other room and is very sus, but he’s finally quieted enough to sleep at my feet for now. We’re so not even close to introductions that I can safely place that anxiety away for future use, which is nice, since I have plenty of other anxiety straining for a place in my brain.

Although it’s been just over a month since we lost my beloved Moosh, a crazy cat lady never stops looking at rescue cats. Even when I was at the husband-mandated limit of 2 cats, I still stopped to look at the adoptable cats EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. And of course, now that my household is below the husband-mandated limit, we have what I like to look at as “room to save another.”

No, there is no replacing my Moosh. I don’t expect to. But just on the off chance that Moosh inhabited a new kitty body and is waiting to be brought back home, I have to be diligent in efforts to seek out Moosh’s reincarnated soul (side note, I don’t really believe so much in reincarnation but I will, at times, disregard logic to live in my own fantasy).

As it so happens, on a trip to the pet store, I encountered a very friendly volunteer who was cleaning all the cages of the babies and chatted with me while I snuggled some floof beans. Somehow I got talked into volunteering as well. It’s just two hours a week, cleaning some poop, giving some food, snuggling babies, hawking kitties to potential homes, and falling in love. Like, is that even volunteering? I get karma points for PLAYING WITH CATS???

Aaaaand because I am me, I fell in love with the anxy cat that needs extra love. He’s also black (as we all know, my favorite) and has a long nose (sorry to all the short nose cats out there, I love you too but I love the long ones just a liiiiiiittle bit more). And he loves belly rubs. FUCKING SOLD.

Now I just have to convince the husband.

And also, should you come across this blog and live in Florida, please visit the PetSmart at 7777 Dr M.L.K. Jr St N, St. Petersburg, FL 33702 to adopt some kitties from Rescue Pets of Florida. They are very well taken care of and the volunteers who run it are so very dedicated to getting these guys good homes. Just don’t take Boo, please…

Since I’ve been so super neglectorino with my blog posting in the last few… years…I left a lot undocumented. And even if I’m the only person who reads this (despite my lofty and fanciful dreams that this would make me an internet sensation and therefore rich and famous), it’s still worth the effort. Going back and reading through my old posts has been a lovely trip through memory lane of a lot of shit that quite frankly, I’ve fully forgotten about. Maybe we can blame the pandy, since that’s taken up the better part of over two years, but I also have changed jobs twice since I last posted (aside from my recent Mooshmourning).

In the midst of 2020, I finally got a job as a paralegal. It paid well but the hours and the boss were terrible. I can blame a lot on that. It stifled a lot of me. I stuck it out for two years and am now in a wonderful job (also paralegal) where I am hybrid and can WFH some days, and the office is 875834978394 times closer than the horrible job. But this blog is not about me – most of the time – and I’m going to use this time to post about Moosh things before I forget them. I’m not getting any younger, you know.

Today, I shall share the story of Moosh and hyperthyroidism.

He’s always been a weirdo that randomly howled, not every night, just some – and you would think he was dying. But he was not, and he would always look befuddled as to why you ran out to find him in a panic. Hyperthyroid symptom #1, but since he’s always done it, it wasn’t something that I would consider a symptom. Yes, this is not important for the story, but I like to be thorough in case anyone happens upon this looking for cat hyperthyroid advice.

Anyway, what really caused the vet to look at his thyroid was a) she felt a growth and b) he puked on my head at just about 3 a.m. or so every day.

Option 1: You give your cat medicine every day for the rest of their life. MOOSH EFFING HATED MEDICINE. Tooooootally fine with needles, figure that one out. But also, the medicine option had a shorter life expectancy rate.

Option 2: You spend $1500 to send your cat to a cat thyroid clinic where they do some sort of nuclear treatment that makes them radioactive. I will also add, this is a one-time treatment with a 98% success rate. Moosh was a young man of 11 at the time, and the statistics were in his favor.

I don’t know how many cat thyroid clinics there are. I assume not many. But there is one vaguely close to us, and they were absolutely lovely. They have to keep your cat for 3 days in special radioactive-proof quarters, while they expel the majority of the radioactive-ness.

They gave me daily updates, and the lovely woman in charge of doing so was unrewarded by a very upset and unhappy hissy Mo. I mean, he rarely gets angry and hissy. I felt like I had a bad child. He also punctuated this terrible behavior with crapping all over the place when they brought him out to the husband to take home. Radioactive crap.

Then your cat has to be separated from the rest of the house and you can only spend 1-2 hours in close proximity and wear gloves when you scoop poop. This was not kosher for a momma’s boy who was already extremely upset that he was shipped off for 3 days. 2 weeks of that. My poor baby. He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to sleep on momma’s head, and he mewed at the door for hours every day. I cried a lot and turned up the TV really loud to get through it.

Long story short, the treatment worked, it bought us three more years with Moosh without having to subject us to daily medication, and he definitely still did the weird howly thing randomly but his thyroid levels stayed perfectly normal all the way until the bitter end. And may I add, worth every penny. I hope the lady at the clinic has a special place in heaven, because she certainly earned her wings.

I can’t even believe I have the wherewithal to sit and write this blog today. But perhaps because this is a labor of love and well-deserved, prepare yourself.

Moosh is gone. We had to let him go today. After 14 years and 2 days of having him in our lives, he is gone. He fought his hardest, and I know he wanted to live, but his body failed him. And we would have failed him if we hadn’t made the decision.

It does not matter how many times you’ve made the decision. It does not matter how many times you have been in that room telling your baby they are the best baby that ever lived and you will love them forever, it is CRUSHING. It does not matter how much you know your decision was right, and that it would have been worse to let them suffer.

But only 14 years for the goodest boi that ever lived? Unfair. Unfucking fair.

All I can do is cry and know I gave him a good life. And let’s be real, all he wanted was to love and be loved and he got that every day of his life (at least after we adopted him).

So in tribute and with an absolutely shattered heart, I give you Moosh.

Hard to believe this was a baby, but he was only 7 months.

When they were both tiny.

My heart is heavy, but my memories are plentiful, and I wouldn’t trade one second of time with him. My Momo, MeowMeow, Mooshies, Mao Mao, Moops, Moo, Miu Miu, Stinky Bananas, MoBear, Big Bear, Panther, Big Boy, Good Son, and whatever else I’ve called you through the years – I LOVE YOU.

Hi. Remember me? It’s been awhile. When I started this blog way back in 2012, I wasn’t a grumpy old lady yet. I had baby kitties.

You know what happens to baby kitties? THEY GROW UP. At a stupidly faster rate than we do.

And that’s why now, I’m having a shitshow of a meltdown because my eldest, my good son, my love, my Mooshbear…has cancer. Not fixable cancer. Big mass cancer, the kind that might have been there 6 months ago on an x-ray but wasn’t really all that clear so we were just going to see what happens because I didn’t want to front the money for an ultrasound at the time (which I am now feeling extraordinary guilt for). Then through a series of me attributing signs to other things, like he hates the taste of the anti-nausea pill that I put in his food, and subsequently not trusting food, and having already been a picky eater, I didn’t see this coming.

I thought he would always be fixable. He’s too young. Yes, he’s a “senior” cat but he’s not that goddamn senior.

He’s on steroids to see if we can squeeze out some quality of life. My heart breaks everytime I have to force a pill down his throat. And I’m exhausted with constant analyzing of “Am I torturing him by keeping him alive?”

I can’t give up on him but I owe him a good ending. Even if an ending is the worst possible thing for me.

I hate it. I love him. He’s been nothing but light and goodness in my life. I can look through the years of this blog and see just how much he has and always will mean to me. He’s our Momo. My work supervisor. Fuck death, really. Fuck it straight to hell.

The plan was to go through my house horror in chronological order here, but recent events demand that I skip ahead.

So. The termites. We had to fumigate. Which means you leave your domicile while people pump a bunch of poison in to kill the little shits.

Obviously you can choose to find a pet-friendly hotel and bring the cats along, but because tenting ain’t cheap and this is Florida, where people actually travel to on purpose and therefore it is rather expensive to get hotels in, we stayed with my best friend, who graciously welcomed us into her home.

But she has two pitbulls. I will preface this bay saying that I’m COMPLETELY on board with the idea that pitbulls are not bad dogs. It really is all about how they’re raised. Cutty and Moose are the sweetest. That being said, we decided to board the cats at the vet rather than subject them to our housing arrangements for several reasons:  a) my cats are terrified of everything b) my cats and cats in general do not like change c) we thought the cats would pee everywhere in fright and d) I love my vet, so it was a safe choice to leave them where I know they’ll be taken care of.

We got off to quite the auspicious start when we didn’t have an *actual* time to be out – “either the morning or afternoon,” she said. But it was ok, they would give us time to get out before they started pumping full of poison.

REASSURING. SO MUCH SO.

We decided 10am was a good time to vacate without sending the cats into further panic by introducing the mere possibility of being tented over and poisoned – and also what they’re most afraid of – strangers.

As it usually is, getting them into the carriers was a super fun ordeal, full of singing and beautiful harmonizing. It’s always the happiest of times when they sing the songs of their people at full volume! To make things ever-so-much better, when transporting them from car to vet, it was pouring. Glorious! Outside air AND wet! Their favorite combo! So I said goodbye to my very angry and wet cats, after discussing Taco’s blood poop (that’s been a thing) and went on my merry way to the house of dogs.

After 24 hours of poison, the tent comes off, then they open all the windows (a concern of ours since most of them don’t open) and use giant fans to blow all the remnants of poison bad stuff out into the ozone. It sits overnight until some person who is (I hope) extremely well-trained in measuring poison gas levels comes in and deems your home at “acceptable” levels. They remove the “DANGER THIS PLACE WILL KILL YOU I’M NOT KIDDING” signs and put up ones that say “HUMANS WON’T DIE HERE I PROMISE.”

Of course, who believes that these people REALLY do their jobs properly? I certainly didn’t, so we tested it ourselves before picking up the delicate kittles. After 3 hours of re-airing and cleaning and not dying ourselves, I went off to get the babies.

It just so happens that both boys refused to poop until the morning of pickup. Was their poop in any way alarming? Of course not. Perfect tootsie roll nuggets without a hint of blood.

As I patted myself on the bad for my fantastic luck, I headed off for a happy reunion between cats and home.

 

Until…

 

About halfway through the ride and the caterwauling, I noticed a smell. The smell got stronger and stronger. I checked my AC settings. Did I have recirculated air turned off? Did I have it on defrost? As I did my mental checklist, it dawned on me. IT WAS CAT PEE. THE HAUNTINGLY AROMATIC SMELL OF AMMONIA.

Lemme tell ya what an awesome rest of the drive that was. Which cat was it? Is it sloshing all over my car seats? What am I going to do upon arrival to manage this?

SURPRISE! It was Taco (shocker!). The husband met me outside with a towel and help. Fortunately he was in the hard carrying case with a pee pad, so while it didn’t slosh or soak through all over my car, he did get to sit in it for a good 15 minutes. Did I mention it was rush hour?

Options: try to bathe a cat that’s already clearly traumatized? No.

Wet paper towel wipe down, towel dry – hope for the best. Whattya gonna do?

He still smells like pee a lil. We accept this.

It’s also amazing that the vet put Taco in the hard case and Moosh in the soft. I usually give Moosh the hard because he’s a TINY bit fatter (they’re both obese by vet standards though).

Plus side, I stopped worrying about poison gas pockets. I ALMOST thought that maybe finding one and inhaling really deep wouldn’t be the worst thing at that point…

Clearly, we’ve all made it through this alive, except for two baby geckos (I was horrified) and ideally all of the termites (also a pile of ants in my bathtub that established where a point of entry for them was) – also hopefully every other insect in the entire world and please don’t tell me that some of them are good, like spiders, because I appreciate them as a whole but RESPECTFULLY I DON’T WANT THEM IN MY GD HOUSE.

Oh, and as you can see, the cats are full over their traumatizing experience.

One super fun fact about buying a home is everything either requires very precise timing or sitting around waiting. As I’ve expressed multiple times before in this blog, I am a TERRIBLE sit-around-and-waiter. The worst person ever.

 

I’m really not sure how people manage selling a home while simultaneously purchasing one. Basically, your home really isn’t yours (or in the case of selling, NOT yours) until the day of closing. The only thing I can possibly compare the fun and games of purchasing a home to is playing Super Mario Brothers, where some mistakes will just make you lose your fireballs, a subsequent mistake will make you teeny tiny Mario and the next mistake will make you dead. Except in the game, you can use another life if you have one, and maybe don’t have to start all over from the beginning if you’re far enough along. But if you’re DEAD-dead, you start alllll over from level one. Hey, doesn’t that sounds uplifting?

 

A partial but not remotely complete list of things that could possibly make you start all over again:

• You put in a full price offer and someone outbids you
• You put in an offer that is more in tune to what the house is worth and you get rejected or counteroffered with more than you want to pay
• Your offer is accepted, and the home inspector finds things that are icky and scare you off
• The home inspector finds things you ask the seller to fix as a condition of buying the home and the seller declines
• You do something to screw up your mortgage approval before underwriting (lose your job, put something major on credit)
• The house appraises for less than you’re supposed to buy it for
• The appraiser finds that the pool on the property is actually a tiny bit on your neighbors’ property even though it was approved as-is 20 years ago (true story, happened to someone I know, and the surveyor said  “Oh, our equipment is much more precise now” – really?? Whose fault is that??)
• A natural disaster destroys the home before you close (unlikely but totally possible)
• You don’t fill out the 28357348 forms you’re required to within whatever timeline is needed
• You fill out the forms incorrectly
• Your agent/broker screws up your paperwork
• The title company finds a problem with the title of the house (there’s a lien on the property or a weird second mortgage or the deed wasn’t transferred properly at some point)
• Your wire transfer doesn’t go through (ours went REALLY slow and gave us many panic attacks)
• You learn at walkthrough (JUST prior to closing) that the repairs agreed upon in the contract weren’t done properly
• You can’t find home insurance (if you’re in a “coastal” part of Florida, you have limited options – Geico, for example, declined to offer coverage)

 

Some of these things can be fixed. Some cannot. If they can’t, congratulations! You get to start the whole process over again. There’s no “saved game.”

 

So if you’re buying AND selling, you have all of the above TIMES TWO. Noooo thank you.

 

But if you’re lucky, you have really good people in your corner – ideally, your agent, who hopefully answers your questions in a timely manner without having to call them 827593 times to remind them to answer you (unlike mine) — or your loan officer, who should be a super cheery, wonderful lady (shoutout to Michelle at GTE) who was always full of positivity even when she had to talk to your shitbag agent that you KNOW was a dick. Or your insurance guy, who actually answered your emails and calls even if it was 9pm (I thanked him profusely and recommended him to everyone I know). And most important, friends and family – the friend that referred me to the insurance guy, my mom who listened to hours of overanalyzing, the kitties, who didn’t give two shits (but get points for purrs and snuggles). Oh, and the husband, a saint of a human being for not running far, far away as most sane people would if they had to deal with a high anxiety, overwound cat mom such as myself.

We must have looked at 50+ houses. It can get terribly depressing. Especially knowing that if we just went up to our max approved loan amount, we would have had SO much more choice. But we’re responsible. Or at least we thought we were. We happen to live in a very popular county in Florida. You don’t get much for under 200k. First world problems? Probably. But it still sucks.

 

We had pretty reasonable must-haves. Concrete block (we have hurricanes), having most big ticket items newer (HVAC, roof, water heater), no flood insurance required (harder than you think, also different from hurricane evacuation zones), and enough yard to be a buffer between neighbors. When we started, we thought 2 bathrooms were a must-have. THAT is a rare diamond not found in our price range. Unless you give up the concrete block for a wood frame. Everything is a trade-off. And of course, none of it matters if you find the house and it goes under contract before you can put in an offer (that happened only once, and I think I’m still salty about it because it was the ONLY house that fit all our wants except for the 2 bathrooms and it was meticulously cared for by an old school guy who lived there for 60 years and even had a hand-carved door that his kids gave him as an anniversary present).

 

If you’ve never experienced the amazing world of flipped homes, I urge you to go check out some listings. Everything looks like HGTV in pictures online but half of the houses are baffling in person. The one that sticks out to me is the one that was 199K with a completely brand new kitchen… and everything else in the 1960s house just had a coat of paint. Except the yellowed tile windowsills. The electrical box looked like it was going to rust away and/or explode.

 

And what’s MOST baffling is not that these people thought that a super fance kitchen would fool buyers, but that the electrical crap won’t even pass inspection for insurance so fooling buyers is moot…then again, knowing what I know now, maybe there’s a way around that.

 

We went to an open house that was over budget but we were there so why not? 239K for 800 sq. ft. It had beautiful tiles in the kitchen, a butcher block countertop, a barn door bathroom – but to get to the bathroom, you had to walk through the kitchen. Which, by the way, is at the opposite side of the house from the master bedroom. You have to walk around walls to pee in the middle of the night? Nooooo thank you. I think it finally sold for like, 220k – but I pity the people who had to make that work for that price.

 

Basically, the world of house hunting is a bitch when you’re trying to stay on a budget. If you find a house you like, do you like the neighborhood? Is it convenient? Is it slummy? Are all the houses around you rentals? Do your neighbors have loud dogs?

 

Things we ruled out houses we liked for:

• Teenagers milling around the neighborhood midday (even though the house was 2 blocks from a popular Italian market, which is apparently a HUGE selling point)
• Musty smell despite no evidence of water intrusion (it smelled like our mock courtroom which I know has water issues)
• Yard too big
• Bedroom too small

 

But mostly we ruled things out for being halfassed done and overly expensive. Or not done at all and terrifying.

 

In the end, it comes down to what you’re willing to sacrifice for the things you really want. You’re not going to get it all. It’s kind of a depressing thing to realize. And, of course, do the cats have good windows? That did weigh into many, many decisions. For all the problems in the house we ended up in, the cats have good windows and looooots of squirrels. Of course, by “good” I just mean “big” – they all need to be replaced. Including the one that has a window unit in it that was supposed to be replaced BEFORE we closed that as of today, went unreplaced for a THIRD TIME due to wrong size. THREE TIMES. I honestly thought the husband was joking but alas, he was not.

*&#$(*#&*!(&*#(&$

The husband and I had been meaning to buy a home for years, but we put it off and put it off and put it off…until the day that our landlord informed us he was selling our townhouse and would we like to buy it? (the answer is a RESOUNDING no, BTW.) Since we were off-lease at that point, we didn’t know how long we had to find a place and get a loan and close and all that.

 

We could have rented somewhere, but the rents around here in Florida have skyrocketed and frankly, it just didn’t make sense when we could be putting that money into something of our own. At least, that’s what they tell you.

 

So we started out. Hello, sticker shock. If you want a house for under $200k around here, you better WORK. They’re all either flipped and overpriced, pieces of absolute crap or snapped up faster than you can line up a showing. To start, we had a very nice lady as our agent, who helped us put an offer on a house in a lovely part of town, but we couldn’t agree on repairs (it needed a roof) so we went back on the hunt. And although the lady was very nice, we didn’t feel like we fully meshed with her, so we tried a friend of a friend who was a bit more, shall we say, sharky.

 

Listen, the kittles needed a roof over their heads, and we felt like we were under a time crunch. It seemed reasonable at the time to go with a more aggressive approach. This was the BIGGEST GIGANTIC-EST TERRIBLE NO-GOOD MISTAKE EVER. I’ll skip to the end, in case you’re worrying about the cats. They do have a roof over their heads. We now own a house. But their mommy and daddy are stressed to the max in what seems like a neverending tale of shitstorm.

It’s our first time buying a home. We didn’t know what the hell we were in for. And my hope is that this blog, aside from being a helpful guide to cat people with lemon cats, is helpful for just ONE OTHER PERSON so they don’t have to go through what we did.

 

This is a very long story so I’ll break it up into smaller pieces for brevity’s sake. Here’s what you’re going to learn:

• Why real estate agents for buyers are useless (sorry to any good ones out there, but in Florida, it’s really a misnomer to say you’re working for the buyer because LEGALLY all you are is someone that shows the house for the seller’s agent)
• Why you should hire your own home inspector – not the one your agent recommends – and why you might as well put out the money to set up termite, plumbing, electrical, structural and roofing inspectors that SPECIALIZE in what they’re doing
• Why you should be extremely specific in your contract and not assume that the professionals aren’t just using terms of the trade
• What you should know about closing costs
• What you should know about flood maps
• How to estimate your future property taxes
• Who’s responsible for making sure you don’t get screwed (hint: it’s you. Only you.)
• How to find out what you need to know about utilities when your shitty agent never gets back to you
• How to know if your agent is a total shitbag
• What to know when you do final walkthrough
• What you need to know about a home built before the 1980s
• How much windows cost
• Why you need to check for termites even in a block home
• What legal recourse you have when you discover things after you close
• What happens when you complain about your terrible service to your agent’s broker
• Why using a good contractor is important
• Why you should always get a second opinion
• And many things in between.

 

Excited? Stay tuned.