These should be houses that looked good “on paper” - the price was right, neighbourhood okay, rooms and features sheet read well - that disclosed some amusingly unlivable flaw when actually examined.
When we were house-hunting, we saw lots of these (indeed sometimes it appeared we saw nothing but these), and to each dud we gave a nickname. Here are some examples:
Cigarette House: discussed in the above thread, a house that looked good but was so permiated with stale cigarette smoke from decades of chain-smoking indoors as to be unihabitable; consensus being that the smell could not be removed without expensive renovations.
The Cliff Dwelling: house looked great and view was wonderful but backyard visibly eroding into a gigantic cliff; guarden shed currently prevented from falling 80’ into neighbour’s yard by a cinder block used as a prop. Neighbours to each side have cliff face reveted by concrete defences somewhat like beach defences at Normandy.
The Boo Radley: generally unfinished basement (bare concrete), but in the far corner from the stairs what appears to be a nanny or inlaw bedroom suite with ensuite bathroom, all carpeted with musty broadloom; with metal door on bedroom, with heavy latch and lock - on the outside of the door. WTF? (Seriously, WTF?)
Reminds me of a commercial running right now for a product I can’t remember. It shows a couple looking at a pretty decent place, saying, “Well, it’s not what we had in mind.” Then it shows the next few houses: the one where the bathroom door is blocked by the toilet, the one that smells like sea bass, the one where the next door neighbor’s window is inches away and he’s gazing in with interest…
Final scene, the couple is back at the pretty decent place and now they love it.
Bits-n-Pieces House: I once looked at a house in a very nice location. However, it started as a small cottage and over the years the half-assed-construction owner built multiple add-ons. Going from room to room involved giant steps up or down. Nothing was on the same level. Also, put a marble on any floor and it would start rolling in some direction.
I parsed the thread title as “Clothes to wear while hunting for houses,” and assumed at first it was about making an impression.
Then I read on a bit and began to think you must be talking about grubbies or coveralls. “What kind of market are these people looking in if they expect their clothes to get wrecked at an open house?” :eek:
I looked at quite a few houses in my little built-in-the-80s ranch/split level houses. I learned something really important: If you have a 1000 sf ranch style house, it’s probably already as good as it gets. If you go adding walls and trying to move things too much, you’re just going to screw it up.
I looked at one house in which a previous owner really wanted a formal(ish) dining room instead of an eat-in kitchen. He constructed a nice wall and created one–actually a decent, if rather small, dining room with a door leading to the separate kitchen. The kitchen, however, was now roughly the size of a really bad broom closet. The realtor and I had to take turns looking at it.
The split levels in the neighborhood are odd, too. All of them have a living room and a good-sized kitchen on the lower level, with another living room type room and three bedrooms upstairs. It just felt wrong to me to have to go downstairs to the kitchen–I felt as if my dad had remodeled it and for some reason thought the kitchen would be better in the basement. Maybe that was normal in the 80s, but it felt really non-intuitive to me.
When we were looking for our first house, we ran into some doozies. My favorite was the one where the rooms were tiny. The listing boasted three bedrooms but we found that two of them fit a twin-sized bed and nothing else. You could skootch in to get to the closet but there wasn’t even room for a small bureau. The bathroom was completely empty except for the toilet - no vanity, sink, cabinets, nothing but the toilet. We did try the marble trick in the kitchen and it sloped down towards the family room. Also, I think the place was haunted, it had a terrible feel to it.
When we were looking for our current house, the first realtor took us to some pretty bad ones (we got rid of him after a few trips out to look around). One house was very attractive but backed up to a train track. One was in a lovely subdivision that was 1/2 mile away from a bolt factory. When we went to see the house there was a thumpy vibrating noise that would surely drive me to drink. “Oh, not to worry! They knock off by 5:00 every day!” :rolleyes:
A friend of mine is a realtor so we enlisted her services next. She wasn’t as familiar of the area we were looking at but she did a much better job. Even then she couldn’t control Stinky Hairy Guy lounging on the sofa in a wife beater in the first house we looked at. Dude needed to change his underwear or something, it was bad. That was too bad because the house was nice, but I just couldn’t do it.
We went to a place that seemed to be OK. We looked throughout the downstairs and then went upstairs. The master bedroom was locked. Hm, that’s weird. The front door key worked in that lock too (strange) so she unlocked the door and went in. Pretty. We were standing there talking when the bathroom door opened, steam rolled out, and there stood a guy wearing (thank God) a towel around his waist. “What the hell are you doing in my house?!”
When I told my husband about that he said that I was making it up. Meanwhile, our house was up or sale too and he worked the midnight shift. The real estate agents had strict instructions to call first before bringing anybody in. Well, one ignored that and my husband woke up in horror to find three people in our bedroom, talking about the wall colors. The blinds were closed and they flicked the light on to find my very grumpy husband, hair tousled, saying “Why are you here?!”
Good times. No wonder we decided to build instead.
We once saw one that had a basement room converted to a bathroom, in the absolute worst possible way. It was a pretty big room, but the toilet was placed directly behind the door, so the door wouldn’t open all the way. The sink was so close to the toilet that you could wash your hands while you were sitting. Then there was probably 6 feet of blank wall, and at the other end was a one-piece fiberglass shower/bath. We noticed there was an odd glow emanating from the clear grab bar in the tub. It turns out, they had installed the whole thing over a WINDOW, without doing anything to cover the window from either side. Outside light was coming in and showing through the gaps in the enclosure.
Another one, not as bad but still not very desirable, was tucked in behind two other houses with a loooong narrow driveway between them, and then in front of the house was a big patch of asphalt like a parking lot. And it was filled with cars, as was the driveway. I didn’t count, but I’m sure there must have been 15-20 cars there. We ended up not seeing the inside because the agent that was supposed to show it to us never showed up (our agent was out of town that day and arranged with the listing agent to show it), and the owners who came out and invited us in creeped us out.
Ha, I was going to mention that commercial too. Love it, especially the one where they open a door, look in and both recoil in horror. Bwhaaa.
Snakes on a Plain - There was one we visited that looked bloody marvelous on the web site. 2 story, 6,000+ sq ft, hardwoods, upgraded kitchen, 90K pool with extensive rockwork and landscaping, extensive decks all around including a 3rd story one on top of the house, batting cage, wonderful screened patio w/ old fashioned stove, creek behind property, etc. Well, it was that creek that was a problem. It had flooded a couple of years before after T.S. Allison, which is why the pool had been renovated, it filled with debris. So I’m wandering around the backyard near the creek, see the high-water stain on the neighboring house, look to the pool and there’s a substantial sized water mocassin near the waterfall.
I’m a yard putterer but this one was a little too killer.
When we were looking for our present house, in our first foray into country living, we looked first at Roadkill and Renters, an old house with lots of outbuildings on 11 acres, where there was a completely flattened dead cat laid out in front of the main entry door like a doormat and we had to wade through foot-deep dirty clothes (including many types of underclothing) to look at the bedrooms. Those people did make some cookies and leave them on a table in the (filthy) kitchen for us.
Next we went to the Donner House, a decrepit hillside farmhouse on 10 acres where the elderly owners were cooking Sunday dinner and remained exactly 8 feet behind us as we went from room to room. There was something peculiar about the odor of the meat they were roasting, so we always referred to it as the house with the cannibals.
We were shown one house in a neighborhood with a sizeable student population. It had NO living room of any kind; the only common space was a small kitchen.
WTF? Who would even consider a house without a living room? God, our realtor sucked. :mad:
This reminds me of Maze House - a perfectly nice large home that must have been at some point converted into some sort of cheap apartments or the like; all of the rooms were split up into a haphazard maze of tiny bedrooms with added walls and doors everywhere. These rooms were seriously tiny, they just fit a bed (a small bed) and you had to walk through some to reach others.
I suppose a home reno dream, since of course none of the added walls were load-bearing you could easily enough knock them out with a sledgehammer, but still.
Edit: oh yeah, like in neuroman’s example, there was no living room left - it too was converted into tiny bedrooms.
Easter Egg House - every room was painted a different shade of pastel (peach bathroom, lavender bedroom, mint kitchen, etc). My husband said it looked like the Easter Bunny puked all over the house. There was also a very large piece of stained glass in the family room - of a barn scene (we also referred to this one as the Barn House).
Frankenstein house - similar to Kayaker’s Bits-n-Pieces House above - just a bunch of add-ons, very oddly shaped kitchen, oddly shaped master bathroom (with a pass-through bathroom that both opened onto the living room and the MBR). You also had to step up to the MBR closet (which was nice and large).
Chicken house - nothing really wrong with it, but the folks living there had WAY too many chicken knicknacks.
One house I looked at had a door off of the kitchen. Opening it, there were about 6 steps up, and at the top was a toilet mounted in a tiny room with nothing else. WTF?
Another house had a (once) normal living room, but with the addition of a wall down the middle, ending about a foot from each end wall. Like a large monolith in the middle. You could walk around the whole thing, but I have no idea what the hell they were going for.
Alpinist House - When I was looking for a house in Austin, TX, I found one listing that looked perfect - great neighborhood, large, low price, etc. I called up and drove there. When I got there, I found out why it was so great on paper and still available - the driveway to the garage from the street was about 100 feet long, at (it looked like, but I can’t swear to it exactly) 30 degree angle up, with a turn in the middle. My wife looked at that, and said there is no way I am driving up there or backing down from there every day. We didn’t even go inside.
Anne Frank house - this was a custom in our old neighborhood, but I’m pretty sure the owners designed it themselves. Several things just didn’t fit very well layout-wise but what was bizarre was that in the downstairs master there was a tight spiral staircase that went up to a fairly big room on the 2nd floor. But there were no windows in that room, doors, no way to move in furniture of any kind. It was just a big empty room. But then, there was a slender fake panel that hid another secret entrance. To use that you went to an upstairs closet, pushed open a fake hinged wall, walked the length of the house along unfinished attic and rafters and then slid in through that fake panel.
You know who else would have like to come in through that secret passage? Hitler!
The Pee House: I went and looked at a well priced foreclosure in the desired neighborhood. In typical foreclosure fashion, it had been stripped of. . .well, most everything, but that was ok, since the price was low enough that we could buy things like lights and sinks for the bathrooms and still come out ahead.
Except, as I was looking around down stairs, I noticed an odd smell. As went upstairs, the smell got stronger. This was really strange because while the house was a foreclosure, everything was super, duper clean. Going through the master bedroom, the smell was even stronger. Once I got into the master walk in closet, I found the problem: the carpet was literally SOAKED with urine. Bright yellow. The yellow stains even went several feet up the walls and I mean, it was completely saturated.
I resolved that was the place where they stored their pet elephant.
This is a very well timed thread for me I’ve been house hunting in Denver for the last 3 monthe. The who needs heat in Colorado house was a beautiful house on the largest park in Denver. The house had been recently remodeled and the main floor looked spectacular. Once in the basement things got weird. The heater only had 1 cold air return ducted into it the rest were just holes with grates in the floor of the main level and the side of the heater had been removed and replaced with a filer. The was no hot air duct to the master bedroom either. (did I mention this was in a house built in 1930 in Denver?). There was also a bath room that was elevated above the rest of the basement by about 4 inchest, for easier plumbing I imagine but it looked horrible to have 4" of unfinished concrete sticking up from the floor. There was also a cold joint in the foundation and it still had it’s original 70 year old shake roof on the house.
The Pornerific House was a gorgeous house built on the side of a mountain overlooking Denver. The owner was a interior decorator in his early 50s who had used his house so a show piece. The finish was top notch with 50-100 grand in granite throughout the house including a heated slab granite floor in the guest bathroom. Where it started getting weird was the large 3 person shower next to the bed. The toilet was in it’s own closet but the shower was maybe 5’ from the bed. As you moved into the walkout basement you went into what he termed the Africa room which was painted with a splotchy multicolored paint job designed to replicate animal skin. There were zebra, cheetah and leopard carpets (built in but not wall to wall) and random closets opened up throughout the basement that didn’t have handles you just had to know where to push. There was a peninsula remote controlled fire place separating the room into different sections which led out to the hot tub overlooking the city. Both my girlfiend and I felt like we were walking through a porn set and that the whole house needed to be bleached before moving in.
Not as interesting as some of the above, but I did purchase the mystifying Safety Pin House. It was only a couple years old, great space, but dirty and full of trash. The sellers were supposed to clean and clear before they left as part of the deal, but as oftern happens when we went to take possession after closing the place was still dirty and full of trash. We insisted the selling realtor see to this. When I went back the next day, they had pulled all teh trash out of the house and dumped it on the curb, not in bags or cans, just in a pile. Broken glass, stuff everywhere.
So, I cleaned it up bagged the trash then tackled the house. Apparently they had decided to leave literally hundreds of open safety pins strewn throughout. New ones, old rusted ones, in closets, cupboards, peppered throughout the carpets, in windows. I thought it was aimed at me but I found a lot of them rusted in place under sinks, so it was not all for my benefit. Even after throrough professional cleaning I was finding those things for weeks.
