Adventures in Real Estate

Or, why grime doesn’t pay.

We are currently looking for a house in the central-lower Westchester County area. Mortgage rates are low, housing prices are down and apparently we can beg borrow and scrape together just enough for a yard. Woo-hoo! So we’ve been house hunting.

I need to make it super-duper abundantly clear how much we LOVE our real estate agent. She totally rocks! So NONE of the following is her fault.

We started out well. At the first house we wanted to see, there was no one home, no lockbox and no answer at the listing agent’s. Auspicious start, right?
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Then we went on to an adorable little house. It had a fantastic backyard. Truly gorgeous. A tiny kitchen just itching for my own personal stamp. A mirrored living room – easily remedied. I could even forget about the part where the front door leads you to the bedrooms. But the public housing projects across from the backyard? Not so much. Oh, and the empty lot *between* the house and the projects, you know, the ones where the drug deals go down? Not a selling point. Into the car and on to the next one.
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Another gem we spotted was 2 blocks away from the housing projects. Under the highway. But with a big eat-in kitchen and three decent sized bedrooms upstairs, we could totally ignore the broken banister. And the kinda skanky neighborhood. The 8 mattresses in the basement, however, freaked us out. Who knows which illegal (and I mean that in every sense of the word) tenant would forget and come “home” after a long day of who-knows-what to find a new family living in the house? Thanks, but no thanks.
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The next weekend’s trip started out so promising! New neighborhood. Adorable house directly across the street from a park with a big ol’ playground. New siding and shutters. Closed in porch with a, is that a powder room? On the porch? Why so it is! And look, no furniture in the living room. And all three bedrooms occupied upstairs, including someone in the shower. And a bed and dresser and crib in the, well I guess that’d be the dining room. And another bedroom in the basement. Sadly, the too many people wasn’t the problem. The too much work needed (including dining room reclamation) and too-high price were. Onwards!
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We eventually got into the house we tried to see first. Another closed-in porch (this one sans powder room), a nice sized living room, good bedrooms upstairs, an attic playroom/bedroom and fully finished basement were all awesome. Another bedroom in a dining room, ok. Who am I to judge whether you sleep with your cutlery? It was so cute, but a short sale, so the bank would need to accept our much-lower offer.
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We won’t even discuss the 1950s house with the original 6” square wall oven and fugly kitchen wallpaper. Or the illegal tenants in the basement. There were no bedrooms in the dining room, though. Then again there was no dining room.
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Then there was the house that isn’t on a street. It’s on the back half of a big lot (read: it’s in someone else’s back yard). To clarify further, it’s most accessible from a public parking lot, not its own driveway. It was a gorgeous, beautiful, tilty 1890s farmhouse with rough-hewn banisters and an updated kitchen off of HGTV. The bedrooms were tiny, small and haunted, in order. No really, I totally felt a little spirit presence in the attic that would be Brian’s office. If he could stand up in there that is.
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This past weekend we saw 2 “houses”. The first had phone books and garbage in the yard, and front cement stairs that need replacing. The really fun part was the butt-ugly peel-n-stick linoleum tile covering every floor surface in the house. And the 1960s wall oven and range which haven’t been cleaned since they were installed. And the dining room with pictures of Selena Gomez and the Jonas Brothers on the wall (that’s right, a teen girl’s bedroom this time!) And the hideous linoleum upstairs and the harvest gold silk bamboo print wallpaper swallowing the bathroom. And the ,mildew/mold blooms on every. Single. Wall. And the foreclosure papers still in the mailbox.
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The last house we’ve seen so far was in a great location – easy walking distance to the train station, decent, established neighborhood. We wondered whether the antique Jaguar in the driveway comes with the house. But the living room and dining room had lovely new laminate floors. And the full bathroom off the dining room qualified it as a master suite! The uneven ceilings and walls that weren’t square were a drawback. And the basement where it looked like they stashed some bodies, not so good.
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We’re expanding our search to new areas as soon as we’re done with Abby’s birthday celebrations.

REMINDER: We LOVE our agent. Love, love, love her. She’s going to take us to see my dream house which we’ll be purchasing just as soon as we win the lottery.