The million dollar fixer-upper
On Sunday we decided to brave the rain and look at a couple of open houses. I have always been a fan of the concept of a fixer-upper. You buy a house that is nearly falling apart at a half of what it is worth and then turn it into a dream home. According to Aaron, a fixer-upper expert, most people say they want to renovate a home but only say that when they think of the price. Most people don’t have the stomach for it. So we took a look at a home on Topcock Street that might have a few defects with a listing price of $1.1 million. A fixer-upper listed at a million? Maybe it could be fixed-up for $400K more and then be worth $5 million?
I thought the high price tag would suggest that this would be a mansion with infinite potential, ready for installation of a grotto and the Hugh Hefner lifestyle; ready for a huge windfall profit. We figured it might be in reasonable condition on the inside although the exterior was surrounded by caution tape and the entry porch had some dark rotted wood that caved in, probably to where the bodies were buried from the crime scene. The front windows by the door were broken and the yard was filled with crab grass, a garage overgrown with moss, and some odd rusted metal pole or wire structures in the style of busted fence had replaced a former wooden porch fence. Sarah had driven by earlier with a few friends after brunch and declared it a potential dream home.
We entered through the front door and were expecting that Lurch from the Adam’s family would greet us. Inside on the first floor was a very nice stairway up to the upper regions of the home. We were greeted by a realtor/preservation nazi. She gave us a 40 page booklet on the requirements for preserving homes in the historic ‘argoyle ridge’ area that included a fifteen step approval process for placing a vase in your window. Any changes to the exterior would require approval or variances from the local historic preservation society. She calmly let us know that she was president of the local preservation committee and was happy to provide a calendar at no cost with 12 of the wonderful historic homes depicted. The lecture she gave to us about the preservation and value of homes in the area led me to believe that the we wouldn’t be buying a home in this neighborhood, we would be doing the valuable duty of adopting the pit-bull or greyhound of homes and helping them to recover. She didn’t want to find an owner that would understand the gravity of the responsibility of taking care of the abused pet. The immediate question I had was whether we would need permission, if we were to pay the 1.1 million dollars, to remove the caution tape.
The first floor wood had been decimated by some kind of random scuffing and staining party. The fixtures in the kitchen had been installed by someone from Kentucky looking through a junk yard to find what looked like rusted out old parts. Other fixtures had the odd look of industrial installations, as if the bathroom toilet needed to have the same design as a 1950’s high school toilet, or an outlet needed to be installed outside of the wall as if in a prison weight room. As we went up the dark stairs we began to understand that this was no normal run of the mill fixer-upper. This was the home where they filmed Poultergeist, The Amityville Horror Show, and The Money Pit. The walls had cracked and crumbled in a way that was beyond the damage I had seen while touring the ancient greek ruins of the labyrinth in Crete. The miasmatic smell and crumbling plaster walls suggested that the former residents were probably running a historic crack house, a historic bargain brothel. I didn’t dare to visit the basement for fear that I would find the meth lab and expose Madeline and Sarah to deadly brain numbing fumes.
We climbed the stairs into the third floor only to find the most disgusting carpet ever. It was a brown carpet that had tried as hard as possible to represent the look and feel of woodland moss. I couldn’t tell if it was actually a carpet or insulation gone bad. Whatever it’s original intent was I couldn’t imagine it was for decoration. One patch of it had been torn out to show the original wood floor underneath it had been better preserved than most other locations. For some bizarre reason one room on the top floor had a nicely sanded wood floor with a urethane coat added to it. The front room on this third floor had a large open window area facing the street. The window woodwork appeared to have been shredded to the consistency of Triscuit by some mythological beast. Was this where the Minotaur ended-up?
We wandered back down the stairs in a daze and shifted from the normal dream home conversation of which room would be our bedroom, where we would put the Jacuzzi tub into a conversation about whether our health would be permanently harmed for having entered this zone of doom. Other people were also walking around in a similar daze although the contractor types seemed to be thinking about how to profit from this location. I was amazed.
The only logical explanation offered, by another real estate agent at the next open house we went to was the history of the house. The house had been sold to a developer who wanted to tear it down and build three town houses on the large lot. The historic commission had wanted to see it restored and rejected the proposal. That might have been why the new realtor was an odd preservation nut. The developer had tried to make the case for tearing down the house by staging it to show how clear it was that the house needed to be wiped from the face of the earth and was rejected again. After about twenty minutes inside Sarah and I were convinced of the developer’s work. This house should be torn down. The ground should be blessed by a priest, rabbi, and shaman and a new home should be inserted in it’s place.
For the partial right not to be allowed to do so… the going rate is $1.1 Million.