This story always amazes me for several reasons. 1. It happened to us (and we're realtors). 2. We should have known better (because we're realtors). 3. The home inspector that we used should have known better ('cause he's a freakin' home inspector and he was charging me $400 bucks). 4. You never know what you might find in an old house ('cause it's an old house damn it!).

When we purchased our house, we agreed that we could handle the mousedroppings, we could handle the rat's nest in the basement (no word of a lie), we could handle the cat urine smell (damn lazy cats too, with all the mice and rat parties that must have been going down in this dump over the years), yes, we could handle all of it.  But there was one thing that really gave us cause for concern when we arrived at the bottom of the basement stairs and first saw 'it'.  An odd shaped, ancient, green pipe was sticking straight up out of the ground at the bottom of the stairs. 'Gee, what makes that so unusual', I thought to myself with an incredible amount of sarcasm.  The pipe was of a medium size though slightly narrow in appearance and seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. It just existed.  Kinda' like my old pot smoking friend in Toronto who also just simply existed. The pipe did contain water, however, and the water had a heinous odour, a combination of oil, cabbage and the breath of your oldest, pipe smoking 2nd Uncle.  Really nasty stuff.  Lovely visual, isn't it? 

Our home inspector, a man with a reputation as a very thorough inspector I might add, was stumped. $400 bucks worth of stumped.  After his 4th or 5th cigarette, he turns to us and says, "Wow, in 25 years of home inspecting, I've never seen anything like that before". Isn't that great! Don't you love it when people say that to you.  The last time I heard that was during my old Fraternity days when I was called in to the medical clinic at the University of Guelph but that's a whole other story.  He lit up another butt.  $400 dollars buys a lot of cigarettes apparently.

Anyhow, he had no idea what the pipe was for. He thought it might be an oil tank but he wasn't sure. The pipe was smaller than the usual ones found with old tanks but similar. And did I already tell you it stunk to high heaven?

"The size doesn't matter" he said.  Not the first time I've heard that, I thought.  "The size isn't worrying me but the position of the pipe does".  Gee, ya' think?  Perhaps we'll just leave it there and tell everyone it's for a patio unbrella or something like that, I thougt.  Or maybe we could put another long pipe over it and erect the Canadian flag each morning.

Regardless of it's eventual use, the only real problem with this oil tank pipe, if indeed it was an oil tank, was that it was, again, inside our house. Oil tanks aren't buried in people's houses, are they?  Can you imagine the mess of having to remove it out of the house, not to mention that it might actually be leaking into the ground which can cause environmental damage (i.e. tens of thousands of dollars to clean up).

We bought the house and gambled that it wasn't an oil tank.  What the hell.  Nothing like rolling the dice with $400 thousand.  We don't recommend you do the same. With the market being crazy, we didn't have time to test the water inside the pipe and we figured we'd deal with it.  Hey, with the price of natural gas at the time, going back to oil sounded like a swell idea.

As it turned out, the pipe was merely that. A useless pipe that led to nowhere, sticking out of the ground of our basement, buried into the foundation. The water had leaked in from an old connection. All that worry for nothing.

Moral of the story--Reno disasters are often not disasters at all. Think positive. Always remember the pipe is half full, not half empty.  Cigarettes are gross...Oh, and even the best home inspectors experience occasional lapses in brain power so choose well.  Please go to www.truerealestatestories.com for more from our collection.