An influencer who believed she had purchased her ‘dream home’ soon realized it was more of a nightmare due to a series of ongoing issues.
Buying a house is one of those significant life events that you hope goes smoothly.
It’s typically one of the most costly endeavors you’ll undertake, and if all goes well, you’ll finally have a place to call your own, assuming you can manage the mortgage payments.
Instead of funneling a large portion of your salary into a landlord’s pocket, you’re investing in your future.
That’s how it should be, but when things go awry, you’re left with an expensive property that the bank largely owns, which you’ll be paying off for many years.
Consider the situation of TikToker and influencer Laureise Livingston (@laureise), who bought a house a couple of years ago and started discovering numerous issues.
It isn’t the house itself that’s the main issue, despite being 100 years old, which Laureise acknowledged presented ‘a lot of opportunity for issues’.
Instead, it’s the ‘very woodsy, very beautiful’ location that has proven problematic.
“It has been rodents and bugs and beetles that have just been eating us alive financially,” she explained, revealing that living in a picturesque woodland area isn’t always ideal.
Laureise recounted sitting on her couch one evening and hearing scratching beneath her floorboards, which wasn’t the start of a horror movie but rather an infestation of Norwegian rats, also known as Brown rats.
She described the ‘ginormous’ rats as chewing through the heating pipes in her home, and even more concerning, exposing asbestos due to their relentless gnawing.
To exacerbate the situation, the rats were ‘using the asbestos to make nests underneath our house’, which cost her ‘about $10,000’ to resolve while her home was left without heating for ‘maybe six months’.
After finally addressing that issue, another arose when a neighbor contracted a termite infestation.
Upon inspecting their own home as a precaution, they were relieved to find no termites but dismayed to discover ‘woodboring beetles’.
https://www.tiktok.com/@username/video/7408977580453317930
These beetles are reportedly ‘just as bad as termites’ and required two possible solutions for eradication.
Option one was a $4,500 ‘heat treatment’, necessitating the removal of anything that could melt or ignite, followed by eliminating the beetles with heat.
Alternatively, she could opt for a $7,000 fumigation, requiring a four-day evacuation while the house was filled with poison.
Ultimately, she chose the heat treatment; the challenges of homeownership, indeed.