The woodland abode: A cautionary tale

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Published Date 10/8/2024

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach," wrote Henry David Thoreau in his seminal work, Walden. However, for one San Francisco Bay Area couple, their foray into woodland living became more akin to a horror movie where the monsters are microscopic and the headaches come in the form of repair bills.

Realtor.com’s Marianne Garvey tells the tale of influencer Laureise Livingston and her husband's dream of owning a charming 100-year-old home nestled in the woods turned into a nightmarish battle against nature's tiniest invaders. Their story serves as a stark reminder that sometimes, the grass—or in this case, the forest floor—isn't always greener on the other side.

"Just a PSA about buying a house in a wooded area: Just don't," Livingston warns in a TikTok video that has since gone viral. Garvey says the couple's idyllic retreat, purchased two years ago, quickly revealed its dark underbelly. Like a Trojan horse filled not with Greek soldiers but with rodents and beetles, their dream home harbored unwelcome surprises.

The first act in this woodland drama starred Norwegian rats, turning their cozy nights on the couch into a horror show of scratching sounds emanating from beneath the floorboards. These uninvited guests weren't content with merely making noise; they decided to dine on the home's HVAC piping, wrapped enticingly in asbestos. The couple's attempts to evict these furry squatters led to a financial bloodbath, with treatments and repairs costing upwards of $10,000 and leaving them without heat or air for half a year.

Garvey reports that just when the couple thought they'd weathered the worst, enter the wood-boring beetles—nature's tiny carpenters with a penchant for destruction. These insects, as voracious as they were unknown to the couple, threatened to reduce their home to sawdust. The options for dealing with this new menace were equally unappealing: a $4,500 treatment that required removing anything that could melt, or a $7,000 fumigation that would exile them from their home for four days.

For those still enchanted by the siren song of forest living, Livingston's experience underscores the importance of thorough inspections and pointed questions about pest histories before signing on the dotted line. After all, in the dance between man and nature, it's clear who leads—and it's not always the one with the mortgage.

As Thoreau also wrote, "It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise."

Livingston's tale serves as a cautionary fable for would-be woodland dwellers. The moral of the story? Paradise comes at a price, and sometimes that price is paid in pest control bills and sleepless nights wondering what's lurking behind the walls.

Realtor, TBWS

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