by Adam Carolla
Closely connected to that is living in the same house as your grandparents. (Though credit where it’s due, one of my listeners came up with this one.) The really rich live in the manor that has been in their family since the Civil War, and the really poor are sharing a doublewide with Granny, Mama, Mama’s third boyfriend in as many months and their six brothers and sisters.
So, with all of this in mind, what should you be looking for in your first, and hopefully last, house?
Space: Famous racecar driver/builder Carroll Shelby once said that, when it comes to winning races, there’s no substitute for cubic inches. And not-so-famous driver/builder, me, once said when it comes to relationships there is no substitute for square footage. When you and your spouse are literally up each other’s ass because you don’t have a big enough place, it’s going to cause marital strife. The bright side of this is that when you inevitably get divorced you won’t have much property to fight over.
Trust me. A guy could move into a studio apartment with a Victoria’s Secret model and within two days he’d be ready to shiv her with a sharpened toothbrush.
The bottom line is that you can live in a three bedroom for nine years or a one bedroom for nine months. Also, more square feet usually means more than one television, and separate TiVos. There’s no sense in getting in a fight with your old lady because Top Gear and Top Chef come on at the same time.
A Nice Yard: A house is more than just the four walls you sleep in. You need that yard to throw a baseball, chase the dog around and, this one is directed at you, Sonny, take a piss in.
Yes, Natalia (and all you other ladies reading this), you’ll never quite understand what a power move this is. Taking a piss in your own yard feels so liberating. Being a dude has its cons for sure, like dying several years earlier, but a big pro is that you can literally pee anywhere. Imagine you’ve been driving home with a bladder full of piss. Instead of having to fumble with your keys, unlock the door and race up to the bathroom, you can just step out of your car, unzip and water the bushes. Because those bushes are yours. If you did this in your apartment complex you’d be arrested, and if you did it on someone else’s lawn, they’d shoot you with rock salt. This is the patch of ground that God created and that you worked hard to own, and no one can stop you from putting your urine in it. Go for it. Plus, that stuff has a smell and it might ward off some predators.
And on that note, Sonny, I’m guessing you’ll be about my height, so when you buy that first house, make sure the bathroom sink is at optimal piss height, too.
A Cul-De-Sac: If you can manage it, you want to live on a cul-de-sac. That way you don’t have assholes like me zooming up and down your street plowing into my future grandkids on their hoverboards. And make sure it’s called a cul-de-sac. There is a big difference between a cul-de-sac and a dead end. They’re both streets that have no outlet but at the end of one is a back entrance to a golf course, and at the end of the other is a couch with raccoons fucking on it.
Basement: This might be a tough one to pull off if you stay in Southern California, or the Southwest in general. For some reason there are no basements out here. Basements are great. It’s like adding a second or third story to your house. And it’s always fifteen degrees cooler down there.
I’m thinking about this more for my future grandson. Without a basement, where is he supposed to lose his virginity? Every kid from the East Coast or the Midwest lost their virginity in a basement. Growing up in SoCal, we had to go out and hump in a car. If you had a compact car, it sucked. Getting it on in the back of an ’82 Honda Civic could literally cramp your style.
Plus, there’s just something truly great about going down those creaky wooden stairs to a basement workshop and refinishing an old coffee table, playing a few games of darts or grabbing a Sawzall and dismantling a hooker corpse. Perhaps I’ve said too much.
Bar-Free Windows: Windows with bars are something you want to avoid, and an immediate sign that you should move on with your house search. This may not resonate with people outside of Los Angeles, but almost all the houses here have bars on first-floor windows. That’s how much this town sucks.
Here’s how you know you’re in a horrible neighborhood: There are bars on the windows of the houses, but the bars in the neighborhood have no windows. Heavy.
So You’ve Found Your Dream Home
Make sure you get a home inspection before you close. Just understand that there’s going to be shit to fix. Every home is a fixer-upper. Don’t walk away from a good place because you don’t like the paint job or a few windows are drafty. There’s always something to do, and you should appreciate that. Make the home yours. But here’s a bit of paranoia you can just ignore, and that is mold inspections. I don’t think humans would exist if mold could really kill us. We currently have a very bizarre relationship with mold. We devour blue cheese and penicillin, but will freak out if we find it during a home inspection. This is just white people panicking over nothing. Ironically, you never hear about black mold affecting black people. It’s always the wealthy white folk who also coincidentally have allergies to lactose, gluten and life.
Okay, so you’ve found your dream house; now it’s time to purchase it. Just like your first car, don’t come crawling to me. You’re going to have to earn it just like I did. I didn’t ask your grandfather to take out a second mortgage on his piece of shit in the Valley to help me out. Not that he would have, anyway. So unless you’ve married a rich guy or carved out a nice career in gay porn (that goes for either of you), you’re going to need a loan.
Here’s what you need to know about the mortgage process. There is no such thing as good credit. There’s only bad credit and not bad credit. Every real-estate transaction I’ve ever made required me to sign a Library of Congress’s worth of paper and go through FBI level interrogations. I’ve done several sizeable real-estate deals and every time it’s the same. I’ve never defaulted on a loan; I’ve never been foreclosed on. I should have the kind of credit where I can walk into any person’s home and say, “This is my house now, get out.” But I’m still treated like a guy who operates a forklift and is trying to buy his first one-bedroom town house.
Moving In and Moving On
So you’ve secured your home, signed the deed and changed the locks. Now it’s time to move. Here’s a few things that you should be aware of.
First, don’t do this yourself. That couple of hundred bucks you shell out on movers will be the best money you ever spend. Not only are you saving your back, you’re saving your friendships because without hiring movers you’re going to rope your poor buddies into doing it and they’re going to resent you later. You’re essentially saying, “Here’s a job that I’d pay a stranger five hundred bucks to do, but since we’re so close I’ll give you a six-pack of Heineken.” And you can almost guarantee that it will be a friend who accidentally drops the heirloom china or breaks your framed autographed picture of Mr. T. You’ll never see the mover again, but it’s going to be awkward hanging with your friend who tripped and dumped Nana’s urn on the lawn.
So hire movers, and then lower your expectations. Something is going to get scratched or broken. It’s just part of the process. Don’t be an asshole to the poor bastard who’s wearing the back support just trying to make a few bucks moving your fridge.
In fact, here’s another tip: Tip. Moving is so expensive that people usually just pay the fee, call it a day and then complain when the dresser gets scratched. They never think to add a gratuity for the guys literally doing the heavy lifting. So tip the guys in advance and maybe they’ll take a little extra care. They’re used to getting nothing but attitude at the end of the move when they’re covered in sweat and dreaming of a cold beer and Vicodin. They’ll appreciate the extra cash, trust me.
Make sure you give the tip out when all the movers are together. I’ve noticed in all of my moves that there is always an alpha mover. He’s usually the older of the two guys, the cagey veteran of the moving van. If you tip that
guy when he’s alone, you know he’s just stuffing it in his pocket and stiffing the poor college student working at the moving company on weekends. Make sure the wealth gets spread around and gets in their hands in advance, so they’ll put in a little extra hustle and not put an end to your end table.
You might not have room for all your stuff in your new place. Even if you move it on up to a bigger abode, sometimes the furniture you had in one place just doesn’t fit into the new one. Or the new house already has a fridge and you no longer need the old one. And in general it’s good to get rid of stuff before you move, so there’s less to pack and break the movers’ backs. So instead of hanging on to stuff you don’t really need or use, just dump it. Don’t do the storage unit thing. The Carollas are a long line of hoarders (except we didn’t really have anything to hoard). Don’t fall into this trap. You’ll be happier if you just leave that old stuff behind, and replace it if you need to. It makes no sense to go out and get a storage unit just in case you want that bread maker in three years. If you haven’t used it in a year, donate it, have a yard sale or use it for target practice.
Those storage-unit commercials paint a much sunnier picture of themselves than is accurate. The roller door slides up to reveal the storage-unit renters and they’re delighted. It’s always happy families going to their clean storage unit to get out the water skis.
Bullshit. Everyone is miserable at those places. It means your abode is smaller than you like, and you can’t even find nine-by-nine to keep a bunch of stuff you don’t need but are too pathetic to part with. Or your old lady kicked you out, you’re crashing on a buddy’s couch and you put all of your shit in storage until you get your own pad. In L.A., those places are all under freeway overpasses, the sun hasn’t shined on them in decades and the only people who are more miserable than the people who go there are the people who work there. If you have to put “do not attempt” on car commercials where the SUV is doing some off-roading, these storage-unit company ads should have a disclaimer, too. “Warning: Professional Actors Portraying Gross Exaggeration of Happiness.”
The last one I saw featured a mother showing her daughter her wedding dress. Mom is taking her dress out of the box and the girl is over the moon. Awesome. She gets to wear Mama’s mothbally, was-white-but-is-now-yellow wedding dress covered in a Rorschach test of semen stains. In storage-unit history, has there ever been a mother presenting her daughter with her thirty-five-year-old wedding dress to her delight? Has that ever happened? I say nay. Could you imagine saying to your twenty-two-year-old daughter, “We’re going out wedding dress shopping.” “Where, Beverly Hills?” “No, we’re heading to the storage unit under the 110 Freeway.” She’d beat her mom with the table lamp she also kept in the storage unit.
Home Alone?
One of the things you’ll find out quickly when you own your home is that even if you’re single, you’re not there alone. There are ants, spiders, cockroaches, rats, bats, snakes and various other creatures taking up residence in your residence. Sorry, Sonny, but this is one gender role that is still intact. You, as a male, will be the exterminator in your home, unless you end up gay, and then you two can flip for it. Either way, here are a few tales and tips.
Spiders: These little bitches seem to be out of control. Every house has spiders, but the ones we have in our house as I’m writing this seem to be some turbo-charged, over-caffeinated breed. They’ll get a web up while you blink and it’s not cute, symmetrical Charlotte’s Web stuff, it’s like something MC Escher would shoot out of his ass. It looks like Johnny Depp took his multiple scarves off and threw them in a ball on the chair.
I walked into my bathroom at four in the morning, and there was a giant spider on the wall. I felt like the stepparent who came home early and found the teen banging away at his girlfriend on the couch. I was thinking, is this what goes on all the time when I’m asleep? The spider noticed me and froze. He was probably like, “What are you doing up at this hour, old man? Time to get that prostate checked.” Then, he scurried behind a mirror. It was a stalemate. I couldn’t go back to bed knowing it was there, but the mirror was too heavy to move. I ended up blowing into the crack behind the mirror to try and coax the thing out the other side so that I could smash it. I endured an hour-long retarded Mexican stand-off with an arachnid, instead of catching the zzzzs I need to be able to work and thus afford to house that spider. And my kids.
They always make their appearance at the worst time. Once, about two years ago, I was all set to crash after a long day. I had done a couple of gigs that afternoon, came home, had a couple of Mangrias and headed off to bed. When I flipped on the light, there was a spider hanging out on the ceiling. I was a little wobbly from the day and the Mangria, and standing on a pillow-top mattress, so it was tough to get that little fucker with the toilet paper. You also have to be sure to pick the right amount of toilet paper. Too little, and you can feel the thing crunch, which you don’t want. It’s just gross and its guts will leak through the TP and onto your hand. But, if you use too much, it will create a soft nest for the thing, and it will just scurry away to fight another day. This particular day I didn’t have my TP ratio right, because I ended up with two spider legs in the paper, and the now wounded and angry spider was nowhere to be found. It landed somewhere in the bed and I just knew it was biding time until my head hit the pillow to come back and take up residence in my ear hair.
Rats: You’ll eventually get one of these lovely vermin in your house, too. No matter how manly you think you are, Sonny, when you see that little rat tail scurrying, you will turn into a 1950s cartoon housewife. You’ll be up on a footstool on your tippy-toes, freaking out. I don’t know why rats scare us so much, but they do.
It would be weird to explain our relationship with rats to an alien. They give us our greatest scientific advances, but if we see them in our kitchen at night, we go after them with a tennis racquet. Apparently, we share many biological attributes with rats, but we still want to kill them. We don’t have that range of emotions with dolphins, for instance. It might be a grudge because rats spread the plague. Plus, in the ’80s, there were all those vans painted with evil renditions of rats with fangs cheating at cards. Rats get a bad rap. They’re not looking for trouble and when you turn on the light they run away. It’s not like you come home and a rat is banging your girlfriend. I think the real problem is their posture. Rats always look like they’re up to no good. In Disney movies, the hero always has great posture and the villain is always hunched over. Hummingbirds have great posture and we love them. But the rat is our mortal enemy. We’d all probably have rats as pets if they would just hit the chiropractor and take care of that scoliosis.
Snakes: You kids already know that where we live we have rattlesnakes. You may have been too young to remember when our dog, Molly, was bitten by a rattler. A year or so later, our gardener found a rattlesnake as he was making his appointed rounds with the hedge clippers. Because of those two incidents, your mom decided that not only did we need to get Molly rattlesnake-aversion–trained, but we needed to have the snake wrangler come out and safety proof the place for you two.
First off, I’m not even sure if what the gardener found was an actual rattlesnake. There are nonpoisonous snakes that look like rattlesnakes. They’ve taken on that camouflage, so birds of prey and coyotes won’t go at them. What the snakes didn’t factor in when evolving that camouflage was the fireman who gets called out by Lynette to chop them in half with a flathead shovel.
So, anyway, despite me and my wallet’s protest, the snake-proofing guy came and laid down a powder that smelled like mothballs and tampons put in a Cuisinart (by the way, Mothballs and Tampons is my favorite morning zoo team). He sprinkled this powder in a big circle around the perimeter of the house. This all seemed like a good plan until my assistant, Jay, piped up with, “What if there are snakes that are already under the house? Doesn’t that just keep them in?” Thanks, Jay, for working the wife up all over again. You’re fired.
> Flies: Every house has flies. That’s just inevitable. They’re called house flies for a reason. Amazingly, we’re well into the 2000s as I write this, and we still don’t have a great way to kill them. Inevitably, you’ll get that fly buzzing around and go looking for a flyswatter and not be able to find it. It’s a twenty-nine-cent item, but you’ll only buy one and thus spend an hour looking for it. This very thing has happened to me. Just like everything I attempt to locate in my own home, someone had moved the flyswatter to some random drawer seemingly just to fuck with me.
Everyone thinks they’re a ninja with the bar rag or T-shirt when it comes to flies, but you never manage to actually get the fly that way because the whoosh of air you create just pushes it to safety. And the catch-and-release plan never works either. It’s nice to think that maybe that fly was a good person in a past life and you should give it its freedom, but it never pans out. I had a fly in the house once, and after chasing it around for an hour, I cornered it in the bathroom, then sucked in my stomach and slid out the crack in the door to give it a time out. But to the fly the bathroom is Valhalla, like a fat guy getting trapped in a Fogo de Chao. Eventually, I found the flyswatter and sent it to the big shit pile in heaven.
My point is that you’re going to get these things a lot, so don’t go for the fancy Sharper Image flyswatter that kills with electricity. That shit never works. They’re always trying to invent new fly-killing technology. This one uses lasers to shoot them down in midair, this one kills with telepathy; you put on a hat and think bad things about them. Just buy a half-dozen of those classic cheap plastic flyswatters and keep one in every room.
Must-Haves for Your First Abode
On that note, let me give you a list of other stuff you’ll need to have in your home.