Good Lord. $750,000 for THAT???
About ignoring all the memorabilia and personal items piled up in a house - realtors will generally advise you to go easy on all this stuff when selling a home - it supposedly interferes with the buyer-fantasy of establishing their own nest. A bit silly, yes, but when you’ve got framed photos of every relative back to Revolutionary War days jamming the cupboards, shelves and tables at every turn, and enough knickknacks to stock an antiques warehouse, the buyer might legitimately question if you’ll ever be able to get it moved out in time for the new owner to take possession.
We toured at least two versions of this. One was The Inexplicable Partial Second Story, featuring a railing-less alcove hanging over the living room. One visualizes watching TV on the living room sofa while a family member overhead trips, flailing her hands helplessly as she pitches over the edge onto your head. Then there was the Rube Goldberg Second Floor Deck, on which I would not trust a small dog’s weight, much less my own.
In another realm, there was It’s Not The Heat, It’s The Humidity, a slightly decaying daringly modern home in the Houston suburbs (at least it was probably daring back in 1958), featuring a gigantic wall-less common space on the first floor, which included an indoor pool, reeking of chlorine. Sorry I bumped into your coffee table - I couldn’t see for the condensation on my glasses.
mirthless laugh Come to Los Angeles, home of the world’s crappiest million-dollar homes. I’m told that, in other parts of the country, a $500K house is a mansion with uniformed footmen. Here in LA, a $500K house probably does a fair-to-adequate job shielding you from the elements.
Go ahead, ASK me how my house-hunting is going.
Back on topic, I’ve seen:
X-treme Bathroom!
Imagine a bathroom done entirely in concrete: walls, floor, ceiling, everything. Now imagine that the shower isn’t enclosed or anything; there’s just a showerhead in one corner with a drain in the middle of the room. How hip! How edgy! How totally impractical! (Don’t the towels get wet?) I saw on the spec sheet that it was called a “wet room”, so now I know what to avoid.
The Little Condo That Could
526 square feet. Went for $415K, or $35K over list. How much do you figure the nice hardwood floors cost you per square inch, Mister Homeowner?
The Curiously Vertical Condo
Two bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, five stories. I suppose it would obviate the need for a StairMaster…
The Palace of Excretia
Five bedrooms, eleven bathrooms. Yes, eleven: 6 full, 5 half. What kind of parties do these people have?
Oh hell, I’m soooo glad I don’t live in Venice any more. I’m (probably) going to be buying a place this summer (townhouse/condo) and that’s over 4 times my max price range, while being almost twice UNDER my min. square footage.
I saw something there about 2.5+ to 5 acres of land. Sounds fishy; don’t they know what size the lot is?
The house I currently live in is for sale by the landlord… I live in Santa Cruz, so I can attest housing prices are ridicuous here. I live in an old farm house next to a very loud and busy street.
This house was built in the '30’s and has no insulation and some very funky (and dangerous wiring). I had the front room (my home office) rewired up to code, so I could hook up my computers, etc. The house so many other problems that would be too numerous to mention in detail.
However, that didn’t stop literally 200 people from coming by and taking a look. I even loved how some people assumed the server rack in my office (loaded with $25,000 worth of computers) came with the house. :rolleyes:
Anyhoo, it looks like there is an buyer for the place… for this craptacular shit shack, they got $660,000.
People is crazy.
I would so be tempted to buy that house and use the toilet as a vase.
Some people think this is a way to drive up the price.
When my parents were househunting last, in 1988, the house they liked best was a gorgeous 3-story brick number on a big, beautiful lot out in the country. It had been custom built by the owner, who was a big-time real estate developer. The housing market was lousy for sellers then, and everything was going at bargain-basement prices.
So, just around the time my dad and seller were coming to a deal, seller’s wife burst into tears during the negotiations, and began to sob about how she couldn’t possibly leave her house.
After about forty-five minutes of histrionics, it became clear that the message was: “I can’t leave my house for that price.”
Dad walked away, but it worked on some other idiot.
Exactly. You have to look at “the bones” of a place, not its current furnishing.
In Sunday’s Washington Post was the story of the guy in West Virginia who won 314M$ in PowerBall. (This is the guy who has been repeatedly robbed and arrested, a sad story.)
He, or his wife or someone, renovated a house with a round bedroom designed to resemble the inside of the bottle in ‘I Dream of Genie.’ How the heck will the Realtor sell that one when the time comes?
Here are my house horrors in no particular order:
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What’s that Smell? - When upstairs we could detect the faint aroma of cats. As soon as we openned the door to the downstairs “family room” we realized that faint aroma was around 20 cats penned in with nary a litter box in sight.
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Random Toilet Part III - A plastic accordian door seperated the kitchen from the basement and perched at the top of the basement steps was a fully-functiong toilet. I was trying to figure out how you got around it and down to the finished basement, where there was no door blocking it from the view of the bar downstairs.
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That’s a Bedroom? - 6’ X 8’. No typos.
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One Acre Lot - Two feet of backyard before the 40 foot dropoff.
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Trailer Conversions - We actually ran into 3 of these. Each one started as a mobile home and then random additions were added on in some kind of bizarre, half-assed expansion. Oh, Og, the abuse of cheap wood paneling.
The Happy Ending - After 10 months of looking we stumbled onto a fantasy. The older couple originally tried to sell their house and property 5 years before with no takers. They then split it in 2 - One acre with the house and 1 1/2 acres seperately. The best school district in the area, 2500 square feet plus another 800 square feet unfinished, across from a duck pond, close to the top notch hospital, 8 miles of bike path, and $148,000. $148,000! The inside needed totally renovated and this is in an area where everyone wants the perfect home to move into. After about $15,000 we have a house that our agent said he wouldn’t list for under $220,000. I am never moving.
A few years ago, we saw a house listed in the Sunday morning paper that looked interesting. Called the realty office and asked if we could see it that day. The Realtor said, “Sure. Come on over and I’ll take you out there.”
She also gathered up a few other places to look at, while we were at it.
One of the other places:
We drive up to an unappealing cape in a neighborhood of unappealing capes. There are half a dozen guys in the back yard drinking beer around a partially dismantled car. They’re ostensibly working on it. They look like the guys from Deliverence, and give us the fish-eye as we walk to the front door. We walk up a broken sidewalk, passing a yard oozing water which has made the “lawn” (a dying patch of weeds) squishy. Water is running down the street. We’re admitted by an overweight , unkempt, smoking, smelly middle-aged woman. We look around the crappy living room stocked with crappy furnishings. Everything looks dirty. We are led into the kitchen, where sits a decaying middle-aged man. Also unkempt, dirty and sickly. The woman proudly displays the “new cabinets”. They are the cheapest crappiest pieces of junk, and have not so much been installed, as hung on the wall. The marks on the wall from the old cabinets are clearly visible. The stove and the floor have the same layers of crud coating them.
I attempt to open a bedroom(?) door off the living room but it’s stopped by some object(s) inside after about 6 inches. The woman stops me from entering (as if I could), announcing that it’s her “son’s room”. This has some special meaning, but I fail to discern it. I do however, manage a glance inside. It’s floor-to-ceiling with boxes, furniture and god knows.
I peer down a stairway to the basement, and I’m momentarily confused by the black floor that seems too high. I take two steps down, and the vibration of my being on the stairs causes the black floor to ripple slightly. It isn’t the floor. It’s a foot of black brackish water in the basement. Enlightenment dawns. This is the source of the squishy lawn and the water in the street.
The owner asks if we’d like to see the upstairs. We decline, as we and the realtor are both anxious to race home and scrub ourselves with lye soap.
But…but it has RV parking!
My favorite so far is the house that we saw on Sunday. They said it was three bedrooms. And it’s quite a charming little house. As my husband and I are planning on a family in the next year or two, three bedrooms is a must.
The third bedroom was a PARTITION in the basement. A freakin’ partition.
Look, sellers. If ANY room is constructed out of a partition and a wish, then it is NOT another room. We could’ve saved half an hour not looking at your stupid house.
Amen on the neutral colors - the whole reason we were attracted to the house we’re putting an offer in on today is because the dining room is painted a gorgeous red, the living room is a light yellow, the mud room is a dark forest green, and the bedrooms are all painted. Even my ‘afraid of color’ husband loved it. It’s just enough color and it’s not overdone. I do want to paint one of the rooms (the second bedroom is a LITTLE bright, but it’s their young child’s room, so it’s understandable), but nothing needs to be done just yet.
I actually feel lucky after reading a few of these horror stories.
E.
Some of the unique houses I ran across when house hunting:
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The closet room: A friend from church was willing to sell me her mothers home for a song. $54K in a neighborhood of $100-150K homes. However, it technically was a one bedroom house. My friend, while growing up, slept in what was essentially a closet off the bedroom. The house originally had two bedrooms, but when indoor plumbing became available, they halved the second bedroom to make the lav and closetbedroom. There weren’t any other closets in the house. The front porch was turned into a bedroom. Without heat. When they added “indoor” stairs to the basement (versus the cellar door) they obviously had oompa-loompahs doing the work as we had to crouch to go downstairs. Somehow they managed to raise three kids in this house. I had to turn it down.
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One furnace, two furnace, THREE furnace? Another home I looked at wasn’t so bad. Only one half bath on the main floor (this was made from the closet in the main bedroom. You had to stand between the toilet and the sink and suck in your gut to close the door). The “second bedroom” was the back porch and the primary entrance. But the joy was the basement. The house, built in the teens, still had the original HUGE octopus furnace. And the replacement behemouth from the 40’s. And the smaller new furnace. The older furnaces weren’t hooked up to anything, but were never removed. There was another half bath downstairs. The bathtub was in the laundry room. No shower. Just washer/bathtub/dryer.
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A house I loved was ruined by “updating”. The plaster was covered by dark panneling. The ceiling was dropped with icky tiles. The kitchen? Sesame Street orange formica. The stove was in the corner behind the door. Nothing else near it. The bathroom was huge, if you discounted it being built under the eaves. One would have to have rolled into the tub because you sure as heck couldn’t step into it. If you ignored the gold/mucus green flocked wallpaper in the bedrooms you still would’ve been seesick by the lack of one level floorboard upstairs. The realtor asked if we wanted to see the furnace. Opened up the basement door, looked down, only three risers remained in the stairwell. I could SEE the original look of the house. When I opened up the front closet I saw the original moulding, plaster, high ceiling. But I couldn’t afford the cost of bringing it back up to snuff. The house was bought by a rehabber an put back on the market a year later. They “updated” everything again, completely removing any trace of what the house once was.
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A five bedroom house for $127K? If you ignore the fact that four of the bedrooms were made from the garage. Each bedroom had it’s own entrance. And no ceilings, just the garage joists with assorted boxes and bicycles stored in them. The one bathroom, wonderfully decorated with patriotic fervor (the good ol’ stars and bars was painted on one wall. The whole wall), was on a 20 degree incline.
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Well, you tried. Condo owners attempted to renovate, however they must have hired blind tile and carpet layers. Not one tile in the entrance was square and the carpet was put down in hunks with the wale going any which way. We’ll overlook the fact that the carpet upstairs was electric purple.
The housing market here in the Twin Cities, like everywhere else, is crazy. A house down the street from me is up for $145K- it has one bedroom, no basement, and a whopping 680 sq feet of living space. I know it’s essentially a teardown, but still. Ridiculous.
How’s about the
Religious Partiers
Went to see this one house, ranch/rambler-style with a finished basement. Upstairs it was elderly and religious. Bibles everywhere, the Footprints poster up, praying hands on the wall, the whole works. Downstairs is where the lounge lizard must have lived. Thick (I mean thick - you sunk in up to your ankles) red shag carpeting, disco ball, bar at the far end. Hilarious! My husband swore that if we bought that house, the carpeting stayed. We didn’t.
Ooh, Ooh, can I play?
The Fisher-Price People House
Over 2000 sq. ft. house…all divided up into about half a squillion eeeensy rooms, the largest of which, the “living room”, was a whopping 12x15. If you put any furniture into any of these rooms, you’d not be able to get anyone larger than one of the Fisher-Price people, or maybe a Weeble ™ to get into the room.
With Indoor Pool!
Upon entering the house, we were greeted with a horrible, musty odor, which got worse as we moved toward the back of the house. We found out what it was when our Realtor (may she ever be blessed, that poor woman must’ve showed me over a hundred houses before we found one!) opened the door which we thought was to the outside. No, it was to the basement. Down two steps, turn on the landing, down two more steps and…OK, this one’s not gonna be on our “must buy NOW” list. I’m sure having almost SIX FEET of water in the basement is good for it…
(No really, it’s just a really REALLY high water table here. Or something.)
You can move right in! Right away!
As in, it’s been unoccupied for exactly how long now? Owner inherited it from someone in his family and had never lived in it. Built in…um…we’re not sure, exactly WHAT year, actually. How long has it been unoccupied? Over a year, oh that’s good. Well, let’s take a look around, shall we?
All the windows need replacing. You can tell by the WATER DAMAGE to every window frame and every wall under the windows.
Looks like the roof needs work, too. Oh, and the siding needs to be completely replaced…and a couple exterior walls need extensive work. And is that MOLD growing on the ceilings? I do believe it is.
Oh, look, honey, our very own MUSHROOMS growing in the closets! And you’re asking twice the going rate for houses in this area…Well, I’m sure you won’t get it anytime soon.
That’s why we have "michigan basements"
Now, I’m originally FROM Michigan, as are my parents. I’d never even heard of a “michigan basement” (and neither had they) until I moved to Indiana and started house hunting.
Evidently a “michigan basement” is one where the walls in the basement form a “ledge” about 3 - 4 feet off the ground, “so you can put all your stuff there that you don’t want to get wet.” So…you’re saying that it’s not a case of IF the basement floods so much as WHEN, hey? OK, note to self : NO BASEMENTS.
Especially after one we saw was explained away by the owner as “well, there is a bit of water damage to one of the walls.” Yup, if you call “completely disintegrating brick, crumbled and nonexistent mortar, and a bowed-in and collapsing wall” “a bit” of damage, then yes it was.
I personally would’ve called it “total freaking disaster and by the way, you also need to get the foundation re-done.”
It’s just a bit of antiquing on the paint
One house had a HUGE “parlor” or living room or whatever you call it. HUGE. With the master bedroom over it. No support pillars or anything in the living room. And their waterbed was right over the TOTALLY unsupported ceiling of the living room. Which was bowing down NOTICEABLY. Enormous cracks running through it. We got out of there FAST.
Just Step Right Down
Just built last year! Practically brand new! And evidently nobody checked to make sure that both halves of this modular would stay together, since there was a charming STEP right in the middle of the living room. With daylight streaming in through the cracks in the ceiling and roof. Lovely.
We’ve done a lot of house hunting over the years, and a couple really stand out.
Deer-Butt House - there was a bonus room over the garage, and as you came down the stairs, you were face-to-butt with a stuffed and mounted back end of a deer, with its little tail in the air. We didn’t buy, but for other reasons.
Dead Animal House - the owner was a hunter. He had, among other things, three stuffed bears, some foxes, birds, fish, and a bobcat. Plus there was a big stain on the dining room ceiling - the upstairs water heater had leaked. It was replaced and there was no structural damage - the guy just couldn’t be bothered to paint. And he was a builder. And his realtor was his sister. We did buy that place - it had been on the market a while and they were building a new place, so they had to sell the old one. We were able to look past the dead animals and the gun cabinets and the pile of wet towels on the bathroom floor. It was the nicest house we ever owned, and the only one we didn’t have to do anything to but paint. I hated to leave it…
You forgot the “drippy room” with huge texture stalactites on the ceiling and walls, and also the hugely excessive animal skin decorating on Everything in the dining room…
Was it an old house? Houses didn’t routinely have closets in them until relatively recently (in the last 100 years). That’s why antiques stores are so full of wardrobes and armoires. People didn’t have enough clothes to fill a closet back then, anyway.
The oldest houses I’ve seen are under 90 years old, and this wasn’t one of the oldest…