An influencer who bought her ‘dream home’ quickly discovered it has turned into a bit of a nightmare after she’s been beset by problems.
Buying a house is one of those major milestones in life which you really need to go well.
It’s one of the most expensive things you’ll ever do and if it works out you will finally have a place to call home, at least as long as you can keep up the mortgage payments.
No longer are you shovelling a big chunk of your paycheck directly into a landlord’s pocket where you’ll never see it again, now you’re paying into solidifying your future.
Or that’s how it’s supposed to go, because when it doesn’t work out you’re left with something really expensive which the bank mostly owns that you’ll be paying off forever.
She bought a home in a lovely woodland area, unfortunately the woodland wanted in (Getty Stock Image)
Spare a thought then for TikToker and influencer Laureise Livingston (@laureise), who bought a house a couple of years ago and started finding all sorts of issues with it.
It’s not actually the house itself which is the problem, even though it is 100 years old and Laureise said there were ‘a lot of opportunity for issues’.
Instead it’s the ‘very woodsy, very beautiful’ part of the world the house is located in.
“It has been rodents and bugs and beetles that have just been eating us alive financially,” she said as she explained that living in a picturesque woodland area isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Laureise explained that she’d been relaxing on her couch one night when she heard a scratching beneath her floorboards, rather than being the prelude to some horror film it turned out to be an infestation of Norwegian rats, also known as Brown rats.
She said the ‘ginormous’ rats were chewing through the heating pipes in her house, and even worse there’s asbestos in there which is now being exposed due to their persistent gnawing.
“That’s a nice house, shame if someone made asbestos nests underneath it.” (Getty Stock Image)
To make matters worse the rats were ‘using the asbestos to make nests underneath our house’, and to sort it all out cost her ‘about $10,000’ while her home went without heating for ‘maybe six months’.
Having finally dealt with that problem the next one promptly showed up as one of their neighbours got a termite infestation.
Getting their own home checked out as a precaution they were happy to discover a lack of termites, but not so jazzed to find out they did have ‘woodboring beetles’.
Thankful to own a home but I fear we may never financially recover from this lol.
♬ original sound – Laureise Livingston
It turns out those are ‘just as bad as termites’ and there were two solutions to dealing with them.
Option one reportedly cost $4,500 and would ‘heat treat’ the home, meaning they’d have to take everything that could melt or catch fire out and then blast the beetles.
Alternatively, she could spend $7,000 and get the place fumigated, spending four days out of the house while it was pumped full of poison.
In the end she went for the heat treatment, the perils of being a homeowner, eh?
