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This is not my beautiful house.
I went on my blind date yesterday. In fact, it was really more like one of those 20-minute dating round-robin nightmares than an afternoon of coffee and window-shopping, and I saw three houses and peeked into the windows of another and didn't see a fifth at all. The three houses were each of them mighty fine, in their own way, but because I have a yen for May-December romances, it was the turn-of-the-century houses that were the most seductive.
I still like the red one
best. It's a Craftsman, which as we all know is an open obsession of mine. It's a bit on the shabby side, but appears to me to be in fairly decent shape. 1750 or so square feet. Five fireplaces, some of which have been stripped in preparation for staining. It has a wide front porch (albeit a porch inexplicably COVERED IN ASTROTURF OMG). It has a kitchen and a butler's pantry, both of which retain their beautiful glass-front original cabinets. The bathroom is pedestrian, but serviceable. Big, slightly overgrown fenced backyard. Floor furnace heat, no central air. It has glittery ceilings. The floors are in decent shape, with no soft or rotten spots that I could see. The neighborhood is like the house, shabby but decent, and it deserves to make a comeback because the houses in it are genuinely charming. It's $10000 cheaper than
, which, objectively speaking, is by far the best buy. It's priced low because it's corporate owned, and that and the fact that the former owners were partway through a major renovation are the only things that pull it into my price range. It's in a comfortably middle-class to upper-middle-class neighborhood, full of well-kept homes. It's got some major sex appeal. It sits on a slightly larger lot than Bachelor No. 1 does, and it is also fenced. It's one of those Late Victorian/Craftsman Hybrids. The kitchen has been completely modernized. There are three fireplaces. It has what the realtor calls three bedrooms and I call two, and it's huge, around 2200 square feet, and all the rooms are big--I worry that it will be a little too much. It has a back deck, with positively dangerous steps that will have to be replaced before anyone can use them. Central air and heat. There are a couple of spots where the ceiling plaster will have to be patched, and the owners had knocked out a wall between a bedroom and the butler's pantry and finished the walls but the floors are still a mess, though the tile they'd planned on using is stacked neatly against the wall. It's got a wraparound porch and lots of windows (both houses have lots of windows, actually). The bathroom's big but awkwardly laid out, and the fixtures are pink, and the wall tile is pink and bright new-leaf green O_o.
It's a good thing to have two houses to crush on, right? I could seriously love either one. And so now I have to decide which one I'd most want to commit to and fight the onset of a major panic attack and set everything in motion.
*takes deep breath*
:::
Of course you have seen neither of these houses personally. But I'm curious to know: which do you like best?
I still like the red one
best. It's a Craftsman, which as we all know is an open obsession of mine. It's a bit on the shabby side, but appears to me to be in fairly decent shape. 1750 or so square feet. Five fireplaces, some of which have been stripped in preparation for staining. It has a wide front porch (albeit a porch inexplicably COVERED IN ASTROTURF OMG). It has a kitchen and a butler's pantry, both of which retain their beautiful glass-front original cabinets. The bathroom is pedestrian, but serviceable. Big, slightly overgrown fenced backyard. Floor furnace heat, no central air. It has glittery ceilings. The floors are in decent shape, with no soft or rotten spots that I could see. The neighborhood is like the house, shabby but decent, and it deserves to make a comeback because the houses in it are genuinely charming. It's $10000 cheaper than, which, objectively speaking, is by far the best buy. It's priced low because it's corporate owned, and that and the fact that the former owners were partway through a major renovation are the only things that pull it into my price range. It's in a comfortably middle-class to upper-middle-class neighborhood, full of well-kept homes. It's got some major sex appeal. It sits on a slightly larger lot than Bachelor No. 1 does, and it is also fenced. It's one of those Late Victorian/Craftsman Hybrids. The kitchen has been completely modernized. There are three fireplaces. It has what the realtor calls three bedrooms and I call two, and it's huge, around 2200 square feet, and all the rooms are big--I worry that it will be a little too much. It has a back deck, with positively dangerous steps that will have to be replaced before anyone can use them. Central air and heat. There are a couple of spots where the ceiling plaster will have to be patched, and the owners had knocked out a wall between a bedroom and the butler's pantry and finished the walls but the floors are still a mess, though the tile they'd planned on using is stacked neatly against the wall. It's got a wraparound porch and lots of windows (both houses have lots of windows, actually). The bathroom's big but awkwardly laid out, and the fixtures are pink, and the wall tile is pink and bright new-leaf green O_o.It's a good thing to have two houses to crush on, right? I could seriously love either one. And so now I have to decide which one I'd most want to commit to and fight the onset of a major panic attack and set everything in motion.
*takes deep breath*
:::
Of course you have seen neither of these houses personally. But I'm curious to know: which do you like best?
no subject
We bought the house on 3/3/2003. It had been a rental for 20 years, and had last been "renovated" in the 50s; it was 1100 sf. It was a screaming deal for this area at $251,000 (we offered on it 15 minutes after we saw it; there were 3 other offers, but we had no contingencies so we got it. Whew.)
We remodeled the hideous kitchen and installed in-floor heating, a new heater, and rewired the place first off. (Still had the old knob-and-tube wiring, and the outlets were not grounded, and there were about 4 of them in the whole house. The kitchen basically ran off a power strip.) While we were gone this winter we had the tiny bathroom removed and a new one carved out of the strange skinny bedroom (8x15), and the foundationless sinking old-addition knocked off and a new 2-story one framed in. (The rest of the house is high-ceilinged, so the addition is barely visible from the street. We live in a historic district so we had to get permission for this. We're trying very hard to stick to the original feel of the house. As it is, we're only increasing the size to about 1450 sf.)
Right now the new upstairs bathroom has just been tiled. The sink and toilet are about to be installed. Everything's sheetrocked and painted, but the windows and doors haven't been trimmed yet. (Today I stained and sealed a bunch of trim.) We have bought the planking for floors - we're going to re-floor the whole house as the original wood floor is a mess - and I guess that's the next big project. We also just bought and have started to install light fixtures.
Here are a few pictures from last year's photo meme - one of our lovely arched windows, and a view of part of the living room - a niche, and a bit of interior archway and a window. Right now we are living in this part of the house, but at the time we had just redone the walls and repainted.
no subject
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Oh Isis, that is lovely. That window! The details like niches! The landscaping outside! I would love to see picspam!
I really envy you your pretty, pretty unpainted woodwork. Did you have to strip it before staining? Maybe it is just a southern thing, but around here it seems hard to find woodwork that hasn't been painted twenty times over (when they were renovating my last apartment, the guy who dipped the front doors told me they'd stripped away EIGHT layers of paint). Both these houses have painted woodwork, but I wasn't hoping for otherwise.
Another thing that's different down here: there aren't so many bidding wars for houses, and most go for several thousand dollars below list price. A good, reasonably-priced house in a nice neighborhood can stay on the market for several months before selling.
And another: floor heating seems like an extravangance here, where it doesn't get all that cold for all that long. But up there, I can only imagine how welcome it is--I can feel my toes curling luxuriously in sympathy! :D
On the whole, your renovation sounds much more comprehensive than mine would have to be. I would love to hear more--reading about projects like this is one of my favorite things to do.