We should have known something was up when the seller took our first offer, with the only stipulation being we had to waive the inspection. (Later, we were told that the owners had gotten a divorce, she got the house, then decided to quit her job to go to Mexico and swim with the turtles.)
The house was so nice, though, and it was a seller’s market—we’d looked at so many houses over the last two months, making offers and getting outbid time and time again. We loved the house, and figured, hey, if a problem or two came up with the inspection, so be it. At least we’d finally be able to stop renting. We’d be homeowners! And, in our defense, the realtor agreed. He told us he used to be a contractor and he said he didn’t see any major problems with the house.
So we bought. It has its little oddities (you can only turn on the office light by turning on the garage light, and the door to the garage doesn’t have a lock—we hadn’t even noticed until we needed it to lock. When our garage door went kaput and had to stay open for two days, waiting for a repairman, we went to bed every night with the door unlocked. Not scary at all…).
We also found weird things all over the yard. Once, when I was mowing, I screamed so loud my husband thought I’d cut off my foot or something. He came running, only to have me point out a face looking up at us from the ground. It was some sort of mask, buried, face up. Think ‘Brady Bunch’ Hawaii surf episode, with the tiki idol necklace. That’s what the mask looked like, a tiki idol. Who does that? We found other, less weird things in the yard, too, but that was the oddest.
But the weirdest thing was the drainage bill.
Turns out, we were using water, but it wasn’t going anywhere—at least that’s what the county told us in a letter. The county assesses drainage fees and notes them on your property taxes (unlike Florida, where we used to see a drainage charge on our monthly water bills). But the county sent us a weird note, telling us there must be a problem somewhere in our system, because we were using water every month that simply wasn’t draining. Huh.
So, we got a guy in. We’d been wanting to redo the downstairs bathroom since we moved in. The downstairs is really a, well, kind of a finished basement? The house is three stories, sort of, if you count that finished basement. From the front of the house, you can’t see it, it’s literally a basement from that angle, but we live on a hill, and from the back of our house, the basement is on the ground level. It’s weird, but that’s what it is. From the back, you can see the windows of the ‘basement’, so it’s a non-basement basement. It’s finished with a home gym, the master bedroom, and the master bathroom.
Only the master bathroom sucks. It’s got a crappy pedestal sink, a limestone shower they ‘forgot’ to finish (at least that’s what the contractor suggested, that they forgot to do it…) so it mildews after every shower, and a huge jacuzzi tub we just don’t use. Neither my husband nor I take baths, so since we moved in, we’ve been planning to remodel the bathroom.
Our plan was to take out the shower and tub, make one whole wall a shower, with dual showerheads on either side and a cool bench so I can sit and shave my legs, with glass walls…and we’d rip out the current shower and pedestal sink and install a dual vanity. For goodness sake, the entire bathroom only had one electric outlet! Who does that? So, we were putting in more outlets and swapping out the horrible pocket door for a barn door.
When the contractor came to take a look, he told us the tile floor seemed ‘soft’ to him. He asked what was underneath. He told us it couldn’t be concrete, there was too much give. I laughed and asked if it could be carpet. Not a humorous man, he didn’t find that funny. He told us he’d find out once he started pulling up the tile.
The estimate was a lot, but we knew it would be and we wanted it done, so we signed off and renovations began.
The crew showed up bright and early on a Tuesday. I kid, they did not. They were supposed to be at our house between 7 and 8, they showed up at 9. This, I soon learned, was to be their norm. Telling us one time and always arriving an hour later.
The first couple days were spent ripping out sinks, toilets, cutting walls to make way for a new door. It was messy, it was loud. I needed serious headphones for work; plus, it got me out of a lot of meetings, “Sorry, we have contractors in the house and it’s so loud.”
After those first days, it was time to really rip out the floor. “Hey, got a second?” I heard our contractor ask my husband, who was in his home office.
“Yeah, sure! Absolutely!” This was our answer any time they needed something. We wanted to be available for anything, in hopes of this renovation going smoothly.
“Well, I wanted to talk to you about your floor…” he said.
“Okay?” my husband asked. The floor? We’d already agreed on a new tile. Maybe it was sold out, I thought, or they sent the wrong one.
“The thing is…” the contractor started to say, and stopped. By this time, I’d peeked around the door to see what was going on. The contractor shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like this, but it appears you have a real problem with your drainage.”
We knew this, the county had told us this. But what it meant, we had no idea.
“Yeah, we knew there was something,” my husband said. “The county sent us a letter. Apparently we use more water than gets drained or something?”
“Yeah, something like that. You have a swamp under there, I think. The floor under your tiles is just smushy (technical term, ‘smushy’). Which means it’s going to take a lot longer, and cost a lot more. We’re going to have to see what we’re dealing with and dry it all out, before we can put down new flooring.”
SHIT. I knew it. I’d never heard of a renovation going smoothly. Everyone we knew had warned us. And they told us that estimate was only that, an estimate, that the final costs would skyrocket. Yay. Guess they were right.
“Okay,” my husband said. “Do what you gotta do. Just let us know what you need from us,” he said. I knew what they needed from us. Money. Money. Money.
“Alright,” our contractor said. “I’ll let the guys know. We’ll get started on it. I’ll need to get someone in to see what the problem is, then we’ll start drying it out.”
He set up fans, huge industrial fans, and called one of his plumbing friends. The guy could be there the next morning.
The next morning, just those two showed up, They needed to assess the situation. The plumber friend told him what needed to be fixed, and we were told they could get started that afternoon. Our contractor called his crew. Two men showed up about an hour later. The three of them got back to work.
“We’ll take that tub out,” the contractor said. “We’ll take it out the downstairs door and put it in the yard for now. Then I’ll take it with me tonight.” I was thrilled. A bathtub on the lawn. I’d come so far from my Southern Illinois roots (where bathtubs are common lawn ornaments, typically filled with flowers and plants). If they could see me now.
My husband and I went back to work.
They had only been downstairs a little while when it happened. I don’t even like to think about it anymore, but I also can’t stop thinking about it. It’s all I dream about. Horrific, graphic dreams.
The screams were so bad. So bloodcurdling. You just knew, right away, that things were never going to be right again. I was sitting at my desk when they started. My skin broke out in goosebumps. I jumped up, tripping over my laptop cord, nearly dragging the computer to the ground. My husband came running out of his office. Our dogs were up and at attention. Luckly we had the wherewithal to push them into my husband’s office and shut the door. If not, I don’t think they’d have lived.
My husband bounded down the stairs with me behind him. “Don’t!” he yelled back at me. “I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t want you down here.”
Screw that, I thought, if someone needed help, I was going to give it. And I knew, those screams meant someone needed help.
In fact, the screams hadn’t stopped. They’d just changed. The first had been horrified and painful. These, these were just full of despair.
We raced to the door of the bathroom and stopped. I threw up immediately. I had no control over it.
We found one of the men without a leg, bleeding all over the floor. He was crawling away from the pit—that’s what I’d call it, a pit, where our bathtub had been. Our contractor had some tool, a crowbar?
And he was hitting something, hard, and repeatedly, down in the hole. I refocused and could see an alligator, a huge fucking alligator, with half a man in his mouth. The man was bleeding everywhere, the lower half of his body, gone. He was still screaming, though. I’ll never forget it.
Underneath our house had become a swamp. An alligator infested swamp.
I didn’t have my phone, but I ran upstairs and called 911. The operator didn’t believe me, but finally sent the police and an ambulance. But what could the police do? I wondered. In the meantime, I called animal control, who also didn’t believe me, but they sent someone.
The contractor made it out; he stopped hitting the thing over the head, grabbed the only crew member he could save, and we got him upstairs. Animal control actually did get rid of the alligator…and her babies.
We don’t live there anymore.