Team AngelaIt's Like Extreme Home Makeover: Angela Edition!

I remember the surveyor calling me up about three days after we bought the house at 109 Colburn St., where we were planning to build our new accessible home. He said, “Uh, I think you only own about 2/3 of the property you bought.” That got my attention. He explained: “The house sits on a lot that was cobbled together over time from 7 smaller lots. When you bought the house you got a deed that included 4 of those smaller lots, but it doesn’t include the last three. So you don’t own the whole yard.”

At first I thought, “OK, no big deal, we’ll get the lots signed over to us, and that will be that.” It ended up being more painful than that, by a long shot. It turned out that the three lots were in the name of the woman who had died in the house. She’d left the house to her kids, but because no one knew those three lots were not on the deed to the house, she actually didn’t leave those lots to anyone- she probably didn’t even know they existed! Everyone we spoke to in the real estate business said, “I’ve never seen anything like this!” So we were unique, but I can’t say we were enjoying it.

After some exploring, we discovered that the only way to have the remaining lots in our name was to have those lots make their way through the probate court process. That’s essentially a way for the court to say “We’re about to assign these lots to the Bauers… unless anyone is owed money from this lady’s estate, in which case you should speak up.” The way they announce this news is to advertise it in the legal section of the local paper… for 6 weeks. That’s followed by a 30 day appeals process where people can say “Hey, wait, come to think of it, I am owed some money from that estate…” Then, and only then, can the Land Court (where the parcels were formally registered) give their approval to have the parcels issued on a new deed and registered at the Registry of Deeds in our name, a process that takes another 30 days.

So in reality we were looking at around 4 months of waiting before the land could become ours- and the process wasn’t even started until almost a month after we bought the house. With the fall evaporating right in front of us, it looked like we might not be able to begin construction until the spring, since without the three remaining parcels the lot wasn’t big enough to qualify for a new-house permit.

Oh, and in the middle of all this Angela had her right leg amputated, enduring suffering that no one should see, much less go through. She also contracted a MRSA infection just one day before she was to be released from the hospital, and was on twice-a-day IV antibiotics for 42 straight days in an attempt to get it under control. We were a little discouraged, as things didn’t quite seem to be going our way.

And then our friends Sallie and Russ got involved. Russ is a commercial real estate attorney downtown, and he assembled an ace group of attorneys and paralegals to tackle the problem. They somehow got the probate court to waive the 30 day appeals period, got the land court to agree to hustle through the review process in far less than 4 weeks, and gently pushed and cajoled the original attorneys and the sellers into acting more quickly than they had been inclined to at the start. In short, they saved us almost two months of waiting, which was the difference between starting construction this fall, or waiting ‘til the spring.
So now, instead of being in the middle of the probate appeals process, we’re in the middle of the permitting process for the demolition work that will let us make room to pour the foundation for our new home. It was worth the wait.