My life lately has been one problem after another. Wham! Deal with it. Wham! Crap, deal with it, too. Wham-whacka-whacka-feckitty-feck, what else? What fecking else?
One of the conditions of our house sale was an inspection. The guy showed up on Saturday and spent nearly two hours doing the equivalent of a pap smear to our property. Things were going surprisingly well, which should have been a clue that the other crap-covered shoe was about to drop. As he was leaving the inspector came to our door and announced he had found vermiculite in our attic.
Vermiculite?
He was holding a baggie full of some kind of gray pebbly stuff. "Vermiculite itself isn't a problem," he said. "The problem is, it could contain asbestos."
Asbestos. I knew what asbestos was. Asbestos is a nasty, cancer-causing, house-deal-killing toxic nightmare that requires haz-mat suits, masks and tons of money to clean up.
I can't even tell you how discouraging this is. The building inspection that was done in 2004 made no mention of vermiculite. "Fibreglass" was the only insulation type listed by the lazy, lying, no-good inspector at the time. We can't sue, of course, because the inspection was paid for by the people we bought the house from. Screwed, blued and tattooed, that's us.
So here's the deal. The vermiculite has to tested. If it is asbestos-free, the people who want our house will firm up their offer. If it has asbestos, Dave and I will have to pay to have it professionally removed and new insulation put in, at a ballpark cost of $10,000.
If we were making money off the sale of our house, that $10,000 might not be such a big deal. But we are already losing money – $16,000, to be exact. That's how much cash we will have to shell out to get out of our mortgage, pay the realtor, the lawyer and whoever else has their hands out. Apparently we paid too much for the property four years ago – that, combined with a flaccid economy, has meant we will not be making enough money from the deal to pay our bills.
If asbestos is found, we might have to pay $26,000 or more on the day the deal closes.
In case you're thinking we have $26,000 hanging around, we don't. We will have to cash in our investments, sell a lot of our belongings and maybe borrow money in order to get this done. And if we have to pay to have the asbestos removed, there's no way we can afford to buy a house when we move to Alberta. We'll have to rent for a while, and that's fine, but that sucks because we're old and we had dreams, and now they're probably going to be crushed.
If my luck wasn't so shitty right now I'd say there's a good chance there won't be asbestos in the vermiculite. But it's me we're talking about and, dollars to doughnuts our attic is full of it.
Some days I don't think I can take one more bad thing. Not. One. More.
