LIFE
B4 • COMMUNITY JOURNAL • DECEMBER 14, 2011
Use caution on a vacant home buy
Daughter buys Batavia Flora Lisa J. Mauch lmauch@communitypress.com
BATAVIA — Mothers hand many things down to their daughters – advice, recipes, the good china – but Mary Lou Parrott has sold Batavia Floral Designs to her daughter, Patricia Brasfield. Trained as a nurse, Parrott bought the business from the original owner in 1987. Her daughter, who was a nursing assistant, started working there a couple of years later after discovering her flair for flower design. “She just blew me away,” said Parrott. “I didn’t know the talent that girl had.” Brasfield even studied with a world-renowned flower designer in Arizona and has won numerous
awards from the Cincinnati Horticultural Society at the Cincinnati Flower Show. “I never thought I had an artistic bone in my body. I can’t draw worth a lick,” said Brasfield. She said artistic talent isn’t limited to pen and paper, hers came in the form of flowers. That is why she plans on changing the name of the shop from Batavia Floral Designs to Batavia Floral Creations & Gifts to better reflect her creative contribution and her hope to expand the shop’s gift section in the future. Both Parrott and Brasfield want their longtime customers to know nothing else about the familyowned business is changing and the staffing and customer service will re-
main the same. Brasfield’s husband, Lee, will be helping out with IT and the business side of the shop. Parrott also plans on popping in from time to time to help during the holidays or when things get busy. “We’ve always prided ourselves on the quality of flowers and the professional design they receive,” said Parrott. One frequent customer is Moore Family Funeral Home in Batavia. “They are little-town florists with big-town enthusiasm,” said Scott Runck, manager at funeral home. “If you need something right away, (they) get it done. That’s why we continue to do business with them. They do a fantastic job for us.”
The lowest mortgage rates in decades continue to attract home buyers. But you need to take special precautions if the home you’re considering is vacant. Vacant homes have Howard often been Ain foreclosed upon and HEY HOWARD! are still owned by banks. In many cases they have been empty for many months, and the utilities have been turned off. That makes it especially difficult to check out if you’re looking to buy.
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Debra Weber bought a vacant house in Delhi Township in an estate sale earlier this year. She learned just how badly things can go when buying a vacant house. She had the water turned on after she bought it and moved in. “One month later, Nov. 14, I got water in my basement. My sewer backed up,” Weber says. Weber says she never expected anything like that to happen and immediately called a plumber. “They ran a camera and said all my pipes were broken, had holes or cracks or whatever, and they needed to replace all those pipes. It would cost $9,000,” she said. But after paying to fix all the pipes she found water was still getting into her basement. “Now they think it’s a foundation problem. My issue is it was so bad I don’t believe the previous owners couldn’t have known about it,” Weber says. The problem is since this was an estate sale the required seller’s disclosure statement didn’t tell anything about the condition of the house. It never stated whether there were any sewer problems or leaks in the basement. Those selling the house made no claims about the condition because they had not lived there. Weber did get a whole house inspection but that failed to pick up any of these problems. What’s worse, Weber says, is the inspector told her she did not need to be present during the threehour inspection. As a result,
she didn’t ask about cracks in the basement floor, many of which appear to have been filled in. “I do believe it’s just rainwater trickling in – so there’s probably cracks or holes where it is coming in. It’s coming in all around, not just in one spot,” Weber says. The owner of the home inspection company tells me he strongly recommends home buyers be with the inspector while he’s going through the house. That way the homeowner can ask questions and learn more about the items in the house and their condition. The inspection company owner says Weber must have misunderstood, though she denies that. Often when inspecting a vacant house, it’s important to get a company to run a camera through the pipes to check for problems. Such a check can cost a few hundred dollars but, as Weber learned, it can easily save you thousands of dollars. Now Weber is probably going to have to get a sump pump installed in the basement to prevent water from coming up through the cracks. Bottom line, before buying a vacant house these days, you need to take a much more detailed inspection because it’s usually going to be sold “As is.” Howard Ain answers consumer complaints weekdays on WKRC-TV Local 12. Write to him at 12 WKRC-TV, 1906 Highland Ave., Cincinnati 45219.
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