Last July we found the perfect lake house for our family. We had been on the lookout for several months, spending time at various lakes within a few hours home in Lexington.
We spent a weekend last June with friends at Dale Hollow Lake on the Kentucky/Tennessee border and fell in love with the lake. It was beautiful, clean, and most importantly not crowded. One lazy evening I opened the trusty Zillow app and did a search for nearby properties for sale. An amazing house popped up as a FSBO. It looked fantastic from the pictures, had the space we were looking for, a lake view, it was on 4 acres, and it was a great price. I immediately texted the number and asked if it was possible to see it that weekend. To my disappointment, I did not receive a reply.
We went back home and later the next week I decided to try and call the number. You know, just in case they didn’t get the text that was never responded to. Someone picked up the phone and said, “Bank of Cumberland. How may I help you?”
I was a little confused, but explained that I was calling about a house I saw listed on Zillow. The lady informed me that it was a bank owned property and transferred me to the Vice President. He gave me a little information about the house and we scheduled to see it that Sunday.
My husband and I drove the 2.5 hours down (sans kiddos) and spent about 20 minutes at the house. It was perfect for us and a great price at that. There was no negotiating, the VP told us they would only take less than $5,000 below asking so that’s what we offered. They accepted the offer the next day.
We knew the house needed some TLC. It was built in 2008, but the bank had it for the last three years or so and it sat vacant. Even from these pictures you can see that the trim needed repainting, but all in all everything appeared to be pretty minor (especially given some of the other houses we had looked at).
We spent most of last summer just enjoying the house and fixing up the inside a bit. Mostly painting, installing shelving, etc. Around the fall, hubby stepped on the top step of the porch and went right through a deck board. Luckily he’s quick on his feet and grabbed onto on of the columns. What we found underneath was quite concerning. It wasn’t just a rotten deck board, but all of the stair stringers were rotten as well.
The builder placed the wood directly on the ground. Worse than that though, they actually dug out an area for the stringers about 6″ deep that did nothing except hold water. We knew we had several other boards on the three decks that were also rotten, including the ramp of the side deck.
Hubby decided that it was time to find out how big of a problem we had so he started with removing the ramp on the side porch. We uncovered LOTS more problems. Same issues with the decking being directly to the ground, but apparently the builders did not flash anything. Not the windows, doors, transition between Hardie board and stone, not behind the seams in the Hardie board – absolutely nothing was flashed. They didn’t even caulk the seams in between the siding board ends. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they also put chipboard behind the stone all the way to the ground, which just soaked water up the walls.
So, for 10 years this house has just been seeping and soaking up water behind its beautiful facade. All that water turns the insides into this…
We are still in the process of replacing the exterior of the house. Luckily for us the interior construction was much better than the exterior. The house is actually inhabitable and we have been able to enjoy it most weekends.
I’ll post an update soon on what we are doing to resolve the issues.
Gen Z House 