Well, come talk to me now that I’m not pregnant and irrational, Nava. I’ve even got a tile floor in my kitchen!
Not if you’ve got carpet, I’m irrational about it.
My story’s not too exciting by comparison.
When we first moved to the St. Louis area we were looking for condos. We ended up selecting a real estate agent at random & doing all our own research & driving. She was just along to bring the lockbox key. She was in her mid 60s and as clueless a blonde dingbat as you’ve ever seen.
One gentrified condo-heavy area was also the gay enclave. So we go to see this nice-seeming 3BR place in a 4-story building built about 1920. The building is nice, classic architecture & Old World woods & finishes, etc. The condo itself is nice if a bit over decorated, albeit with nice high-end stuff. The folks who lived there kept it clean & neat and apparently had plenty of income. We ended up not buying it, but it was in the running for awhile.
The oddity? Lots of photos & paintings on the walls of shirtless muscular young men. Like 9 of 10 things on the walls were cute guys posing. And portable space heaters in every room and in every hallway. Lots of space heaters. No, even more than that many. Seeing one or two is/was common in lots of older buildings in town; 1920s construction often left cold spots & St. Louis gets plenty cold & drafty in the winter. This condo was quite something else again; you’d trip over the two in the kitchen, two in each tiny bathroom, and the others strung down the hall.
It was instantly apparent the current owners were A) gay & B) nudists. Fine with me.
As we were driving away, Madame Blondie is mystified trying to figure out the space heaters. She was musing out loud & had all sorts of half-baked theories; you could hear her clueless gears slowly grinding their feeble teeth off. So as not blow her sheltered midwestern mind we suggested maybe they were to keep their house plants warm. She liked that idea.
And no, they didn’t have MJ plants hidden about; I thought of that & looked.
Other than the **Gay Nudists **and a couple of **Cigarette Houses **that would’ve needed a bulldozer to renovate, I got nuthin’ over several house-buying cycles.
Late Add: Oh yeah … And one house of unfinished basement with filthy carpeting covered in dog shit.
Hockey Heaven House.
This house must have been owned by a divorced dad who never thought about resale value. The living room was decorated in the colors and wallpaper of his alma mater. Space had been taken from it to build a long narrow closet space between it and the kitchen. All three bedrooms were decorated in the colors of their favorite pro or college hockey teams. The bathroom was plain white and cream.
The reason for the long closet was because, off the dining room & kitchen was a long 3-season porch with a hot tub, big TV and pleather furniture. More sports stuff and a mini-fridge with cases of Mountain Dew and Coke stacked beside it. Also out back were two awkwardly-placed sheds and not much else.
Apart from the odd shape of main rooms, all I could think of was that I’d have to redecorate all the rooms pronto. I’m a hockey fan, but I don’t breathe it. And the wall colors (with logo-ed borders) were dark so painting was going to be a contact sport itself.
No thank you.
Likewise, I am afraid.
I suspect that our first realtor thought that, since this was our first house, he could unload one of the ones no one else would touch. We went over, at the start, exactly what we were looking for, the price range, and location. Not one of the first five houses he showed us met any of our criteria.
And I don’t think we were being unreasonable - our next realtor showed us three in the first month, and we bought one of them.
Regards,
Shodan
The Bird House: First, the listing said the house was made out of bricks. I showed up and, no, those are not bricks. Those are cinderblocks that have been painted red. But okay, let’s look inside. Turns out the people who lived there (renters) had pet birds. Which is nice. But they didn’t keep the birds in cages. And it appears you can’t housebreak birds.
The Cistern House: A currently vacant house as the owner had moved. I showed up early and took a walk around the outside while waiting for the realtor. I noticed something unusual. The storm drains along the roof didn’t run down to the ground or into a barrel as is normal. They ran down the side of the house and then went into the house at ground level. I asked the realtor about this when she arrived. It appears the house had an unusual water system. Rather than town water or a well, it got its water supply from rain. The rain would land on the roof and then run down into the basement where there was this immense water cistern. This was the water supply for the house. I’m no expert but even I could foresee problems with this concept.
The Porch Toilet House: Okay, I’m cheating on this one. I didn’t look at this one for purchase. I actually lived in it as a rental. A nice place overall but it had a strange feature. If you came in the side door to the kitchen, the first thing you’d encounter as you entered the house was a toilet. There was actually a rational reason for this. The main toilet was upstairs and the previous occupants had an elderly relative living with them who couldn’t go up and down the stairs. So they converted the dining room into a bedroom for her but they needed a toilet downstairs. And the only rooms downstairs were the kitchen, the dining room/bedroom, and the living room. It would have been very difficult to wall off part of the dining room or living room and run water to them. But the kitchen, of course, already had a convenient water supply. So they converted the entryway off the kitchen into a half bathroom.
I wouldn’t want it as my only water source, but I love the idea of a cistern to collect rainwater. I’d prefer it outside so I can use it on the yard, though.
My husband and I once looked at a house in Boston (IIRC it was Brookline) that sat up against the bottom of a giant rock. A small cliff, actually. It you looked out any windows at the rear of the house, all you saw was New England granite.
Because of it, the house was situated upside down, first floor was all garage and storage, 2nd floor was bedrooms and the third floor was the kitchen, dining and living areas, which made sense, because the top of the rock was your backyard and the only floor that got natural light from all sides. It was quite a lovely house but the thought of carrying groceries up two flights of stairs was not at all something I would ever consider.
I’m with you on this, though in MN, tile floors can make for very cold feet. I had a flood and had to throw out my basement carpet. I will replace it with heated tile just as soon as I am sure that the flooding problem is eradicated.
I really miss hardwood floors and radiator heat. It keeps the dust and dust mites down.
My parents were looking for a house in one move. Mother found a beautiful home. huge, over 100 years old with gorgeous yard and gardens. A barn so I could (finally!) have a horse. She was in love before they ever got to look inside. And that’s where it ended. Apparently, it was the responsibility of the husband to maintain the outside and the wife the inside. She was morbidly obese and could barely move. The house was filthy and just reeked of cat urine. A gag-inducing level of smell, that Mother just knew they’d never be able to get rid of. She talked about that house for the next 25 years as the one she most regretted not being able to buy.
StG
We’re thinking about putting a heated floor in the new bathroom we’re planning downstairs - I think that would be really nice in our spa bathroom in the basement.
About a hundred years ago, after we’d been married a few years, we briefly thought about buying a house. The one house that stands out was worthy of nightmares. We came in through the back door, into the kitchen. Oh, what a lovely kitchen! New cabinets, ceramic tile counters, wonderful new appliances built in. The living room was nondescript. We went upstairs to the bedrooms. As soon as we got to the top of the stairs, the first “uh-oh” appeared. The ceiling was stained from leaks. In the master bedroom, the ceiling was actually drooping in places.
Our realtor made realtor noises, “Any repair work can be written into the sales contract.”
Uh-huh. Let’s go see the basement.
It was one of those bend-at-the-waist basements. Even I, at 5-6, felt like I was going to bang my head on the rafters. We came around one of the slap-dash walls to the “laundry room,” and my eyes went UP and stared in horror.
The “ceiling” was criss-crossed with old knob-and-tube wiring, and there were splices all over. All I could think of was the extremely outfitted kitchen, directly overhead, with plenty of electricity-hungry appliances. I turned to my husband and said, “Get me out of here.”
The realtor sang another verse of how stuff can be “written into the sales contract.”
I bet the house burned down the next day, but not completely because the soggy roof could have extinguished the fire when it collapsed onto the flames.
~VOW
If you can find bamboo throw rugs in your area you may want to give them a try. My flat is in a cold area (not as cold as MN, but high enough that when it snows in the middle of summer it doesn’t even make the local news) and I have those. They don’t get mites, they feel even less cold than my wood floors, and they’re washable. As in, after the renovators left, I took the dust-and-spackling whitened rugs and showered them: like new.
Hunting for their first house, my parents looked through one that had been renovated and extended so it wound up with a room in the middle of the house with no external walls and therefore no windows, no natural light at all. The same house had indoor/outdoor chickens - the door from the kitchen to the backyard was left open so the chickens could wonder in and out at will.
The Hantovirus House - abandoned by a family, this house sits next to a large field, the opposite side of which is a newly-expanded 5 lane road. The humans may or may not have moved out before the mice moved in. The stench of their waste and many dried husks littered the house, taking only a couple of minutes to start me wheezing and coughing my way out of the house…
The Cancer Cluster House - only a few years old, this smaller home was lived in by a retired couple who decorated it just as my parents would have liked while replacing all the ceiling fans w/ contractor lighting so they wouldn’t have to give them up if the house sold. The house sat directly across the street from a huge, noisy set of power lines. I got out of the vehicle and told our arriving realtor we wouldn’t buy this house unless the basement was filled w/ money. It wasn’t money but it was filled all right - w/ 60 years of stuff times two.
The meanest thing our realtor did was encourage us to bid on a house we loved that was a short-sale knowing it was just a bite to get the bank moving on what they’d *really *accept.
I will look into bamboo rugs. Thanks Nava.
I still plan to use heated tiles. My house is a split entry style, which makes the lower level difficult to heat. The heated tiles is my best chance to allieviate that problem because the tiles will hold the heat and because heat rises. A Vancouver friend of mine went with this solution and is very happy with it. Area rugs will go on the tiles to help stop the echo chamber effect.
Long ago, we were househunting in Durango, Colorado. One house had a couple of huge rock formations in the yard. That was nice, but the one in the basement went from floor to ceiling and took up most of the space.
Another house smelled like a tavern-the-morning-after. The homeowner was a liquor distributor, and collected wood from bars being remodeled or demolished. He had used it to construct the divider between kitchen and living room. It permeated the entire house.
Curry House - this was one of the first houses we looked at it, and it seemed a good value for the price. But it was co-owned by two people, and one of them didn’t want to sell (long story, a former but never-married couple, she signed over half the house to him for nothing, then regretted it later). So he couldn’t prevent viewings, but when we were there, he had a large pot of very redolent curry bubbling away on the stove (he was south asian, I think) and he was in the house the whole time.
The curry smell was so strong we could smell it out on the sidewalk. That wasn’t the deal-killer, though, since we both love curry. No, it was just that the kitchen needed a complete tear-out re-do, and the whole situation was too creepy.
[QUOTE=FairyChatMom]
The Rednecks-At-Home House - We had an appointment and showed up at the set time only to find the family elected to just hang out while we looked. We were followed around by the lady of the house, which prevented me from making some snarky observations about the decor. Yeah, juvenile of me, but as soon as we walked in, I was pretty sure, the place would suck. The house supposedly had 2 master suites, but one was just a bed in the basement over a black and white checkerboard tiled floor - real classy. And in one of the bedrooms, an adult female was sitting on the bed, watching TV, smoking. Yeah, also classy. Then there were all the guys hanging out in the back - I didn’t even want to see what was out there.
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Probably renters. We saw a few houses with renters, but it always seemed to be that the renters were trying to sabotage the sale by hanging around during the open house. In San Francisco it’s very hard for a new owner to get the old renters out, so we decided not to look at any more rented houses.
Roddy
Oh, the joys of house hunting. Some that I remember from various forays:
Decapitation Central: It was actually a converted original log cabin which would be kind of cool except I’m only 5’6" and I smacked my head walking up the stairs, and the upstairs had a ceiling fan where the blades were at my throat level. Oh, and this one had dirty clothes scattered all around.
Swamp Thing: Another old, old house, only this one had about four inches of mud in the basement that we weren’t aware of until we stepped off the basement steps. The owners were furious with us that we tracked mud on the steps.
Handstand House: All of the windows were centered at about knee height. You couldn’t look outside without bending all the way over at the waist or squatting.
Choo Choo House: Four bedrooms, all joined so that you had to go through three to reach the fourth. This was one my parents looked at when I was about 10 and my mother took one look at the bedrooms and walked out.
Institution Manor: Six bedrooms, all with padlocks on the outside. The entire interior was institution green. My sister bought this house and was later on an episode of Bob Vila’s “Restore America” with it. It turned out spectacular.
Staple House: Hidden rooms, closets within closets, and carpet that was heavily stapled and still peeling up. I stepped on the carpet and some of the staples went into the sole of my shoe and I was tethered to the floor as I struggled to destaple myself. I bought this one. A gorgeous, frustrating house I lived in for 15 1/2 years.
I should mention that the house we eventually bought we were able to get because, although it is a very nice house with fundamentals in good condition, the owners had last redecorated in the '70s and it looked like shit - it had ratty '70s carpeting everywhere (including musty bright orange shag in the basement!) and multiple, horrible wallpaper everywhere - obviously a DIY project (for example, had gross, decaying plaited-grass wallpaper in the bedroom, and wallpaper on the ceiling in the bathroom - even panels of mis-matched wallpaper on the closets in the bedrooms.
As well, the appliances were all in advanced states of decay - the dishwasher was something I’d never seen before: it had a spinning wheel used to close it, like the wheel on a submarine, and the inside was tiny (the bottom third was machinery). It was rusted right through otherwise it could have been an interesting museum piece …
Anyway, we fixed it up with a great deal of effort - more than I had thought at first. It makes me tired just remembering it. What emerged, though, was a lovely 1930s Art Deco type house, with lots of nice period details - mostly hidden. We peeled off the '70s carpets to reveal untouched hardwood floors, and a bit of polishing with wire brushes revealed that the tarnished lumps used to open doors were actually very nice original art deco doorknobs.
The hardest, most disagreeable task was eliminating that terrible grass wallpaper. Ugh.