Fall House Hunt

Flushed with anger: When the American dream becomes a stinky nightmare

“The house, I guess, is just a series of unfortunate events.”

It can be a bitter awakening when the dream of homeownership becomes a nightmare, and through freak disasters, owners can find themselves cleaning up a huge mess — sometimes literally.

By Lindsay Crudele

5 minutes to read

There are some words that just don’t go together. “Toilet” and “explode” are two of them.

So in January, when the toilet exploded in Nick Motyl’s Somerville condominium, he called 911.

Motyl had closed on the home, his first, in September 2021.

“I got the thing that I wanted for such a long time,” Motyl said. “And it was really cool for like two years, and then it just kind of got ripped away, literally overnight.”

At first, it seemed like a little drain blockage. The toilet wouldn’t flush. The plumber couldn’t get there anytime soon. But then, without warning, water began to gush from the tub. Terrible, stinky water. It was sewage.

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It can be a bitter awakening when the American dream of homeownership becomes a nightmare, and through freak disasters, owners can find themselves cleaning up a huge mess — sometimes literally.

“The force of the sewage explosion at that point was getting more and more powerful,” he said. “It had crested the threshold of the bathroom and started flowing into the kitchen.”

Sewage had backed up one town over, and Motyl was downstream at the end of the line. Motyl found himself standing in 4 inches of cold sewage, his condo wrecked. His primary insurance policy, it turned out, excluded sewage. An inspection by Somerville’s Water and Sewer team observed normal flow conditions in the city system. The city notified Medford to clear a debris blockage, and officials maintain the clog was not caused by Somerville’s sewer main.

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“Everyone that you would expect would be on the hook for this, whether it’s the city or the insurance company or whatever, it’s just, like, nobody’s problem,” Motyl said.

But it remains a problem for Motyl, who spent months couch-surfing with friends while shelling out for rehab work on the unit in excess of six figures.

“That first two weeks, I couldn’t stop shaking,” he said.

Owning a home seemed like an obvious goal — and a socially encouraged one at that — said Motyl. But it’s hard not to regret this decision.

“I don’t honestly know what I would have been able to do to prevent this from happening,” he said.

The nature of regret is never simple

It was a few months following inspection when Nicole Eller figured out there was a hole in the foundation of her new home. A heating exhaust system had been improperly installed prior to move-in day at the Barrington, R.I., property. Soon, the house required a water heater replacement, costing more than $15,000. Door and window replacement contractors presented myriad frustrations. And, Eller said, she had ignored her mortgage broker’s advice to buy a slightly larger house, and her family soon began to outgrow this one.

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More Fall House Hunt

“The house, I guess, is just a series of unfortunate events,” Eller said.

But the nature of regret is never simple. Along with the trouble was also joy, said Eller, such as the birth of her daughter while living in the house. And while thankfully there were some emergency savings, she said, they won’t be spent on the things they planned.

“We’ve had to put so much into the house that we can’t [move] anywhere anytime soon, because [the repairs are] not things that add to the value of the house,” she said. Eller had a home inspection, which noted a breeze in the home but not explicitly the hole.

Shady contractors

In Milton, Anne Kaufman and her husband, both in their 60s, purchased their first home together last May. Despite a lengthy home inspection, the recently flipped house presented a gauntlet of issues. An electrician recommended by the seller’s realtor turned out to lack a license, didn’t finish the job, and ran off with thousands. It began with illegal wiring and poorly installed laminate flooring. Tiles fell from the ceiling. Every major appliance broke. But nothing compared to the basement sewage flood, requiring $40,000 in repairs. After a tree fell on the house in December, Kaufman’s homeowner’s insurance dropped the couple before a year had passed.

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“I don’t understand homeownership as the American Dream, as, in my experience, it just opens up so many possibilities for unscrupulous contractors and repair people to take advantage of homeowners, especially first-time buyers,” said Kaufman.

The team of professionals who often make up a home buyer’s support system can anticipate some problems, but not all.

Rushing a sale can spell trouble down the line, especially when that means waiving the home inspection, a popular move in a competitive market in which having contingency clauses can mean sacrificing a deal.

That was Motyl’s decision, which he made in order to appear competitive. In a Globe query to the City of Somerville about the incident, officials noted that the state plumbing code requires below-grade units, such as Motyl’s, to include backwater valve installation. Motyl said his valve system was installed, and, he said, a working theory is that strong pressure broke the valve, which has since been replaced. The valve was last inspected in 2012 when it was first installed, said Motyl.

But inspections can occur after a sale, too. That’s when James Brock, who runs Boston Home Inspectors, also gets the call and informs a new homeowner that the boiler needs replacing or that there are termites or mold.

“All of a sudden it’s, ‘Oh, we didn’t know, or we should have known,’” Brock said.

He saw an uptick in waived inspections in 2023, and while he said requests seem to be catching up to previous rates of popularity, he’s currently tasked with looking at homes that closed last year.

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“And we’re discovering problems,” he said.

Shant Banosian, executive vice president with Rate (formerly Guaranteed Rate), said home buyers often underestimate the home repair budget that may be lurking. That’s when a reputable mortgage company can help.

The real overall costs of owning a home in the Boston area often elude buyers who think they’ve done their diligence to calculate their budget. To afford a single-family home in the area, a recent study suggested one’s household income should top $217,000.

“We’ve had a lot of people in the past few years be overwhelmed with sticker shock once they actually close on the home,” said Denisha McDonald, executive director of Financial Education Associates, which conducts home buying classes.

“They go in with their budget in mind of what they want to spend on a home, but they’re not very good at explaining that to their loan officer,” McDonald said, citing ample everyday costs often left off the table, such as child care. “What buyers forget is your life budget is actually different from what the lender is going to look at.”

Banosian suggested that the competitive market can inspire more creative configurations, and has observed a rise in clients buying homes with a friend, instead of a spouse or partner — but doing so without building an exit plan contingency in case circumstances change.

“You’re really unclear how to kind of unwind this ownership,” he said.

As for Motyl, he is continuing to rehabilitate his condo. He has moved back in, managing by living in the rooms farthest from the leak.

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“When I explain this to people, every first response is like, “Did you call your insurance company?’” he said. “I’m like, ‘Dude, give me a little bit of credit.’”

Lindsay Crudele can be reached at [email protected].

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