After our bar crawl through Avondale on Sunday we figured we probably should check out some open houses. We looked at three two-story frame homes. Everyone tells us that brick houses are better quality and have more longevity than frame homes, so we’ll probably steer toward brick, but we had to go with what was open on Sunday.
By the way, I want to hear your thoughts on brick versus frame – I really like the big wide porches on the frame homes, but maybe that’s because I’m a foreigner who was fed an idealized vision of American life through treacly American TV shows. I always kind of thought that I’d end up living in one of those houses with Scott Baio or Kirk Cameron (but he decided to have six kids and become a born again). Anyhow, the first two places we looked at were dumps. I really don’t know if they were dump dumps or fixer-upper dumps, because I’m not that knowledgeable yet. I hope they were dump dumps because I don’t mind a bit of hard work, but not that much.
These houses had ghetto kitchens (and my standards aren’t unrealistically high in that regard), warped moldings and uneven floors. Many of these older houses have tiny bedrooms, unfortunately, and even the living areas aren’t that big. They served the purpose of the families who lived in them back in the day, but as my real estate agent says, these days we’re all spoilt and want more space. The third house we went to had been fixed up by a young couple who planned to move to the ‘burbs.
We really like it, but we wouldn’t buy from people who had only owned a home for a year and had to recover their renovation costs and try to turn a profit. We’d rather buy from someone who has lived in the house for years and owns it outright as presumably they’ll be more flexible on price.
This couple had renovated the attic, which had two bedrooms and a separate library / reading space by the window, as well as numerous storage closets, built-in bookshelves and a second bathroom. I loved it. They also had enclosed a porch off the main living area to create a three-season sunroom.
Scott and Kirk – it’s your loss.