3 Bittersweet Lane

On Easter Sunday, we decided to put in a low offer on a foreclosure we've been eyeing since it was a short sale nearly three years ago in Dewitt.  It's in the one neighborhood I was interested in there.   Older, right off 481 but you'd never know it.   After a couple of weeks of back and forth and a lot of weird requests from the bank that owned it, Bank of America, and an offer from a guy whose been trying to get it since last fall, we made a deal.  We did have to put our foot down about a clean title....they wanted no responsibility.   Turns out they illegally subdivided out a small piece to the former owner where all liens would fall.   A complicated mess that both our agent and lawyer had never dealt with.  We closed two weeks ago, on a Wednesday morning, with a lot of signing in our lawyer's downtown office.  An older Italian guy, he got worked up at their mistakes and got on the phone with their agent twice to bluster at them.  Then they handed me the only key they had to the front door.   This house has 12 doors to the outside not including the three garage doors!  Nuts, right?  This house is full of crazy things.  The light fixtures are everywhere and so random.  I took this photo two days after close when the landscape guy had started work.

This was his first pile of brush of many.  See that cupola on top of what is our bedroom?  I loved it and thought it gave the house great character.  Todd showed me last week through the attic you could see daylight.  I was insistent we could save it,  Then Kevin called: the giant leak in that room is there.  Of course.   It had to come down.  I asked him to take it off in one piece and see what I could do with it.

Up close it was nothing special.  Rotting wood and tarpaper .. Not tin as it might appear.  Good bye cupola.   And the house actually looks fine without it.