[speaker001:] the home that uh we bought back in the early eighties was uh was was typical tract home and we were uh trying to find something that would would get us into the housing market as it were thinking that someday we'd move on uh the economy however changed that a little bit and looks like we're going to be in this home for a while but uh it's not too bad
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] some of the things that we didn't uh think about when we bought it turned out uh worked out all right for us was we bought on a top of a hill and some of our neighbors down the the lower part uh get their yards flooded every once in a while doesn't get up into the house but it just makes a bit of a mess in the in the yard itself a little bit of debris and a little bit of runoff on the
[speaker002:] uh yeah
[speaker001:] on the uh grass area it's kind of hard to keep grass in certain areas and I'd never really thought about that but but we're pretty much at the very top of this little hill and all the runoff from from the concrete uh the shopping center near us and the alleyway all that goes down to our neighbors so so that was a little thing that I'd never really considered and was fortunate that it worked out that way
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] uh another uh calamity I guess that befalls some purchasers that I didn't uh think about when I first purchased this house was what can happen right immediately behind you we are on the edge of a development that has a little retainer wall that separates us from the rest of the from a street and a little little uh business area and uh some friends of ours moved into a house and a couple of years later a a uh shopping center built up behind them and it was a grocery store that had that stocked at night at about three am every night
[speaker002:] oh oh no
[speaker001:] they would run the trash compactor and it was so loud it would wake them up and they never got used to it and they finally had to move they just couldn't stand that noise then oddly enough after that they uh uh it it it closed down now that grocery store isn't there and hasn't been there for about six years now so uh it's kind of a a bad thing to happen but we happen to have landed again in a very lucky spot there is a little business development behind us that's a bit of a a a little bank and a couple of dry cleaning things and little strip shopping center but it's several houses down because the property that's the other side of our little wall is a triangle shape and the wedge part of the triangle got too skinny to do anything more than put some grass and trees there there's not even a parking lot so it it's a nice uh two or three houses on either side of us is nice grass and trees and
[speaker002:] oh good
[speaker001:] and then across from that is a a major four lane street and then across from that is is uh the parks of the city that we live in has some soccer fields and some baseball fields and that completely goes on to the horizon so as far as we can look out over our little retaining wall is grass and trees and parks
[speaker002:] oh that's really nice
[speaker001:] and we really didn't didn't uh I mean that wasn't our consideration when when we bought it it was a complete blank lot they hadn't even built the house yet and we were new to the this whole process and all we knew is that it was a the cheapest house that this this tract development uh sold so it turned out to be pretty good and
[speaker002:] where do you what area do you live in oh okay I live in Dallas uh Rowlett
[speaker001:] Dallas yeah it's uh it's a nice area as it were about the only two things that uh didn't work out too well for us well one of them's nice in in a way we're on the beginning of a corner we live on a on a U shaped drive and we're the first house that they actually started turning to make for a turn on a on a cul-de-sac not a cul-de-sac but a turn on a ninety degree turn on the street which meant that we're not jammed right up against our neighbor's house
[speaker002:] uh-huh oh that's really nice
[speaker001:] there's there's like twelve or fifteen feet on one side but on the other side there's over sixty feet before the next house because they they set us back a little ways and they turned it sideways so our houses begin to to turn to to make this turn as it were so we're real far away and we have a really large lot we have a bigger lot than all the rest of the the ones down the street but uh as it turned out we decided we learned that neither one of us really likes taking care of all that grass so it it was a bit of a drawback but uh it'll probably make for a good selling point if we ever give it to someone that does like all that grass
[speaker002:] oh yeah it probably will
[speaker001:] and uh we did also end up in a in an area that we didn't we didn't realize when we bought it that uh the soil is that uh black clay and it
[speaker002:] yeah we have that
[speaker001:] it tends to uh go to the extremes of being dry or being moist and it it's done a little bit of a foundation damage that uh most of these houses get no matter how much watering we do
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] so we have to contend with doors that sometimes sometimes the during the year don't uh just close just right and uh things of that nature
[speaker002:] right I guess that's just Texas though you have to live with that
[speaker001:] yeah that's true there are there is a little segment little segment up near McKinney and up near um uh they said out near Wylie there's some some little areas where the soil is completely sandy and then it it uh goes back into the black gumbo around it
[speaker002:] hum uh-huh
[speaker001:] but there are some housing developments that uh the guy that came out and inspected our damage was saying that there are some little little pockets of neighborhoods that don't have these problems at all and had I only known you know maybe I'd have looked over there
[speaker002:] really
[speaker001:] uh what about your house
[speaker002:] well we bought uh our first house at the end of eighty six and like I said it's out in Rowlett and it's it's real nice it's four bedroom and it's kind of a tract area too we've got people behind us and on both sides of us I don't really like that too well I keep telling my husband that our next house is going to sit square in the middle of at least ten acres of land but uh it's a it's a good size and it's something we can stay in and grow in for quite a while I guess uh hopefully till the real estate market turns around like you we we bought when it was down a little bit but we've had so many repossessions in our neighborhood that we couldn't sell for anywhere near what we've got into it so
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] it uh hopefully it'll turn around
[speaker001:] it's true that there's always that chance I guess
[speaker002:] sometime yeah oh I think it will eventually out here they're building more new houses all the time though and people can go and buy a brand new one that's never been lived in for less than they can get a used one so I guess that's what they would choose
[speaker001:] hum
[speaker002:] but there uh well as a first time home buyer I know what you mean there's a lot of things you're not sure about what to look out for the only really trouble we've had with our house is the seals breaking between the double panes and water moisture
[speaker001:] um-hum um-hum
[speaker002:] gets in there and you can hardly see out of them now they've got so much and the builder's gone bankrupt and the glass company's gone bankrupt so we don't really have any recourse and just hope they break or something
[speaker001:] um-hum nothing you can do that's right there's nothing you can do
[speaker002:] yeah but other than that we haven't had any problems
[speaker001:] yeah we've got we've got one that's done that uh we've been pretty fortunate most of our neighbors have had many more um
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] I don't know that we've done anything different to prevent ours from doing that but most of our neighbors have ended up replacing them uh buying some nice Anderson windows or some some uh name brand windows uh one neighbor went with whatever Sears installs and they have the the different kind of window that the kind that you can tilt out either pane and and raise or lower you know lower the top down or the bottom up or tilt it in both of them tilt in so you can clean them or and it's a real strange
[speaker002:] oh uh-huh
[speaker001:] mechanical beast but uh they haven't lost their seal yet so it's I guess there's a quality some quality in it
[speaker002:] yeah we we had um our insurance our home owner's insurance actually covered some of it because I told them it looks like something's eating into the glass it turns like a milky white you know so I said well how do we know it wasn't some kind of chemical or something that's eating into that which would be covered under a glass rider so
[speaker001:] so um-hum
[speaker002:] they replaced like seven of them and we just had to pay the deductible but
[speaker001:] hum
[speaker002:] they wouldn't that insurance company went out of business in Texas because they had so many claims that they couldn't make a profit and so now none of the other insurance companies will will consider covering that
[speaker001:] goodness yeah that's
[speaker002:] which I can understand it's really not
[speaker001:] that'd be hard to hard to cover all the ones that go bad
[speaker002:] damaged oh yeah
[speaker001:] it's true
[speaker002:] but I bet we've got at least seven more now that are bad
[speaker001:] goodness
[speaker002:] just about every window in our house I guess eventually is going to have to be replaced
[speaker001:] yeah and it'd be nice to do it with with all the same kind too
[speaker002:] yeah well what they did is just they came in and just cut the glass out of the frame and put more glass in
[speaker001:] hum
[speaker002:] that's over a year ago and it's it hasn't had any problems yeah seemed to
[speaker001:] and those held that's interesting I didn't know they could do that
[speaker002:] somebody told me that they thought that too was caused by just a little bit of shifting in the foundation puts a little pressure on that seal and makes them pop open
[speaker001:] yeah that could be but once you get that moisture in there it it can fog up and not go away quickly enough
[speaker002:] right
[speaker001:] well I hear my kid calling me I better go see what he wants okay bye
[speaker002:] okay well it was good talking to you bye