Since our agent is on the island we called the listing agent to show it to us. First we did a drive by. Cute. Small. Rattiest house on the block. There was a car parked in the garage, which had no door, but the house had no lights on. You could tell someone lived there. That turned out to be very wrong.
Our listing agent, Ed, told us the owners were selling it. HA. HA. HA. Technically they were. The real case is that the owner died. His ex wife was selling the place. Very sneaky Ed, very sneaky. It's important to us to know this info. People that inherit a house may be willing to negotiate price. Often times they live no where near let alone know anything about the worth of the location.
So we walk in. The living room ceiling is tiled and there are missing tiles. Lots of missing tiles and lots of discoloration. Ed proceeds to let us know the roof will probably also need replacing. How one must feel to lead potential customers to a dump. Honesty was the best policy and Ed had a very good attitude about it.
The kitchen was very similar but less cool than the awesome old place we saw on the island. The stove counter was extremely low. Anyone in a wheelchair would idealize it. The former owner had all these kitchen appliances from the 60s. They obviously made quality stuff back then. There was a wood stove also in the kitchen. Will insisted on opening it. I somehow knew it was going to be bad. I expected a dead rat but it was chock full of trash. Stuff that should never be burned but probably commonly was in that house. He had a chalkboard also that had old person handwriting with weather dates on it. Wills birthday was the first one, stating that it was the coldest at 4 degrees.
The rest of the house was tiny. There were three doors in the hallway one right after the other. Ed and I wondered why they weren't merged into 1 closet. He told us that back in the day, in New England, there was no property tax. You were taxed based off of how many doors you had in your place. Interesting. Our previous owner was a furniture maker and every drawer and shelf had wood or wood relations in it. He did have 2 pieces of art that were clearly from the 80s. His clothes were still hanging in his closet. That made me sad. His bed had a black velvet headboard. Hot. There were at least ten trash bags with full newspapers in them. He had tons of vinyl records. Dude loved him some music. I'm sure any DJ would have loved his old school collection. He had a lamp covered in the free stickers magazines send you. Obviously a ongoing work of art. It had its fair share of Playboy stickers on it.
Outside is where the poop showed up. It was the holy grail of poop. There was a large pile of dirt that had no business being where it was located. Which happened to be by a door. I went over to investigate. I thought for sure I would see a hole or some horribly expensive thing to mend. What I found was a ton of old cat turds and a super fresh one. A Ton. I thought about telling Ed but decided against it.
It was very loud at that place. Boeing is crazy close and the sound of airplanes taking off was quite prevalent. There was a view. You had to be outside to see it. You also had to stand facing your neighbors junk yard. No way am I paying $300,000 to live next to trash. The yard was pretty alright. I could garden, the kids could play. The trampoline and hammock could stay.
There was a shop full of tools. Now mind you, this was the garage. That had no door. Wide open. Full of wood working tools. Clearly a great neighborhood. I asked Ed what was going to happen to all this stuff. I wanted to know who was going to claim it all. He was honest, told me the whole thing was a mess. Lots of people were involved, nursing homes were involved as well as museums. Yikes. He seemed a little burdened by it all. The owner had 5 acres that sold for over 1 million dollars recently. Apparently there was a lot of property for sale with this mans passing and the house we were looking at was the last thing to sell.
In the car we nixed it. We thought we could make it what we wanted but after seeing the inside we knew it wasn't so. Too expensive to fix and update. How can something so pricey be so nasty?
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