The Flip (An Angel Hill novel)
Page 11
“Cool,” Mike said, “I’ll be up in a second.”
He finished getting his pictures, then went up so they could start their planning meeting.
They gathered in the living room first. Mike had a yellow legal pad and a pen and said, “Let’s just start with the entryway and work our way through the house. If anyone’s got any ideas they want added or any input, everybody remember we all own this place together, so speak up. What do we think about the entry, soon as you walk in the door?”
“It should make a good first impression,” Brian said. “Set the tone for the rest of the house as soon as you walk in.”
“I agree with that,” Mike said. “But I mean as far as, say, doing anything with the porch, such as it is. It’s not going to do much good to change the porch; we don’t have much room to work with considering how the house is laid out. But we definitely need to stage it well out here. Fresh paint all around.”
“I think we should cover the porch,” Keith said. “Maybe enclose it so you come up the stairs then come inside to like a mud room out there, so you can get your shoes or whatever off in the rain or snow, and not track shit inside. Like a buffer zone.”
“That’s a good idea,” Mike said. He opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch and said, “I think we’ll have room for it, too. Do we want to do anything to the living room?”
Everyone looked around the room, then shook their heads and Steven said, “I think it looks alright like it is.”
“Well, not like it is, it would need fresh paint at least. What about the windows?”
“They seem okay,” Keith said.
“But should we think about updating them anyway? This is our first house, this is our first impression. We want to sell a top quality product, I think we need to put the money into it.”
“You need to spend money to make money,” Brian said.
“That’s right,” Mike said. “The windows are okay, but we have no idea how weatherproof they are. It’s cold as shit in here, to me that says we need to improve the insulation wherever we can. Also, I’d like to get some carpet in here.”
“I don’t know about that,” Keith said.
“Hey now,” Steven interjected.
“These floors are perfectly fine,” Keith said. “Hardwood sells houses better than carpet will.”
“Okay,” Mike said. “That is a good point. But they’ll need to be refinished.”
Keith nodded at that.
They all agreed the dining room was good as it was, too, but that new windows would be a good investment all around.
“Any ideas on paint colors?” Mike asked. “For both rooms?” He had been making notes on everything they would be doing so far. When he mentioned paint, everyone looked at each other and shrugged. “We can come back to that,” he said. “Into the bedroom.”
“I have a question,” Steven said. “We’re talking about turning this second bedroom into the bathroom. So if this bedroom is here, why couldn’t this be the master, the en suite, and have downstairs be like an office, a guest room, and another bathroom there. I mean, why do we want to put the homeowner in the basement while guests or whoever are up here?”
“Would you want to go stay at someone’s house and have to sleep in the basement?” Mike asked.
“That’s a good point, though,” Keith said. “You know, we fix it up nice enough, it’s not gonna be like a basement anyway, but who wants to buy a house they plan to live in, but they end up living in the basement?”
Mike shrugged. It was a question he hadn’t considered, and it seemed to be the first roadblock.
“Okay,” he said, “why don’t we, since we’ve already agreed to knock out this bathroom and move it over here, then to move this bedroom downstairs, why don’t we just do all of that, then when we’re closer to done, when we can see how things are shaping up, we’ll make that decision as a team.”
Everyone nodded agreement and Mike led them through the smaller bedroom, into the kitchen.
“Here’s the big one,” he said.
“Gutting it, right?” Brian asked.
“Yeah,” Keith said. “Gonna have to.”
“If we want to make any real money on this, that is. Bathrooms and kitchens, that’s where you spend your money.”
“How much room do we gain by losing this shit bathroom?” Keith asked.
“Square feet? No idea. But a good seven feet out.”
“That should give us room for an island, then.”
Mike nodded and made a note on his pad. Island.
“We’re going granite countertop, custom cabinets, glass and marble for the backsplash. I want to bring in new light fixtures all throughout the house, maybe even ceiling fans. We all know summers here are no joke.”
“What’s the cooling situation,” Brian asked. “We got central air in this place?”
“Haven’t even looked,” Mike said.
“I’ll check,” Steven said, and went out the back door to search.
“Okay, what colors in here?” Mike asked.
“White cabinets,” Keith said. “Are we including appliances?”
Mike thought about it for a second, then asked, “You think we should?”
Keith shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt the sale price. This is a starter home, right? Fuck it, let’s give em a little something to get started with.”
“We’re not furnishing it, too, are we?” Brian asked.
“Just for staging at the open house,” Mike said.
“Man, how much is all this gonna cost?”
“A lot,” Mike said. “But if we hire a good contractor with the right connections, and if we do enough ourselves, we’ve got sixty grand in the budget for reno. I think we can do that easy.”
“As long as the wiring and everything is good,” Keith said.
Mike nodded at that and said, “The inspection came back okay, but once we open these walls…”
“No idea what we’ll find,” Steven said, coming back in through the back door. “Yeah, central air unit is around the side.” He nodded to indicate the western side of the house. “Between the dining room and kitchen in that little alcove behind the windows.”
“Cool,” Mike said, making a note on his pad. “Then maybe we can scratch the ceiling fans and just go with lights.”
“Are we doing anything to the back yard?” Keith asked.
Mike noticed Keith had been taking a more active role than Brian or Steven. But when he thought about it, Keith was in the same boat, unemployed. His stake in making this business a success was bigger than theirs. Plus, he’d done work on his own place, and knew what to expect, to a degree. Brian and Steven still lived at home and had probably never had to give a second thought to kitchen layout or paint colors.
This was going to be quite an education for all of them, though.
“Let’s go take a look,” Brian said, and they filed out the back door.
Outside, Brian felt a smile breaking when he saw there was a garage. It wasn’t much, one car and it looked pretty gnarly from the outside, but as long as the roof was sound, it would serve its purpose.
“I bet if we get that garage in shape it’ll raise the value,” he said. “I know I’d be willing to pay more for a house with a garage.”
“This yard is shit, man,” Keith said, looking around at the dead grass and weeds. Several mounds were visible throughout the yard, telltale signs of moles. “We’ll need to get some traps out here and clean this up.”
“The back porch?” Mike asked. “Any thoughts on it?”
Keith stood in the door and looked around at the frame.
“I think we’ve got some rot in the boards. We might think about taking it down, maybe put a deck or a patio back here?”
“Hey now,” Steven said, “that’s sound cool.”
“And expensive,” Mike said.
“Gotta spend it to make it, remember?” Keith said.
Mike nodded and said, “Let’s go figure out this basem
ent.”
He led the way and they gathered at the bottom of the stairs. Brian looked around, marveling at all the rooms he hadn’t seen the first time.
“So what’s the plan, anyone?” Mike asked, his pad at the ready.
“I think the walls are gonna have to be torn out, reinsulated and rebuilt, for starters,” Keith said. “But doing that, we can put them back up however we want.”
“Do we know which ones are load-bearing?” Steven asked.
“Nothing that runs the direction of the joists is going to be load-bearing,” Keith said. “So we’ve got a lot to work with, actually.”
“I still say guest room and office down here,” Steven said. “We can even open up this center area as a rec room, like a hangout spot for kids or something to bring their friends. That’s what we used our basement for when I was growing up, but we’re talking eighties and an old crappy TV that didn’t work all the time. It wasn’t the best place to hang out.”
“We could do this one up nice,” Brian said.
“We will do it up nice,” Mike said, “but we haven’t settled the master suite upstairs or down yet. I hear what you’re saying about not wanting to leave the guests upstairs, but people want to feel like their bedroom is a sanctuary. They want it to be where they can go to get away from everything, to shut out the rest of the house and just chill out.”
“Man, you watch too many of those shows,” Keith said.
“I don’t feel like that about my bedroom,” Steven said.
“Well, women,” Mike said. “Chicks dig a master suite. And if it’s apart from the rest of the house, I think they’ll like it even more and that’ll make them want it more. A quicker sale.”
“There’s that,” Keith said. “But I think we need to figure this out before we get started, it’s gonna be a big part of the plans, and the budget.”
Mike couldn’t believe he was hearing this. They had a point, but whose idea had this been? Who was the one with the knowledge in this area? Two of them lived with their damn parents and the other one had a small farm on the edge of town and was more interested in pussy than anything else. But they’re gonna tell him how to design a fucking layout?
It’s a partnership, he argued with himself.
It’s also a business, he argued back. We want to sell this place for as much as we can, and this is the way to do that.
“Think of the room,” Steven said. “You’re talking putting two rooms down here, bedroom and bathroom. And only a bed and bath upstairs, too. You put the master upstairs, that’s bed and bath up there, then we can do a guest room, bathroom down here, nothing fancy, just what you need, a small home office--you know everybody’s got one of those now--pretty up the laundry room, rec room in the middle, you’re adding, what, two extra rooms to the listing right there.”
That was something to consider, Mike realized. As much as he hated backing down--it made him feel like he might not be the idea man he wanted to believe he was--Steven had a point. There wasn’t room upstairs to make a bedroom, bathroom and office.
“And if we make this open area a rec area,” Mike said, “who wants them right outside their master suite oasis?”
“Exactly,” Steven said.
“You might be right,” Mike said. He looked at the rooms, scanning the area, visualizing what it would look like. He took more pictures with his phone, then said, “Okay, I think that’s what we’ll do, then. Cool.”
“Cool,” Keith said.
Brian and Steven nodded and Brian asked, “So what does that do to the work that needs to be done?”
“Just adds another one or two walls,” Keith said. “These walls already have to come down, so I say we do like with the kitchen and gut the whole thing down here.”
Mike said, “So, I’m gonna call some contractors and get some bids. Do we all want to be involved in that, or what?”
“I’d like to be,” Keith said.
“I’ll sit in on it,” Brian said. “Since we’re just starting out and don’t know anyone, I want to know who’s handling my stuff, and stuff like that.”
“I’m gonna look around down here a little bit,” Steven said. “I’m not gonna be much good finding a contractor and I don’t know a lot about what we’re doing here, so I trust you guys.”
With that, Mike, Brian and Keith tromped back up the stairs where they would start calling contractors, leaving Steven alone in the basement.
He wanted to be alone down here for two reasons. He wanted the freedom to move around and snoop unimpeded, but also he didn’t want anyone else laying claim to anything he found, especially if it was another picture.
Steven had spent the better part of last night, and another hour this morning, looking over the drawing he had found yesterday, trying to understand it, trying to understand the girl who drew it, and trying to figure out her signature so he could find her.
He could feel her presence down here. Not in a ghostly kind of way like she was a spirit hovering near. He just felt that connection, which he still didn’t fully understand, was stronger down here. She had been here. He could almost smell her in the air. Whoever she was, she had walked these floors, breathed the air in these rooms.
He felt he could walk the space in one of these rooms and might be sharing a space where she once stood, and if he was still and quiet, he might even feel the memory of that presence passing through him.
The person who drew that picture of the house with the clock face didn’t just scribble that out one day on a whim. That wasn’t a one-off. She had been at it for a long time, he felt, and that meant there had to be more pictures. Hidden away somewhere in a forgotten closet or behind an old dresser? The place had no furniture, so no old dressers for pictures to have fallen behind, but still. There had to be more. And the basement was the most obvious place.
He went back into the room where he’d found it, searching every corner. He saw nothing but dust. But he thought he heard something.
He looked over and saw the door to the room was closed, but he hadn’t realized the room had a door, let alone remembered closing it. He stared at it, trying to remember touching it, maybe just unconsciously knocking it closed while he was looking along the floor, but he honestly didn’t think he’d done it. And the noise, what was it?
It sounded like someone choking. Maybe crying? No, it was definitely choking. He ran to the door and pulled it open, but the outer room was empty. He stepped out and looked around, wondering if one of the guys had come back down to get him, then swallowed something and couldn’t cough it up. But he was alone, as far as he could tell.
“Hey now,” he said, “what’s up? Who’s down here?”
He waited for Mike or Brian to make another noise. He wondered if they’d gone into one of the other rooms, but the other two were empty as well. Then he heard it again, this time from the rear of the basement, under the back porch. In the dark.
“Mike?” he asked, creeping forward. He knew he should be hurrying, but something told him this wasn’t Mike, that this wasn’t anyone he knew.
Whoever it was, they weren’t choking, he realized, but they were struggling to breathe, for sure. It was a sickening, deathly sound and it made Steven’s own chest tighten and he felt for a moment like he couldn’t breathe, either. He tried to cough but there was no air in his lungs. He tried to draw a breath and found his lungs were shallow and wouldn’t bring in enough for his starving brain.
He tried to yawn, tried to speak, but his entire chest was being compressed by the sound of desolation coming from the shadows.
He moved back, afraid something would jump out at him. Even if it was one of the guys trying to scare him, he felt plenty scared already and didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing him jump. So he stepped back and turned away from the darkness. That’s when he noticed it.
There on the floor, under the staircase, half on the floor and half leaning against the wall and hidden in the shadow of the stairs, was another sheet of paper.
This was a girl, drawn in charcoal, but she had butterfly wings coming from her back, and a simple dress draped over her. She hung in the air above a sunflower. It had no title or date, just that scribbled signature again. This time it was less scrawl, though, and he detected discernible shapes in it. Letters he thought he might decipher if he had time. He was supposed to work tonight, but he thought maybe yesterday’s illness hadn’t quite let go of him and he might need another day to feel better. After all, according to Wal-Mart policy, it was still all one occurrence if it was several days strung together. Hell, he might as well take tomorrow, too; it would still only count as one absence in his file, and if he really wanted to sell the idea he was sick, he should take some time to give the impression he’d been recuperating.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her in this room, drawing pictures on a sketch pad, working feverishly, her face smudged in black where she had scratched a cheek, or moved her hair out of her eyes only to leave charcoal tracks behind. She was beautiful, he knew it.
He wanted to watch her draw, then bring her lunch so she could eat without stepping away from the work. He wanted to frame the work and see it hanging in a gallery, a room full of her works.
He wanted to be her rock and the one who encouraged her every day, and he didn’t even know her name or where she was.
Steven looked again at the butterfly girl, then rolled the picture, keeping it loose enough, then slid it into the waistband of his pants, the top covered by his shirt, and went upstairs again.
The guys were gathered in the living room and Mike was scrolling through the yellow pages on his phone, writing down contractor numbers when Steven came back up. He breezed past them, out the front door. They heard his car door close a minute later, then Steven reappeared and said, “Man, forgot I left my phone in the car. So, what are we doing?”