Took off after work last night to look at two more houses I'd found online; this time
Rissi came along. We met Marvin the
Martian Realtor at the first of the two new properties.
House the First: "This Two-story Farmhouse home features ... 1 car Attached Garage ... 2 bedrooms, 1 full bathroom..."
My second "Internet Romance" house. It was, honestly, a nice little place, although not as spacious as it looked in the online photos. The downstairs was open and bright; new Pergo flooring & fresh paint made it look pretty spiffy. The ceilings were a teeny bit low, and the kitchen was small. The two bedrooms upstairs were decent, only disadvantage there is that the smaller of the two had no closet and would require a wardrobe or armoire to be used as an actual bedroom (which would take up a fair chunk of already kind'a limited space). The bathroom was likewise in okay shape - though I'd probably replace the sink with a pedestal version, to keep the little nook where the toilet was from looking claustrophobic.
Again, it had a relatively new high-efficiency furnace, and newish hot water heater.
Its main problem: it was - well, a nice
LITTLE place. Like the best of last Saturday's houses, it had no basement. It also didn't have the long garage & mudroom that the other place had. Long, pretty front yard, teeny little garage... I'd have no problems at all
renting a place like that, but it didn't inspire me to want to buy & make it my own.
Conclusion: second-best property so far, but I doubt I'll put in an offer. *sigh*
House the Second: "This One and a half story home features Frame exterior, Composition roof,
8 car Attached Garage, ... 1 fireplace, Gas heating, Central Air cooling, 5 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, 1 partial bathroom ... Jet Spray Tub...."
Okay, I knew going in that this one - just based on its description - was going to be
ODD. On the off chance it was a good sort of odd, though, I had to see it. I mean... 8-car garage, wtf?! But I thought depending on the condition of it, I might be able to use some of that space for an art-studio type area - and if nothing else, it'd give me more storage than I could need.
First of all, this place was a royal bite in the shorts to find, and we had to drive up some very hilly roads to get to it, which can be a big strike considering Pittsburgh winters. The property had been neglected for longer than most of the others I've looked at, with the grass nearly a foot tall.
From the front, the place honestly looked like at one point a business had been run out of it. The inside... you know, if I were looking to move into a place with a couple or three friends - and at least one of them had some home-repair skills - it could have been tempting. It was a funky, rambling place, with a full-sized hot tub
on the second floor, a coat of arms hanging on the wall just outside the hot-tub room and a set of deer or elk antlers on the wall opposite, various piles of interesting clutter left all over the place. At least one of the "5 bedrooms" was captive to another; one of the upstairs bedrooms was almost completely taken up by a plywood platform built for model train tracks! There were a couple of random skylights; the kitchen on the main floor was narrow but long... the strangest thing, I think, were the two sets of double doors on the second floor.
...yeah, the ones that had no deck or steps outside them. O_o (...although now I think I know how they got that hot tub onto the second floor.) I didn't even venture down into the basement to check the furnace and water heater.
There was no access to the alleged 8-car garage from inside the house proper; it didn't look quite that large from the outside, and all its windows were either painted over, or the kind of patterned glass that lets in light but you can't see through. No way of knowing what its interior looked like - but the house itself, while amusing and plenty quirky, needed more TLC than I could give it on my own.
Conclusion: Sorry, O Quirky House - but I do hope you find a young family and/or collection of people who can appreciate your oddities and fix you up proper!
(Sub-conclusion: If I were to win the lottery, the weirdness/amusement factor would almost be worth buying this place and rehabbing it!)
After that, I made Marvin take us back to the best house so far, so Rissi could see it. That one is still entirely a possibility.
He had another batch of handouts for me to look through and see if there were any I'd be interested in visiting. They're all in a neighborhood closer to work, but frankly on most of them the property taxes are no better - and I think only one of that lot has off-street parking. 8P I'll go through 'em more thoroughly tonight, though - and find my list of the houses
I thought looked interesting in that neighborhood as a counter-proposal.
No new houses this weekend, as Marvin is out of town and I will either be away myself or lurking around area garage sales, depending.
semi-frantic
anxious
