Journey to Gestalt

Okay, I really ought to have remembered how frustrating this process is, from tagging along as Nan & Lara shopped for homes.

The day started with a very minor frustration; I stopped at my bank as soon as they opened Saturday morning, hoping to speak to someone about mortgages and what I'd have to do to get a preapproval, etc. Only the mortgage specialist wasn't in. *facepalm* Looks like I'm going to have to take time off from work to talk to him, at some point. I did get a somewhat better idea of what kind of numbers I'm looking at, which reassured me that yes this should in fact be possible, and that I might even be able to go a little bit higher than I had been looking.

Originally, Lara had planned to go out with me on the expedition to look at houses. She had some database testing to do, though, and ended up waiting and waiting on other people to get their part of the process done. As it turned out, she couldn't start her testing until just past the time I was supposed to meet the realtor - so I went alone. My realtor had added two more houses to be looked at, one of which I'd actually looked at online (and had on my list as a possible for Round 2). I took a notebook with me to scribble down the pluses and minuses of each house.

House the First: "Solid built brick ranch. Large living area, open dining room, and eat in kitchen. Nice level back yard. Don't pass up this house!"

Ummm... yes, pass it up - unless you're willing and able to do a LOT more fix-up work than me. The yard was indeed nice and level, and frankly it was the best thing about the entire property. The concrete walk up to the front door was badly cracked in several places and crumbling in one. Somebody had kicked in the metal lower panel of the front storm door. It had very old, single-pane windows (energy efficiency? ...what's that?!). The living room was NOT very large, and had carpet of a rather vile bright shade of green. The kitchen was stereotypical 60s - 70s decor: VERY dark cabinets, avocado green stove, and scary large-loud-print wallpaper.

Two of the three bedrooms were about half the size of my room in the Mews house, and also had fugly carpet. The somewhat larger "master bedroom" had soot stains going up the wall from the furnace register. WTF?! Had the previous owners never heard the concept of changing their furnace filter, or what? The thing that had even my real estate agent giving up on it, though, was the cracked foundation in the basement. Right, Strike One.

House the Second: "Adorable and cozy - large rooms ... larger than it looks."

Okay, House 2 had a curved gravel driveway leading to the garage and a fairly large flat area that could be used for additional parking. Nice landscaping in front of the place. The front porch would be a great place to put a small table and chairs or a hot tub, if I could afford one. The living room was large, and had an actual log fireplace in one of the far corners. The combined kitchen/dining room area was nice, open and well-lit; it had a couple of gouges in the vinyl floor-covering, but frankly I hardly noticed, and it still looked better than the kitchen floor in the previous place. There's a long, narrow room along the back of the house that I suspect used to be a porch; the floor was just a wee bit uneven, and you have to pass through this room to get to the downstairs full bathroom.

The stairs to the second floor were narrow and had a twist, which would make getting any furniture up them quite a challenge. Upstairs... well, it claims to be a 2-bedroom, but the other rooms were captive to the smaller 'bedroom'; you have to pass through it to get to either the master bedroom OR the upstairs bathroom. The master bedroom was HUGE and interestingly quirky (a couple of little nooks). The upstairs bath was tub-only, and had the toilet placed under a slanted ceiling; tall people would have to exercise caution when standing up, or risk bonking their heads.

It had no basement, but there was a BIG garage (much longer than most cars would need) and a mud-room between the kitchen and garage (just as long) that would make for good storage areas as needed. The back yard was up a slight hill, but once you got past that it was pretty level - and had a large lilac bush ♥, a couple of trees, and an aluminum storage shed for keeping one's lawn mover and other yard-maintenance type tools.

One thing that was both amusing and vaguely alarming: neither the realtor nor I could find the furnace! O_o Near as we can figure, it was in a crawl-space under the house... that's something that would have to be checked on. So - not ideal, as this place was a little more expensive and wouldn't allow me to have a roommate unless it was somebody I really trusted well - but overall, far more positives than negatives. This one had possibilities.

House the Third: "GREAT HOME WITH NEWER ROOF, WINDOWS... DECK, BEING SOLD 'AS IS'..." ...yes, the description was written all in capslock - should have told me something right there. This was one of the two I'd picked out myself, although I wasn't terribly confident about it due to that "as is" clause. Sadly, that uncertainty proved well-founded.

First of all, we had a hard time finding it. It was on a quiet, almost cul-de-sac sort of street, which was nice. The steep steps leading to the front door were in very good condition. The living room - unremarkable, I didn't bother to write down any comments for it. The kitchen was tiny and cramped, with badly damaged cabinets. Not at all attractive. The downstairs master bedroom had cracks in the plaster walls, and some of the plaster in the closet had actually crumbled. The single bathroom, on the main floor, was in decent condition - except that the cabinet (vanity?) holding the sink blocked about 1/4 of the doorway. I'd be guaranteed to constantly bash my hip on that!

The two upstairs bedrooms would have also been unremarkable, except that their ceilings were only about 6" high! Very claustrophobic for anybody over 5' 5". Then I went down to the basement, and that killed it completely. The basement and garage were just one big room, no separation at all between where you could pull a car in, and where they had the washer and dryer hookups. And the garage door gapped pretty badly, too - all sorts of small critturs could sneak in through it, and the drafts in winter would be killer. A big Strike Two.

House the Fourth: "THIS MOVE IN CONDITION HOME HAS BEEN WELL TAKEN CARE OF * NEWER EAT IN KITCHEN W/LOTS OF CABINETS * NEWER WINDOWS, FURNACE, A/C, H20 TANK..." Yeah, there's that capslock again.

This was the one I'd half fallen in love with via the website. It was in an older neighborhood, that was once part of the steel-mill zone, but we went to Google Maps' street view and the area didn't look bad at all. And I wanted to stay in love with it, really I did!

Again, we had trouble finding it, because my agent doesn't usually show homes in that part of town. It was also the only place still occupied at the time, so we had the owner kind of hovering over us the whole time. And it really did have a lot of good points about it.

Like the previous house, it had steep stairs leading to the door - and again, they were in excellent condition. Unlike the last place, the front yard was terraced and had an interesting mix of plants in the terraces. There was a huge, beautiful azalea bush in full bright-purple bloom in front of the place. The living room had two sets of built-in bookcases (with cabinets below)... but what looked in the website photos like brick walls turned out to be some kind of brick-look paneling put up over the old lath & plaster walls, and it didn't look nearly as good in person as in the small photos. Still, not a deal-breaker. Dining room was in nice shape (although that was the only room in which I saw a crack in the wall... maybe because it's one of the few that hadn't been paneled over) and had a fireplace - which had been closed off by the current resident, but could be opened again. They'd installed double-pane thermal windows throughout the place, and even had compact fluorescent bulbs in most of the light fixtures.

The kitchen... I adored their kitchen. Not huge, but didn't feel cramped at all, bright, TONS of cabinets for storage, a small bay window one could keep plants in, a built-in breakfast counter (with still more cabinet space built into it!). I'm not much of a cook, and the kitchen isn't usually my favorite room, but... damn. ♥ Behind the kitchen & dining room, at the back of the house, was a long narrow den-type space that made me start thinking "hmm, sewing and/or art space?"

So that was the first floor. (Anyone notice yet what was missing from that list?) The owner took us out through the den's outside door into the back yard. Small, with one raised bed for flowers and/or a small garden patch. The property had a two-car garage, in very good shape, but garages - yeah, not all that exciting to me really except when they're part and parcel of the basement, and then it's NOT the good kind of excitement.

Back into the house, and the owner took us into the basement. It was in pretty good shape, as basements go; not too damp (although he did have a dehumidifier going). The furnace was less than 10 years old, and a high-efficiency model, something none of the other homes had going for them. They'd replaced the hot water heater less than a year ago, so definite plus there. Lots of storage room in the basement.

The other thing in the basement? One of the two full bathrooms. Including the only shower in the house. >,0 Now, the owner had just told us that the temperature down there stayed pretty steady all year 'round, at about 55 degrees F. And if I wanted a shower, I'd have to walk through the cool and slightly clammy basement to get it?! Yeah, at that point the disillusionment definitely started to kick in.

That may have colored my perceptions when we went up to the second floor, I don't know... but that was a disappointment, too. The upstairs floors were all linoleum (which could be replaced, but that's extra money and effort that I might not be able to invest for a while, so I'd have to live with it in the meantime). All the lath-and-plaster bedroom walls had been covered over with wood paneling that looked kind of cheap and cheesy to me. The two smaller bedrooms didn't even have normal doors; they'd been given the kind of bi-fold doors (kind of like this only all wood) that I associate with closets, not rooms. ("Oh hi, kids, we don't trust you enough to give you complete privacy WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE WITH THE DOOR SHUT?!") The closets in all the bedrooms had been added by the current owner, and in the case of the two smaller bedrooms seemed to take up an awful lot of the space. Second-floor bathroom was okay except for the lack of a shower (he'd never installed one because he had concerns about water leaking into the frame of the window, which was right above the tub).

I might have been able to work around my issues with the upstairs, but the whole "no shower except in the basement" thing - not to mention the lack of any kind of powder room on the main floor! - really killed it for me. Which is a shame, because there was so much to LIKE about that place. I had to sadly call it Strike Three, and I was done for the day.

So, I'm going to give a rest for a couple of days, and go through more of the online listings, before I look at any other houses. The second place is still an option.